By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer

A notorious international arms dealer was convicted in federal court in Manhattan Thursday, in what's likely to be the end of the colorful career of the so-called "Prince of Marbella," a man who sold weapons to rogue regimes around the world. The conviction of the flamboyant 63-year-old Syrian, Monzer Al Kassar, was a victory for the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose agents had pursued him for more than 15 years. 

Al Kassar's lavish lifestyle and his dealings with unsavory terrorists made him seem like the villain in a James Bond movie. A federal jury convicted him of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals and conspiring to acquire and ship anti-aircraft missiles. He had been caught in a sting operation, in which DEA informants posed as representatives of the Colombia FARC insurgent group. FARC is designated a terrorist group.

I met Al Kassar at his 15-room palace overlooking the Mediterranean in 2006, well before he was indicted in the current case. In an exclusive interview, shortly after he was accused of supporting insurgent groups in Iraq in a separate case, Al Kassar showed off his palace - with its spiral staircases, glass-domed ceiling and lavish carpets. He swore loudly to me that he was simply a "legal arms dealer."

By John Rutherford and Jim Popkin, NBC News

Ethel Rosenberg refused to tell a grand jury in 1950 whether she and her husband Julius were Soviet spies, but it didn't make much difference because she was done in anyway by her sister-in-law.

The testimony of Ruth Greenglass, the wife of Ethel's brother David, helped lead to the indictment, conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Transcripts of the grand jury testimony of Ethel Rosenberg and Ruth Greenglass were released today by the National Archives, as a result of a lawsuit filed by historians and the nongovernmental National Security Archive in Washington. It's the first time the grand-jury documents have seen the light of day in more than half a century.

According to several historians who reviewed the documents, the most striking new evidence comes from the grand jury testimony of Ruth Greenglass, sister-in-law of Ethel Rosenberg.  In contradiction to Ruth Greenglass’s later trial testimony, her grand jury testimony does not mention Ethel Rosenberg’s typing any of the information being passed to the Soviets about the U.S. atomic program. In fact, the grand jury testimony describes that information being passed in Ruth’s own longhand.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News Producer

U.S. intelligence officials are analyzing newly released video of Cuban leader Fidel Castro for clues about his health and political viability, NBC News has learned.

The CIA has a medical intelligence unit that has long tracked the health of Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, now the country’s president. But the CIA’s political analysts are equally interested in the new video, released Tuesday, since it also shows the two brothers interacting. Raul Castro succeeded his brother in February. Fidel Castro had last been seen a month earlier, meeting with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

On the FBI’s Kids’ Page Web site, young G-Men-in-training are urged to “go on an undercover assignment” to keep “Special Agent Bobby Bureau” from blowing his cover.

But on the mean streets of Washington, D.C., the FBI doesn’t always seem to practice what it preaches.

Take the house, pictured below, which is located directly across the street from the embassy of one of our former Cold War adversaries. Most of the time, the large skylights in the attic of the house appear opaque, as seen here:

By Robert Windrem and Dan Linden 

If the sky is falling, FEMA is prepared to catch it.

That’s the message tonight from FEMA - the agency made famous by its anemic response to Hurricane Katrina - to the threat posed by a spy satellite that could soon come crashing to earth.

FEMA has produced a memo and 18-page guide, a “First Responder Guide for Space Object Re-Entry,” that have been sent to thousands of local police, fire and emergency service agencies around the country.  It also has helpful hints for the public.

FEMA also has placed six “Federal Joint Interagency Task Forces” on alert in FEMA regions, ready to be deployed, just in case, according to the FEMA memo. A “Consequence Management Group” has been assembled at the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center in Washington to manage the crisis, the memo adds.

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that a U.S. Navy ship is preparing to launch a missile over the Pacific on Wednesday night, in an attempt to shoot down a dead spy satellite orbiting out of control in space.  If all goes as planned, the USS Lake Erie, an Aegis cruiser, will launch the SM-3 tactical missile at about sundown Hawaii time (or about 10:30pm EST) from a position about 600 miles northwest of Hawaii.

The spy satellite lost all power almost immediately after it was launched into space in December 2006. Without power, the 5,000-pound satellite, about the size of a school bus, would be expected to make an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere and crash in early March.  Although half the satellite would be expected to burn up on re-entry, U.S. officials fear that the 1,000 pounds of potentially deadly hydrazine fuel on board pose a risk to people on the ground.  Military and NASA officials say that, because of that threat, they decided to attempt to destroy the satellite in space.

Editor's Note: Updating from an earlier post:

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent

President Bush has personally authorized the U.S. military to launch a surface-to-air missile to destroy a disabled spy satellite that is orbiting out of control and is expected to reenter the atmosphere and crash to earth within the next several weeks. This is the first time the U.S. military will attempt to shoot down an orbiting satellite with a tactical missile.

By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent

Editor's Note: This post has been updated.

It sounds like a scene from "Star Wars." Today, the Pentagon will reveal its plans to knock a dead spy satellite out of the sky with missiles launched from Navy ships. This is the first time the U.S. military will have used a surface-to-air missile to destroy a satellite in space.