President Bush made his third trip to Atlanta in 11 months Thursday during a three-state tour of the Southeast designed to drum up support for his foreign and domestic priorities.

The trip came on the heels of Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, during which Bush focused on the post-Afghanistan phase of the war against terrorism, his initiatives to protect America from another terrorist strike and his ideas for boosting the economy.

The Atlanta leg of the two-day trip focused on education, congressional sources said, with a visit to Booker T. Washington High School and a meeting with area teachers. Visits to Winston-Salem, N.C., and Daytona Beach, Fla., also are expected.

Also Thursday, the kidnappers of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, said they would extend the deadline to assassinate him until today.

The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, which claims to have Pearl, e-mailed news media Thursday. The group said it would wait one extra day for its demands to be met before killing Pearl.

The group’s demands include releasing Pakistani detainees from the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and releasing former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef. The group also wants more access to lawyers for Pakistanis in U.S. custody after Sept. 11, as well as the transfer of F-16s, built by the United States, that were held after Pakistan performed nuclear tests in Islamabad in May 1998.

“The intelligence assessment is (that the e-mail) is from the kidnappers who sent the first one,” an administrative official said.

A Wall Street Journal spokesman said the newspaper is “moving along on the assumption that (the e-mail) is legit.”

The group also warned all other American reporters to leave Pakistan by Saturday.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the demands “are not demands that we can meet or deal with or get into negotiations about.”

“With respect to Mr. Pearl, we’re deeply concerned for his safety,” Powell said. “We’re doing everything we can to try to locate him and rescue him.”

Powell said he knows Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, also is “doing everything he can.”

Also Thursday, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States must prepare for potential surprise attacks deadlier than the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a speech explaining President Bush’s plans to increase the 2003 defense budget, Rumsfeld said the nation is vulnerable to new types of attacks, from cyber-attacks to missile attacks.

Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet said investigators in Kabul, Afghanistan, found nuclear weapon diagrams in a suspected al-Qaeda safehouse.

Tenet said they also found American power plant diagrams, but it is unclear if attacks were planned on them.

– Compiled by Lona Panter

Contributing: CNN and MSNBC reports