Washington , Oct 14 : NASA is planning to launch a spacecraft that for the first time will be able to examine the heliosphere, the solar wind-filled bubble that delineates our solar system from intergalactic space.

Not much is known about this boundary, except that the meeting is far from sedate - something akin to a boat slamming through water at 50,000 mph.

So far, only the Voyager probes have crossed into the boundary zone, some eight to nine billion miles from Earth, with surprising results.

New York, Oct 14 : A famous Pakistani Pashto singer Haroon Bacha has said that the Taliban forced him to take refuge in the US. He said that Taliban threatened him to stop music, else they would kill him.

“There were letters, there were phone calls, there were text messages. They used to come very frequently back home, just telling me to stop music, or else I would be killed and my family would be,” the Daily Times quoted 36-year-old Bacha as telling The New York Time.

Washington , Oct. 14 : A House of Representatives member from Florida is being probed for an extra-marital affair on the orders of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Representative Tim Mahoney is under investigation for reportedly paying 121,000 dollars to a former mistress who worked on his staff. The former mistress has also sued him after he threatened her job when she tried to end the relationship.

Mahoney, a Democrat, has also favoured a probe into his own activities.

Washington, Oct. 14 : Alaska Governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin mischaracterization of a report on her abuse of authority while sacking an officer of her government, has not come off well or gone down well with the American public, claims an editorial in the Washington Post.

Her repeated claim that she has "no unlawful or unethical activity on my part" and "no abuse of authority at all in trying to get Officer Wooten fired," is unfortunate says the paper.

“Ms. Palin does not understand -- or chooses not to acknowledge -- the seriousness of the mess she helped create,” it adds.

Washington, Oct 14 : Shaukat Tareen, the Financial Adviser to Pakistan Prime Minister, has allayed fears of Pakistan going bankrupt, saying that debt repayments amounting to nearly 500 million dollars were not due until next year.

He maintained that Pakistan was emerging as a strong country from economic point of view, and that there was “no threat of Pakistan getting bankrupt”, reported The News.

Wilmington (North Carolina, US), Oct. 14: Republican presidential candidate John McCain has pledged to fight for a new direction for the country in an energetic new campaign stump speech Monday that sought to distance him from the economic policies of President Bush.

"We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change," McCain said while campaigning with running mate Sarah Palin in this once reliably Republican state that has become a battleground this year.