Causes for tanker's explosion near Yemen still unclear

Officials are still unclear as to what ultimately caused an explosion that ripped a hole in the hull of the French supertanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen, according to the BBC. The explosion occurred just miles from the site of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Yemeni officials assert that there was no sabotage but Euronave, the owner of the tanker, believes it must have been deliberate, saying that the tanker was rammed by a small boat carrying explosives. The U.S. declared Monday night that it believes the explosion to have come from within the ship, according to CNN. Yemini government officials maintain that they want to shed their global image as a government that acted as a safe haven for al Qaeda militants and will cooperate with French-led investigations in any way possible, according to the BBC. The ship had a capacity of 2.16 million barrels but was only carrying 397,000. There is environmental concern over a potential oil spill damaging the Arabian coast, although firefighters who put out the tanker's blaze believe that the only worry of a spill would occur if the tanker struck land and ripped open, according to CNN.

UPDATE: The U.S. and France have issued an alert and are now considering this to be a terrorist act after finding traces of TNT on the tanker, according to CNN.

National:Washington, D.C.

Bush warns nation about potential dangers from Iraq

In a national address Monday, President George Bush declared that Saddam Hussein was a dictator of the worst variety and a threat to national security. He said that Iraq could attack with chemical or biological weapons "on any given day," according to the New York Times. The President built a case linking Hussein to al Qaeda and implicating Iraq as a terrorist-training nation, according to the BBC. Bush was clearly preparing the U.S. for the likelihood that war would be the only course left if Iraq refused to disarm. Bush released spy satellite images showing reconstruction of Iraqi nuclear facilities following the 1998 bombings, according to CNN. Bush's speech caps a week-long effort to sell his case to Congress, U.S. allies and the American public. Polls released Monday show support for confronting Iraq, but Americans indicated that they feel skeptical about a unilateral attack, according to the Times. In a press release, College professors Thomas Dumm, Heinz Sonntag, Austin Sarat and Ronald Tiersky expressed concern over the post-invasion implications of Bush's plan. "What the Bush doctrine requires is the establishment of a large scale and permanent military presence in the Middle East," said Dumm.

National:Pasadena, California

Pluto-sized body found orbiting sun in belt of ice and rock

A planet-sized body roughly half the diameter of and more than 1.5 billion kilometers beyond Pluto was discovered to be orbiting the Sun. The object, which was discovered by researchers at the Palomar Observatory, is officially named LM60. Known as Quaoar, from the myth of creation of the indigenous people of the Los Angeles area, the object is about 800 miles in diameter and is the biggest body discovered in our solar system since Pluto was discovered 72 years ago, according to the BBC. Quaoar, which lies in the Kuiper Belt, is a swarm of ice and rock based objects that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune and are thought to be the remnants of our solar system's creation approximately five billion years ago. However, Quaoar is substantially larger than the other debris in the Kuiper Belt. So much larger, in fact, that the aggregate of all of the other objects' masses is less than the mass of Quaoar. "This fits right in with our expectation that there should be a handful of objects [in the solar system] as large as Pluto," said University of Hawaii astronomer David Jewitt, according to the BBC. "It just further weakens the case for Pluto's classification as a planet," he added.