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The Sunday Times reports:

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.
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GPS World reports:

Russia gave the GNSS industry three gifts this Christmas, particularly in its home country.

On Tuesday the Russian Federal Space Agency successfully launched a Proton-M carrier rocket with three Glonass satellites on board from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.

The launch will bring the Glonass satellite constellation total to 18 satellites, enough to provide navigation services to all of Russia, assuming all three can be put into service. By 2010, Russia plans to have a fully operating constellation of 24 Glonass satellites—enough to provide positioning service over the entire globe, complementing the U.S. GPS constellation.

Six Glonass satellites are scheduled for launch in 2008, and the first two improved Glonass-K satellites are scheduled for launch the following year, according to RIA Novosti reports.

In related news, a number of news agencies quoted Vladimir Putin on Monday as asking about the availability of Glonass-enabled tracking hardware for his dog, a black lab. The question reportedly came after Putin was briefed about the launch scheduled for the next day and the status of the Glonass system.

“For example my wife — who in a way was military issue, but that’s another story — works on a large military installation and just informed me this week that the U.S. government, in all its wisdom, has decided that programs like MapQuest, Google Maps and Google Street Maps will no longer be authorized on military and government computers.” –Don Jewell, GPS World
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John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, writes:

Does anyone but me see the OLPC XO-1 as an insulting “let them eat cake” sort of message to the world’s poor?

Hands Across America, Live AID, the Concert for Bangladesh, and so on. The American (and world) public has witnessed one feel-good event (and the ensuing scandals) after another. Each one manages to assuage our guilt about the world’s problems, at least a little. Now these folks think that any sort of participation in these events, or even their good thoughts about world poverty and starvation, actually help. Now they can sleep at night. It doesn’t matter that nothing has really changed.

This is how I view the cute, little One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO-1 computer, technology designed for the impoverished children of Africa and Alabama. This machine, which is the brainchild of onetime MIT media lab honcho Nick Negroponte, will save the world. His vision is to supply every child with what amounts to an advertising delivery mechanism. Hence the boys at Google are big investors.
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Cassidy Deline, The Stanford Daily, reports:

Ever since BIC pens worth pennies have proved capable of defeating expensive, steel bike locks, campus cyclists have worried about the safety of their bikes. [Ed: What about the bomb?]
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If this were an actual picture of Chicago, at least one of these buildings would really have to be leaning.

How to arm a atomic bomb

Meirion Jones, Newsnight producer, reports:

Newsnight has discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF’s nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key.

There was no other security on the Bomb itself.

While American and Russian weapons were protected by tamper-proof combination locks which could only be released if the correct code was transmitted, Britain relied on a simpler technology.
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Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the , which will provide $10 million in awards — no strings attached — for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.

In CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce Schneier, reports:

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the
unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you
act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and
even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of
doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants
and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation
of reported threats.

This isn’t the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it’s
happening everywhere. It’s a result of our relentless campaign to
convince ordinary citizens that they’re the front line of terrorism
defense. “If you see something, say something” is how the ads read in
the New York City subways. “If you suspect something, report it” urges
another ad campaign in Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a
seven-minute video. Administration officials from then-attorney general
John Ashcroft to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have
asked us all to report any suspicious activity.

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist
threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a
tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or trash
sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams,
musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them
uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being
different.
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This prototype plasma antenna is stealthy, versatile, and jam-resistant. Credit: T. R. Anderson and I. Alexeff

Scientific blogging, via /., reports:

A new antenna made of plasma (a gas heated to the point that the electrons are ripped free of atoms and molecules) works just like conventional metal antennas, except that it vanishes when you turn it off.

That’s important on the battlefield and in other applications where antennas need to be kept out of sight. In addition, unlike metal antennas, the electrical characteristics of a plasma antenna can be rapidly adjusted to counteract signal jamming attempts.
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WRC-TV via MSNBC reports:

WASHINGTON - People snapped pictures and stared as a man “levitated” in front of the White House on Monday.

Dutch magician Wouter Bijdendijk, also known as Ramana, said he couldn’t say much about his magic trick.

“This is an art,” he said. “And in India, they see it also as a science. I hope I make people wonder.”

A crowd gathered to watch the magician’s spectacle. Some took pictures, other videotaped and at least one man checked around Bijdendijk for props.

“I just wanted to show that reality is not all that you think that it is,” Bijdendijk said.

Justin Berton, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, reports:

At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie “American Beauty,” a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life’s unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a “most beautiful thing.”

To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.

In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
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John Roach, National Geographic News, reports:

To find north, humans look to a compass. But birds may just need to open their eyes, a new study says.

Scientists already suspected birds’ eyes contain molecules that are thought to sense Earth’s magnetic field. In a new study, German researchers found that these molecules are linked to an area of the brain known to process visual information.

In that sense, “birds may see the magnetic field,” said study lead author Dominik Heyers, a biologist at the University of Oldenburg.
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Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as “one of the most important developments in the history of science”.
BREITBART repots:

The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.

In Everett’s “many worlds” universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe.
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Don Woolford (AAP), via Slashdot, reports:

KIM Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes while he was defence minister in the 1980s.

“We spied on them and we extracted the codes,” Mr Beazley told Parliament during his valedictory speech today.
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Los Angeles Air Force Base repoors:

The Air Force completed a four-phase transition of the Global Positioning System ground segment to the new Architecture Evolution Plan on Sept. 14. AEP was delivered by the Space and Missile Systems Center’s GPS Wing to the 50th Space Wing to replace the legacy 1970s-era mainframe computer at Schriever AFB, Colo.

SMC managed the development, integration and test with the Boeing Company, who led a joint Boeing-Lockheed Martin contractor team, to design and build the new system. The transition was executed by the 2nd Space Operations Squadron from the 50th Space Wing and the 19th Space Operations Squadron from the 310th Space Group.

The ground segment provides command and control of the satellites and generates the navigation message for satellites to broadcast to users so they can determine their position on the earth. The new control segment is a critical part of an overall modernization plan to improve operations, sustainment, and overall GPS service.
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Don Jewell, GPS World, writes:

Since I have been writing about the Perfect Handheld GPS Transceiver, I have received numerous letters and emails asking why an atomic clock is necessary in a handheld transceiver, or in any device for that matter. I could write volumes on the subject, literally, but will try to boil it down to a few key concepts for you.
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Robin McKie, science editor, The Observer, writes:

The Arctic’s sea covering has shrunk so much that the Northwest Passage, the fabled sea route that connects Europe and Asia, has opened up for the first time since records began.

The discovery, revealed through satellite images provided by the European Space Agency (Esa), shows how bad the consequences of global warming are becoming in northerly latitudes. This summer there was a reduction of a million square kilometres in the Arctic’s ice covering compared with 2006, scientists have found.

As a result, the Northwest Passage that runs between Canada and Greenland has been freed of the ice that has previously blocked it and that, over the centuries, has frustrated dozens of expeditions that attempted to sail northwest and open up a commercial sea route between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
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Michael Hoffman, Army Times, reports:

A B-52 bomber mistakenly loaded with six nuclear warheads flew from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30, resulting in an Air Force-wide investigation, according to three officers who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.
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TIM CORNWELL, () reports:

A PASTA price backlash is looming in Italy, the cost of a Hovis loaf has hit £1 in some shops in Britain and desperate Spanish farmers are selling off suckling pigs they can no longer afford to feed.

There was no respite in sight yesterday for food consumers or producers as the price of wheat soared further, to record highs.

Reports of damage to Australia’s crop, set against rising global demand for basic foodstuffs, saw wheat buyers rush to lock in supplies. Resulting heavy demand drove up prices in the United States and Europe.

European wheat futures hit a record 300 a tonne yesterday, after a year in which prices have doubled.
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RIA Novosti reports:

MOSCOW, September 6 (RIA Novosti) - NATO jets escort almost all Russian strategic bombers engaged in long-range patrols, Alexander Drobyshevsky, an aide to the commander of Russia’s Air Force told RIA Novosti Thursday.

He said the flights were resumed late on September 5 in accordance with a previously-approved plan. The Tu-95MC Bear bombers fly over the Pacific, the Atlantic, and Arctic oceans, and are refueled in mid-air.
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Laura MacInnis, reports:

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

“There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people,” it said.
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PhysOrg relays:

New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals.
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Jay Leno behind the steering tiller of his 1909 Baker Electric. (Jamie Rector for The New York Times)

DEXTER FORD, The New York Times, reports:

THE new hybrid Ford Escape taxis scuttling around New York City give their occupants an aura of environmental superiority. But as far as clean electric-powered cars are concerned, these high-mileage hybrids are actually a bit behind the times.

About 100 years behind.

Starting in 1914, the Detroit Taxicab and Transfer Company built and operated a fleet of nearly 100 electric cabs. Customers would often wait for a smoother, cleaner, more tasteful electric cab, even when a gas-powered cab was already on station.

At the turn of the 20th century, quiet, smooth, pollution-free electric cars were a common sight on the streets of major American cities. Women especially favored them over steam- and gasoline-powered cars.

In an era in which gasoline-powered automobiles were noisy, smelly, greasy and problematic to start, electric cars, like Jay Leno’s restored 1909 Baker Electric Coupe, represented a form of women’s liberation. Well-dressed society women could simply drive to lunch, to shop, or to visit friends without fear of soiling their gloves, mussing their hair or setting their dresses on fire.
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Stew Magnuson, National Defense Magazine, reports:

The U.S. Army quietly entered a new era earlier this summer when it sent the first armed ground robots into action in Iraq.

So far, the robot army’s entrance into the war has been a trickle rather than an invasion.

Only three of the special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system (SWORDS) have been deployed so far.

The Army has authorized the purchase of 80 more robots — which are being touted as a potentially life-saving technology — but acquisition officials have not come forth with the funding.

“As [soldiers] use them and like them, I’ve heard positive feedback, they want 20 more immediately. It’s a shame we can’t get them to them,” Michael Zecca, SWORDS program manager, told National Defense.

The three robots, which tote M249 rifles and are remotely controlled by a soldier through a terminal, have been in Iraq since April and are with the 3rd Infantry Division, 3rd Brigade.
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