This crew ... had to deal with some very serious problems

This crew ... had to deal with some very serious problems in orbit and they met every challenge professionally and fixed all the problems," Mark Bauman, NASA's deputy director of manned space programmes, said.

"I think we can see the benefit of having humans in space to keep the station healthy and yielding the science return that it will yield," he said.

U.S. space shuttle missions in November and February are to complete the $100 billion station, a project of 16 nations that has been under construction 220 miles above Earth since 1998.

Single-use Russian Soyuz craft will ferry all crews to the station after the NASA retires its shuttle fleet next year.

Earlier this year, Russia announced a halt to trips by millionaire space tourists to free capacity on Soyuz flights as the station has expanded to accommodate a permanent crew of six.

Russian Fyodor Yurchikhin and NASA astronauts Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker remained aboard the station as planned after Saturday's departure.

Three new crew members are to join them next month.
After landing safely, the Airbus A340-500 taxied to a remote area of the Los Angeles International Airport where officials interviewed passengers and crew members, screened luggage and searched the plane.

"No evidence has been found to suggest a credible threat to the aircraft," FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said.

The FBI is now investigating to determine who was responsible for making the threat among the 171 passengers and 18 crew members on the Thai Airways International Flight 794 from Bangkok to Los Angeles, she said.

SEND THE NONVERBAL MESSAGE THAT YOU ARE LISTENING. When someone is talking to you, do you maintain eye contact with that person? Do you show the speaker you are listening by nodding your head? Does your body language transmit the message that you are listening? Are you leaning forward and not using your hands to play with things? Most communication experts agree that nonverbal messages can be three times as powerful as verbal messages. Effective communication becomes difficult anytime you send a nonverbal message that you're not really listening.

Los Angeles airport officials were notified of the threat around 90 minutes before the flight's scheduled arrival on Tuesday night.

It was not immediately known if passengers were aware of the bomb threat during the flight.

Thai Airways said in a statement in Bangkok that airline officials were waiting for the plane to be released for its return to Bangkok.

AVOID EARLY EVALUATIONS. When listening, do you often make immediate judgments about what the speaker is saying? Do you assume or guess what the speaker is going to say next? Do you sometimes discover later that you failed to interpret correctly what the speaker was telling you? Because a listener can listen at a faster rate than most speakers talk, there is a tendency to evaluate too quickly. That tendency is perhaps the greatest barrier to effective listening. It is especially important to avoid early evaluations when listening to a person with whom you disagree. When listeners begin to disagree with a sender's message, they tend to misinterpret the remaining information and distort its intended meaning so that it is consistent with their own beliefs.