Secret Hours

Bernard Madoff’s accountant, David Friehling, was arrested Wednesday on charges of securities fraud. Friehling is the first alleged accomplice to be named by authorities in connection with Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scam, though he was formally charged with auditing failures, not direct participation in the scheme itself.

The Army has let slip one of the worst-kept secrets in the world -- that Israel has the bomb.

Officially, the United States has a policy of “ambiguity” regarding Israel’s nuclear capability. Essentially, it has played a game by which it neither acknowledges nor denies that Israel is a nuclear power.

But a Defense Department study completed last year offers what may be the first time in a unclassified report that Israel is a nuclear power. On page 37 of the U.S. Joint Forces Command report, the Army includes Israel within "a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east."

The single reference is far more than the U.S. usually would state publicly about Israel, even though the world knew Israel to be a nuclear power years before former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu went public with facts on its weapons program in 1986.

Several years later investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published "The Samson Option," detailing Israel’s strategy of massive nuclear retaliation against Arab states in the event it felt its very existence was threatened. Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been estimated to range from 200 to 400 warheads.

Yet Israel has refused to confirm or deny it’s nuclear capabilities, and the U.S. has gone along with the charade.

As recently as Feb. 9 President Barack Obama ducked the question when asked pointedly by White House correspondent Helen Thomas whether he knew of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. Keeping the blinders on is necessary politically in order to avoid a policy confrontation with Israel.

By law, the U.S. would have to cease providing billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel if it determined the country had a nuclear weapons program. That’s because the so-called Symington Amendment, passed in 1976, bars assistance to countries developing technology for nuclear weapons proliferation.

Given the U.S.’s long history of selective blindness when it comes to Israeli nukes, it’s unlikely that the Joint Operating Environment 2008 report compiled by the Army amount to much more than a minor faux pas.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a March 8 article on the report, observed: "It is virtually unheard of for a senior military commander, while in office, to refer to Israel’s nuclear status. In December 2006, during his confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates referred to Israel as one of the powers seen by Iran as surrounding it with nuclear weapons. But once in office, Gates refused to repeat this allusion to Israel, noting that when he used it he was 'a private citizen.'"

Gainor dubbed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "the worst" because "when he came out and talked about the housing plan that he didn’t have, the markets tanked."

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, earned a "B-minus," partly because "he showed his strength on Sunday" during a "60 Minutes" interview. Director of the White House’s National Economic Council Larry Summers received a "C grade" for being "not great, not horrible."

Gainor gave President Obama a "C-minus/D" because it "clearly took a long time for him to wake up and do what he had to do here.

When pressed by Anchor Jenna Lee on the fairness of grading the team only 50 days into the administration, Gainor replied:

Well the market’s giving them the grades.  So I mean in that, we, we have to. The market dropped 20 percent in less than, less than these 50 days. It’s rebounded some now, and that’s great.  I think we all love to see that. But you have to look at what he’s been doing right now. One of the people I included in my grading was Gibbs, [Obama's] press secretary, who’s been on a full-on P.R. offensive against anybody who has been questioning Obama whether it’s the people on a competing network or whether its talk-show hosts or whatever. And I think that scares people and makes them think they’re not taking this seriously.

An analysis of the engineering and economics for a solar water-heating system shows it to have a payback period of just two years, according to researchers in India. They report, in the International Journal of Global Energy Issues, on the success of the 1000-liter system operating at a university hostel.

Putting idle servers to sleep when they're not in use is part of University of Michigan researchers' plan to save up to 75 percent of the energy that power-hungry computer data centers consume.

Data centers, central to the nation's cyberinfrastructure, house computing, networking and storage equipment. Each time you make an ATM withdrawal, search the Internet or make a cell phone call, your request is routed through a data center.

WASHINGTON, March 5—A freak wave at sea is a terrifying sight. Seven stories tall, wildly unpredictable, and incredibly destructive, such waves have been known to emerge from calm waters and swallow ships whole. But rogue waves of light -- rare and explosive flare-ups that are mathematically similar to their oceanic counterparts -- have recently been tamed by a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

J.K. Rowling may not have realized just how close Harry Potter's invisibility cloak was to becoming a reality when she introduced it in the first book of her best-selling fictional series in 1998. Scientists, however, have made huge strides in the past few years in the rapidly developing field of cloaking. Ranked the number five breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2006, cloaking involves making an object invisible or undetectable to electromagnetic waves.

A much-anticipated cybersecurity update will be delivered to Congress next week by Melissa Hathaway, the military collaboration expert assigned by President Obama to conduct a 60-day review of U.S.  cybersecurity policy.

Hathaway is nearly half way into her assignment. Her status report to the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science & Technology is titled “Reviewing the Federal Cybersecurity Mission,” and is set for March 10, 2 p.m. EDT, in room 311 of the Cannon House Office Building.

“The review seems to be in really great shape,” says Jim Lewis, director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They really have scoped out the problem pretty well.”

Lewis led a bi-partisan commission, comprised of senators and security experts, that spend more than a year studying cyber threats and coming to consensus on this thick stack of cybersecurity recommendations  for Obama.

“This process is adding real toughness to the national approach,” says Alan Paller, research director of security think tank The SANS Institue. He anticipates “far more emphasis on regulations with teeth” and smarter spending of the federal government’s $70 billion IT budget.

“I think you’ll see a new clarity of purpose and priorities that don’t try to please everyone,” says Paller.

Lewis says he thinks Hathaway will present several options for the president and Congress to go beyond locking down government systems. The committee should be receptive. “They’ve made the mental decision that it (U.S. cybersecurity policies) does have to be broader, but they’re interested in knowing just how they can engage the private sector to protect the infractructure,” says Lewis, who will also testify.

Other witnesses scheduled to speak include the GAO’s Dave Powner, Microsoft’s Scott Charney, Oracle’s Mary Ann Davidson and NetWitness CEO Amit Yoran.

The world economic crisis has hit investment in clean energy and means its growth is no longer on track for the world to avert the worst impact of climate change, according to leading clean energy and carbon market analysts, New Energy Finance.

Despite the increased popularity of geek culture – movies based on comic books, videogames, virtual worlds – and the ubiquity of computers, the geek's close cousin, the nerd, still suffers from a negative stereotype in popular culture. This may help explain why women and minorities are increasingly shying away from careers in information technology, says Lori Kendall, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

« Older Entries