ARLINGTON, Texas - A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.

Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.

"It's a slap in the face. It's like, 'Oh, we're sorry he died, but he's gay so we can't help you,'" she said Friday.

Wright said High Point offered to hold the service for Sinclair because their brother is a janitor there. Sinclair, who served in the first Gulf War, died Monday at age 46 from an infection after surgery to prepare him for a heart transplant.

The church's pastor, the Rev. Gary Simons, said no one knew Sinclair, who was not a church member, was gay until the day before the Thursday service, when staff members putting together his video tribute saw pictures of men "engaging in clear affection, kissing and embracing."

Simons said the church believes homosexuality is a sin, and it would have appeared to endorse that lifestyle if the service had been held there.

"We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle," Simons told The Associated Press. "Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it — yes, we would have declined then. It's not that we didn't love the family."

Simons said the decision had nothing to do with the obituary. He said the church offered to pay for another site for the service, made the video and provided food for more than 100 relatives and friends.

"Even though we could not condone that lifestyle, we went above and beyond for the family through many acts of love and kindness," Simons said.

Wright called the church's claim about the pictures "a bold-faced lie." She said she provided numerous family pictures of Sinclair, including some with his partner, but said none showed men kissing or hugging.

The 5,000-member High Point Church was founded in 2000 by Simons and his wife, April, whose brother is Joel Osteen, well-known pastor of the 38,000-member Lakewood Church in Houston. Now High Point meets in a 432,000-square-foot facility in Arlington, near Dallas.

Wright said relatives declined the church's offer to hold the service at a community center because they felt it was an inappropriate venue. It ultimately was held at a funeral home, but the cancellation still lingered in some minds, she said.

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On the Net:

High Point Church: http://www.churchunusual.com

WASHINGTON - Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush's new war adviser said Friday.

"I think it makes sense to certainly consider it," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

"And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another," Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a "major policy shift" and Bush has made it clear that he doesn't think it's necessary.

"The president's position is that the all volunteer military meets the needs of the country and there is no discussion of a draft. General Lute made that point as well," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

In the interview, Lute also said that "Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well."

Still, he said the repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan affect not only the troops but their families, who can influence whether a service member decides to stay in the military.

"There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families," he said. "And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions."

The military conducted a draft during the Civil War and both world wars and between 1948 and 1973. The Selective Service System, re-established in 1980, maintains a registry of 18-year-old men.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has called for reinstating the draft as a way to end the Iraq war.

Bush picked Lute in mid-May as a deputy national security adviser with responsibility for ensuring efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are coordinated with policymakers in Washington. Lute, an active-duty general, was chosen after several retired generals turned down the job.

BARCELONA (Reuters) - "Galactic Suite," the first hotel planned in space, expects to open for business in 2012 and would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.

Its Barcelona-based architects say the space hotel will be the most expensive in the galaxy, costing $4 million for a three-day stay.

During that time guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and use Velcro suits to crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

Company director Xavier Claramunt says the three-bedroom boutique hotel's joined up pod structure, which makes it look like a model of molecules, was dictated by the fact that each pod room had to fit inside a rocket to be taken into space.

"It's the bathrooms in zero gravity that are the biggest challenge," says Claramunt. "How to accommodate the more intimate activities of the guests is not easy."

But they may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness -- the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around.

When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel.

Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel.

An American company intent on colonizing Mars, which sees Galaxy Suite as a first step, has since come on board, and private investors from Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates are in talks.

PLENTY RICH ENOUGH

If Claramunt is secretive about the identity of his generous backer, he is more forthcoming about the custom he can expect.

"We have calculated that there are 40,000 people in the world who could afford to stay at the hotel. Whether they will want to spend money on going into space, we just don't know."

Four million dollars might be a lot to spend on a holiday, but those in the nascent space tourism industry say hoteliers have been slow on the uptake because no one thought the cost of space travel would come down as quickly as it has.

Galactic Suite said the price included not only three nights in space. Guests also get eight weeks of intensive training at a James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island.

"There is fear associated with going into space," said Claramunt. "That's why the shuttle rocket will remain fixed to the space hotel for the duration of the guests' stay, so they know they can get home again."

In an era of concern over climate change, Galaxy Suite have no plans so far to offset the pollution implications of sending a rocket to carry just six guests at a time into space.

"But," says Claramunt, "I'm hopeful that the impact of seeing the earth from a distance will stimulate the guests' urge to value and protect our planet."

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's strategic bombers have resumed Cold War-style long-haul missions to areas patrolled by NATO and the United States, top generals said on Thursday.

A Russian bomber flew over a U.S. naval base on the Pacific island of Guam on Wednesday and "exchanged smiles" with U.S. pilots who had scrambled to track it, said Major-General Pavel Androsov, head of long-range aviation in the Russian air force.

"It has always been the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet (U.S.) aircraft carriers and greet (U.S. pilots) visually," Androsov told a news conference.

"Yesterday we revived this tradition, and two of our young crews paid a visit to the area of the (U.S. Pacific Naval Activities) base of Guam," he said.

President Vladimir Putin has sought to make Russia more assertive in the world. Putin has boosted defense spending and sought to raise morale in the armed forces, which were starved of funding following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Androsov said the sortie by the two turboprop Tu-95MS bombers, from a base near Blagoveshchenskin the Far East, had lasted for 13 hours. The Tu-95, codenamed "Bear" by NATO, is Russia's Cold War icon and may stay in service until 2040.

"I think the result was good. We met our colleagues -- fighter jet pilots from (U.S.) aircraft carriers. We exchanged smiles and returned home," Androsov said.

Ivan Safranchuk, Moscow office director of the Washington-based World Security Institute, said he saw nothing extraordinary in Moscow sending its bombers around the globe.

"This practice as such never stopped, it was only scaled down because there was less cash available for that," he said.

"It doesn't cost much to flex your muscles ... You can burn fuel flying over your own land or you can do it flying somewhere like Guam, in which case political dividends will be higher."

COLD WAR CAT-AND-MOUSE

The bombers give Russia the capability of launching a devastating nuclear strike even if the nuclear arsenals on its own territory are wiped out.

During the Cold War, they played elaborate airborne games of cat-and-mouse with Western air forces.

Lieutenant-General Igor Khvorov, air forces chief of staff, said the West would have to come to terms with Russia asserting its geopolitical presence. "But I don't see anything unusual, this is business as usual," he said.

The generals said under Putin long-range aviation was no longer in need of fuel, enjoyed better maintenance and much higher wages, a far cry from the 1990s when many pilots were practically grounded because there was no money to buy fuel.

The generals quipped that part of the funding boost was thanks to a five-hour sortie Putin once flew as part of a crew on a supersonic Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber, known as the "White Swan" in Russia and codenamed "Blackjack" by NATO.

The current state of Russia's economy, which is booming for the eighth year in a row, has allowed Russia to finance such flights, said Safranchuk from the World Security Institute.

"Maintenance and training are not the most expensive budget items of modern armies. Purchases of new weapons really are."

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's indigenous tribes are being surrounded and cut off from food supplies by criminal gangs made up of right-wing paramilitaries that disbanded under a government peace plan, rights experts said on Wednesday.

To control lucrative cocaine-smuggling routes, new gangs with names like the Black Eagles are blocking access to and from indigenous communities around the country, tribal leaders told a United Nationsforum.

More than 31,000 paramilitaries have turned in their guns over the last three years, but the government admits that thousands of former militia fighters have regrouped into drug and extortion gangs.

"The Black Eagles are a paramilitary army that is refining itself as an organized crime group," said Luis Andrade, president of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia.

He said that about 12,000 tribe members throughout the country have been hemmed into their villages by new and old paramilitary groups as well as soldiers enforcing President Alvaro Uribe's hard-line security policies.

"They can't leave to fish or hunt, which has caused hundreds to starve," Andrade said. "This confinement is causing more victims than direct actions such as assassinations."

Indigenous people who do try to leave their villages risk being shot as rebel collaborators, he said.

Urban violence associated with Colombia's four-decade-old guerrilla war has declined under Uribe, who was re-elected last year. But wide swathes of countryside are still controlled by left-wing rebels, paramilitaries and other criminal bands.

The government has never controlled all of the Andean country, which is the world's biggest producer of cocaine. The "paras" were formed in the 1980s to help cattle ranchers, drug lords and other rich Colombians beat back the rebels.

'WILDER, YOUNGER'

The United Nations says the new crime gangs are less disciplined and more dangerous than their paramilitary predecessors.

"They are wilder, younger and not as well organized as they were before. They do not have a political agenda at all. It is pure narco-trafficking," said Roberto Meier, Colombia's representative for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.

"They run over everything in front of them," Meier said.

Uribe's international standing has been damaged by a scandal in which some of his closest allies in Congress have been jailed while awaiting trial on charges of colluding with paramilitary drug gangs.

Human rights groups say the demobilization has not forced paramilitary chiefs to get out of the cocaine business.

The northern Sierra Nevada region remains filled with coca crops used to make cocaine as well as laboratories for processing the drug, said indigenous leader Leonor Zalabata.

"That illicit economic structure is not being dismantled," she said.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour was due to blast off fromFlorida on Wednesday on its first mission in nearly five years, carrying a former teacher who trained with the ill-fated Challenger crew and gear for the International Space Station.

The mission will be the second of four that the U.S. space agency plans this year as it presses to finish construction of the $100 billion space station before the three remaining U.S. shuttles are retired in 2010.

Florida's weather, often marked by afternoon thunderstorms during the state's steamy summer, was expected to cooperate, with an 80 percent chance of clear skies for the 6:36 p.m. EDT launch,NASA said.

Endeavour has not flown since before the February 1, 2003, Columbia disaster, in which seven astronauts were killed when their spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry into the atmosphere.

NASA and Columbia's crew had not been aware that a falling chunk of insulation foam had knocked a hole in the ship's protective heat shield during launch. The agency now monitors liftoffs with dozens of cameras and shuttle crews scrutinize their ship's heat-resistant tiles when they reach space.

Endeavour has undergone an extensive overhaul since its last flight in 2002 and NASA managers say the spacecraft is virtually new. It has a new piece of equipment that can tap into the power grid of the space station and could allow the shuttle to extend its 11-day mission to 14 days.

The primary purpose of Endeavour's flight, which is the 119th in the shuttle program, is to deliver and install a new beam for the station's main support structure, replace a faulty gyroscope needed to keep the outpost positioned properly in orbit, and deliver supplies.

CIVILIANS WERE BANNED

But it is the crew that has fallen under the spotlight, partly because the five-man, two-woman team includes former elementary school teacher Barbara Morgan.

Morgan trained 22 years ago as the backup to Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire social studies teacher who died along with six astronauts seconds after Challenger's liftoff on January 28, 1986, when a booster rocket blew up.

Civilian fliers were banned from shuttles after Challenger and Morgan joined the astronaut corps in 1998.

The astronaut corps itself is also under some scrutiny after allegations last month that a drunken astronaut was allowed to fly on a Russian spacecraft and another almost flew on a shuttle.

"To imply that my crew or I would ever consider launching on our mission in anything but the best possible condition is utterly ridiculous," Endeavour Commander Scott Kelly wrote in a letter to journalists, denouncing the panel that reported the allegations for posting unsubstantiated opinions.

NASA managers have launched an investigation and vowed to reinforce a 12-hour ban on alcohol before spaceflights.

Endeavour's mission was also clouded by the revelation that a component it is taking to the space station had been sabotaged by a worker at one of NASA's subcontractors. The computer has been fixed and an investigation is under way.

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran has started industrial-scale production of its first domestically manufactured fighter jet, state television reported Monday, part of the country's effort to be militarily self-sufficient.

The plane was first tested in 2006 and derived from re-engineered components of U.S. combat aircraft.

"The airplane, Azarakhsh, was made by Iranian experts, and it has already reached the industrial production stage," state TV quoted Iran's defense minister, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, as saying.

According to previous reports, the Azarakhsh, or Lightning, was designed for close air support.

After decades of relying on foreign weapons purchases, Iran has said it is increasingly self-sufficient, claiming annual military exports of more than $100 million to more than 50 countries.

WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (OneWorld) - In the history of warfare, nuclear weapons have been used twice, and though it has been 62 years since an atomic bomb has been employed in a conflict, the threat of a nuclear attack remains as present as ever, say arms control advocates.

Both nuclear attacks targeted Japan during the closing days of World War II. On August 6, 1945 Hiroshima was destroyed by a single atomic bomb. Three days later, on August 9th, a second atomic weapon was dropped over Nagasaki.

This week marks the anniversary of these bombings.

Currently there are nine nuclear-weapons-wielding countries: the United States,Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. According to reports from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, these countries maintain approximately 27,000 nuclear weapons, 12,000 of which are currently deployed.

Although most of the world's nations are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an international agreement forged in 1968 to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, four key states that have since developed nuclear arsenals are not: Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

The NPT obligates the nuclear weapons states that are parties to the treaty to engage in good-faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. The International Court of Justice has interpreted this to mean that negotiations must be concluded ''leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.''

However, in a deal finalized last week, the United States government agreed to transfer nuclear technology to India. Although India has assured the world community that the imported technology would be used only for non-military purposes, critics fear the agreement could result in the escalation of a nuclear arms race in a politically volatile region of the world.

Critics have described the U.S. acceptance of India's nuclear weapons program as amounting to ''a major concession'' for a country that has refused to join the NPT.

''As the world's only remaining superpower, the United States can lead the way" in promoting nuclear disarmament, David Krieger of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation said last week. ''[But] it has failed to do so.''

''It is perhaps the least talked about and most worrying irony of our time. The United States has a massive defense budget, but spends relatively little addressing the most immediate danger to humanity,'' Krieger said, referring nuclear weapons.

''U.S. nuclear policy undermines the security of its people,'' Krieger added. ''The more the U.S. relies on nuclear weapons, the more other countries will do so.''

The non-profit group Citizens for Global Solutions agrees. "We've told the world that we will reduce our stockpiles of nuclear weapons and not develop new ones. Doing our part will help us convince others to do theirs," the group said in a message to its 35,000 members and supporters last week, adding that U.S. leaders should work with other governments to "revitalize and strengthen" the NPT, which it called "outdated."

But as U.S. voters prepare to choose a new president next year, there are indications that George W. Bush's successor may stay the course set by the current U.S. president on nuclear weapons. Indeed, four Republican presidential candidates have so far been unwilling to take the nuclear weapons option off the table against Iran.

And Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently objected to Senator Barack Obama's statement that the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan would be a "profound mistake."

"Presidents should be careful at all times in discussing the use and nonuse of nuclear weapons,"Senator Clinton remarked.

Leonor Tomero from the Washington, DC-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation called Clinton's approach ''reckless.''

"The United States should not recklessly threaten to use nuclear weapons, particularly against states that do not have these weapons....There is currently no justification for lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons," Tomero said.

The blast, heat, fire and radiation from the first atomic bomb to hit Hiroshima killed an estimated 90,000 people immediately and 145,000 by the end of 1945. In Nagasaki, some 40,000 were killed immediately, with another 30,000 dying by the end of the year. In each instance the majority of those killed were civilians.

Sixty-two years later the effects of these nuclear explosions are still felt.

In Hiroshima in 1955, Sadako Sasaki, a 12-year-old girl, was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years after being exposed to radiation from the nuclear attack. Sadako's intimate knowledge of the cost of war and nuclear attack motivated her to try and spread peace, say those who remember her efforts today.

Sadako began folding origami paper cranes after a friend reminded her of a legend: if one folds 1,000 cranes, one will live to be very old.

Sadako was only able to fold 644 cranes before succumbing to her illness, each one crafted with the words: "I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world."

Inspired by the young girl's message of hope, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and La Casa de Maria dedicated a peace garden in Santa Barbara, California to Sadako in 1995.

This year, on August 9, these organizations will celebrate their thirteenth annual Sadako Peace Day, and they have invited individuals to submit their own messages for peace to be sent to the White House.

In a statement commemorating the world's only nuclear attacks to date, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's David Krieger said: "The anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are reminders of the continued peril that humanity faces. This peril is far too serious to be left only in the hands of government leaders."

"Citizens must demand more of their governments," he added. "Their very lives and those of their children could depend upon ending the delusions that nuclear weapons protect us and that nuclear double standards will hold indefinitely."

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Congress yielded to President George W. Bush on Saturday and approved legislation to temporarily expand the government's power to conduct electronic surveillance without a court order in tracking foreign suspects.

Civil liberties groups charged the measure would create a broad net that would sweep up law-abiding U.S. citizens. But the House of Representatives gave its concurrence to the bill, 227-183, a day after it won Senate approval, 60-28.

"After months of prodding by House Republicans, Congress has finally closed the terrorist loophole in our surveillance law -- and America will be the safer for it," declared House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.

"We think it is not the bill that ought to pass," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. But Hoyer conceded he and fellow Democrats were unable to stop the measure after a showdown with the White House amid warnings of possible attacks on the United States.

With lawmakers set to begin a month-long recess this weekend, Bush had called on them to stay until they passed the legislation.

"Protecting America is our most solemn obligation," Bush said earlier in the day in urging Congress to send him the bill so he could sign it into law.

The measure would authorize the National Security Agency to intercept without a court order communications between people in the United States and foreign targets overseas.

The administration would have to submit to a secret court a description of the procedures they used to determine that warrantless surveillance only targeted people outside the United States.

The court, created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), would review the procedures and order changes, if needed. The administration could appeal.

MEASURE EXPIRES IN SIX MONTHS

FISA now requires the government to obtain orders from its court to conduct surveillance of suspected terrorists in the United States.

But after the September 11 attacks, Bush authorized warrantless interception of communications between people in the United States and others overseas if one had suspected terrorist ties. Critics charged that program violated the law, but Bush argued he had wartime powers to do so.

In January, Bush put the program under the supervision of the FISA court, but the terms have not been made public. Congress has subpoenaed documents in an effort to determine Bush's legal justification for the warrantless surveillance.

The new bill was needed in part, aides said, because of restrictions recently imposed by the secret court on the ability of spy agencies to intercept communications.

Final passage of the bill came a day after Republicans rejected Democratic alternatives that would have provided greater court supervision.

The measure is to expire in six months. Lawmakers are to come up with permanent legislation in the meantime.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said he needed the measure "in order to protect the nation from attacks that are being planned today to inflict mass casualties on the United States."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, opposed the bill, saying, "Sadly, Congress has been stampeded by fear-mongering and deception into signing away our rights."

"With the President set to sign this bill into law, I do not believe we will soon be able to undo this damage," Nadler said. "Rights given away are not easily regained."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who broke ranks with many fellow Democrats to vote for the measure, said: "We are living in a period of heightened vulnerability and must give the intelligence community the tools they need."