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- ORDERS FROM HIGH UP DEPARTMENT -

White House Advisor Karl Rove Named as Source For CIA Leak

WASHINGTON -- For the better part of two years, the word coming out of the Bush White House was that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a female CIA officer's identity and that whoever did would be fired.

But Bush spokesman Scott McClellan wouldn't repeat those claims Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledging the political operative spoke to Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, one of the reporters who disclosed Valerie Plame's name.

McClellan repeatedly said he couldn't comment because the matter is under investigation. When it was pointed out he had commented previously even though the investigation was ongoing, he responded, "I've really said all I'm going to say on it."

Democrats jumped on the issue, calling for the administration to fire Rove, or at least to yank his security clearance. One Democrat pushed for Republicans to hold a congressional hearing in which Rove would testify.

"The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "I trust they will follow through on this pledge. If these allegations are true, this rises above politics and is about our national security."

The investigation into the 2003 leak had largely faded into the background until last week, when New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail rather than reveal who in the administration talked to her about Plame.

Cooper also had planned to go to jail rather than reveal his source but at the last minute agreed to cooperate with investigators when a source, Rove, gave him permission to do so. Cooper's employer, Time Inc., also turned over Cooper's e-mail and notes.

One of the e-mails was a note from Cooper to his boss in which he said he had spoken to Rove, who described the wife of former U.S. Ambassador and Bush administration critic Joe Wilson as someone who "apparently works" at the CIA, Newsweek magazine reported.

Within days of the July 11, 2003, e-mail, Cooper's byline was on a Time article identifying Wilson's wife by name _ Valerie Plame. Her identity was first disclosed by columnist Robert Novak.

The e-mail did not say Rove had disclosed the name. but it made clear that Rove had discussed the issue.

That ran counter to what McClellan has been saying. For example, in September and October 2003, McClellan's comments about Rove included the following: "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved," "It was a ridiculous suggestion," and, "It's not true."

Reporters seized on the subject Monday, pressing McClellan to either repeat the denials or explain why he can't now.

"I have said for quite some time that this is an ongoing investigation and we're not going to get into discussing it," McClellan replied.

Asked whether Rove committed a crime, McClellan said, "This is a question relating to an ongoing investigation."

McClellan gave the same answer when asked whether the president has confidence in Rove.

Rove declined to comment Monday and referred questions to his attorney. Last year, he said, "I didn't know her name and didn't leak her name."

The Rove disclosure was an embarrassment for a White House that prides itself on not leaking to reporters and has insisted that Rove was not involved in exposing Plame's identity.

The disclosure also left in doubt whether Bush would carry out his promise to fire anyone found to have leaked the CIA operative's identity. Rove is one of the president's closest confidants _ the man Bush has described as the architect of his re-election, and currently deputy White House chief of staff.

Rove's conversation with Cooper took place five days after Plame's husband suggested in a New York Times op-ed piece that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq. Wilson has since suggested his wife's name was leaked as retaliation.

The e-mail that Cooper wrote to his bureau chief said Wilson's wife authorized a trip by Wilson to Africa. The purpose was to check out reports that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson's subsequent public criticism of the administration was based on his findings during the trip that cast serious doubt on the allegation that Iraq had tried to obtain the material.

Luskin, Rove's lawyer, said his client did not disclose Plame's name. Luskin declined to say how Rove found out that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and refused to say how Rove came across the information that it was Wilson's wife who authorized his trip to Africa.

Rove's lawyer says his client has done nothing wrong.

"In the conversation, Karl is warning Cooper not to get too far out in front of the story," Luskin said. "There were false allegations out there that Vice President Cheney sent Wilson to Niger and that Wilson had reported back to Cheney about his trip to Niger. Neither was true.

"A fair-minded reading of Cooper's e-mail is that Rove was trying to discourage Time magazine from circulating false allegations about Cheney, not trying to encourage them by saying anything about Wilson or his wife."

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said it is "disturbing that this high ranking Bush adviser is not only still working in the White House, but now has a significant role in setting our national security policy."

Dean's counterpart, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, responded: "It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far left. ... The bottom line is the Democrats are engaged in blatant partisan political attacks."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called on Bush to suspend Rove's security clearances, shutting him out of classified meetings.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., asked the Republican chairman of the House Government Reform Committee to hold a hearing where Rove would testify.

Rove should resign or the president should fire him, said Tom Matzzie, Washington director of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn PAC.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., asked Rove to detail any conversations he had about Plame before her name surfaced publicly in Novak's column.

Source: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/
AR2005071101027_pf.html

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- ENERGY IN A JAR DEPARTMENT -

Purdue Findings Support Earlier Tabletop Fusion Experiments

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana -- Researchers at Purdue University have new evidence supporting earlier findings by other scientists who designed an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.

The technology, in theory, could lead to a new source of clean energy and a host of portable detectors and other applications.

The new findings were detailed in a peer-reviewed paper appearing in the May issue of the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design. The paper was written by Yiban Xu, a post-doctoral research associate in the School of Nuclear Engineering, and Adam Butt, a graduate research assistant in both nuclear engineering and the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

A key component of the experiment was a glass test chamber about the size of two coffee mugs filled with a liquid called deuterated acetone, which contains a form of hydrogen known as deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. The researchers exposed the test chamber to subatomic particles called neutrons and then bombarded the liquid with a specific frequency of ultrasound, which caused cavities to form into tiny bubbles. The bubbles then expanded to a much larger size before imploding, apparently with enough force to cause thermonuclear fusion reactions.

Fusion reactions emit neutrons that fall within a specific energy range of 2.5 mega-electron volts, which was the level of energy seen in neutrons produced in the experiment. The experiments also yielded a radioactive material called tritium, which is another product of fusion, Xu and Butt said.

The Purdue research began two years ago, and the findings represent the first confirmation of findings reported earlier by Rusi Taleyarkhan. Now at Purdue, Taleyarkhan, the Arden L. Bement Jr. Professor of Nuclear Engineering, discovered the fusion phenomenon while he was a scientist working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"The two key signatures for a fusion reaction are emission of neutrons in the range of 2.5 MeV and production of tritium, both of which were seen in these experiments," Xu said.

The same results were not seen when the researchers ran control experiments with normal acetone, providing statistically significant evidence for the existence of fusion reactions.

"The control experiments didn't show anything," Xu said. "We changed just one parameter, substituting the deuterated acetone with normal acetone."

Deuterium contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Normal hydrogen contains only one proton in its nucleus.

Taleyarkhan led a research team that first reported the phenomenon in a 2002 paper published in the journal Science. Those researchers later conducted additional research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences and wrote a follow-up paper that appeared in the journal Physical Review E in 2004, just after Taleyarkhan had come to Purdue.

Scientists have long known that high-frequency sound waves cause the formation of cavities and bubbles in liquid, a process known as "acoustic cavitation," and that those cavities then implode, producing high temperatures and light in a phenomenon called "sonoluminescence."

In the Purdue research, however, the liquid was "seeded" with neutrons before it was bombarded with sound waves. Some of the bubbles created in the process were perfectly spherical, and they imploded with greater force than irregular bubbles. The research yielded evidence that only spherical bubbles implode with a force great enough to cause deuterium atoms to fuse together, similar to the way in which hydrogen atoms fuse in stars to create the thermonuclear furnaces that make stars shine.

Nuclear fusion reactors have historically required large, expensive machines, but acoustic cavitation devices might be built for a fraction of the cost. Researchers have estimated that temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level.

Xu and Butt now work in Taleyarkhan's lab, but all of the research on which the new paper is based was conducted before they joined the lab, and the research began at Purdue before Taleyarkhan had become a Purdue faculty member. The two researchers used an identical "carbon copy" of the original test chamber designed by Taleyarkhan, and they worked under the sponsorship and direction of Lefteri Tsoukalas, head of the School of Nuclear Engineering.

Although the test chamber was identical to Taleyarkhan's original experiment, and the Purdue researchers were careful to use deuterated acetone, they derived the neutrons from a less-expensive source than the Oak Ridge researchers. The scientists working at Oak Ridge seeded the cavities with a "pulse neutron generator," an apparatus that emits rapid pulses of neutrons. Xu and Butt derived neutrons from a radioactive material that constantly emits neutrons, and they simply exposed the test chamber to the material.

Development of a low-cost thermonuclear fusion generator would offer the potential for a new, relatively safe and low-polluting energy source. Whereas conventional nuclear fission reactors make waste products that take thousands of years to decay, the waste products from fusion plants would be short-lived, decaying to non-dangerous levels in a decade or two. For the same unit mass of fuel, a fusion power plant would produce 10 times more energy than a fission reactor, and because deuterium is contained in seawater, a fusion reactor's fuel supply would be virtually infinite. A cubic kilometer of seawater would contain enough heavy hydrogen to provide a thousand years' worth of power for the United States.

Such a technology also could result in a new class of low-cost, compact detectors for security applications that use neutrons to probe the contents of suitcases; devices for research that use neutrons to analyze the molecular structures of materials; machines that cheaply manufacture new synthetic materials and efficiently produce tritium, which is used for numerous applications ranging from medical imaging to watch dials; and a new technique to study various phenomena in cosmology, including the workings of neutron stars and black holes.

The desktop experiment is safe because, although the reactions generate extremely high pressures and temperatures, those extreme conditions exist only in small regions of the liquid in the container - within the collapsing bubbles, Xu said.

Purdue researchers plan to release additional data from related experiments in October during the Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics conference in Avignon, France.

The 2004 paper was written by Taleyarkhan while a distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, postdoctoral fellow J.S Cho at Oak Ridge Associated Universities; Colin West, a retired scientist from Oak Ridge; Richard T. Lahey Jr., the Edward E. Hood Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI); R.C. Nigmatulin, a visiting scholar at RPI and president of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Bashkortonstan branch; and Robert C. Block, active professor emeritus in the School of Engineering at RPI and director of RPI's Gaerttner Linear Accelerator Laboratory.

Source: AScribe
http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20050712.144543&time
=15%2002%20PDT&year=2005&public=1

- WHAT THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW DEPARTMENT -

Computer Hacker Says He Found Secret U.S. Space Program

Gary McKinnon has been accused of committing the 'biggest military computer hack of all time', and if extradited to the US faces up to 70 years in jail. So how did this techno geek from north London end up cracking open the Pentagon and Nasa's systems?

In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the movie WarGames at his local cinema in Crouch End, north London. In WarGames, a geeky computer whiz kid hacks into a secret Pentagon network and, inadvertently, almost instigates world war three. Sitting in the cinema that day, the teenage Gary wondered if he, too, could be a hacker.

"I didn't mean it to actually come true." WarGames ends with the Pentagon telling the young nerd how impressed they are by his technical acumen. He's probably going to grow up to have a brilliant career at NASA or the department of defence. This is an unlikely scenario for Gary McKinnon. He currently faces 20 charges in the US, including stealing computer files, obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy", intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, and interfering with maritime navigation equipment in New Jersey.

Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow Street magistrates court - he had, the American prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military computer hack of all time". He "caused damage and impaired the integrity of information ... The US military district of Washington became inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown was $700,000 ... These [hacking attacks] occurred immediately after 9/11 ... " And so on.

Gary McKinnon was born in Glasgow in 1966. His father ran a scaffolding gang, but his parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a bit of a UFO buff.

"I started reading science fiction, too, and doing everything he did," McKinnon said.

Gary read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein - "the golden age of science fiction" - and he joined Bufora, the British UFO Research Association, when he was 15. Bufora describes itself as "a nationwide network of around 300 people, who have a dedicated, noncultist interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma".

"To hope," says Gary, "that there might be something more advanced than us, keeping a friendly eye on us. Hopefully a friendly eye." Then he saw WarGames, and he thought, "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it a try.

He sat in his girlfriend Tamsin's aunt's house in Crouch End, and he began to hack. He downloaded a program that searched for computers that used the Windows operating system, scanned addresses and pinpointed administrator user names that had no passwords. Basically, what Gary was looking for - and found time and again - were network administrators within high levels of the US government and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords. That's how he got in to the US Space Command.

His Bufora friends "were living in cloud cuckoo land", he says. "All those conspiracy theorists seemed more concerned with believing it than proving it." He wanted evidence. He did a few trial runs, successfully hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be".

"Every night," he says, "for the entire five to seven years I was doing this. One of the most interesting things I found was a list of officers' names under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. I looked it up and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of secret spaceship, off-planet, maybe even an entire fleet of secret military spacecraft."

Gary continued snooping around all the Forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, etc - reading internal court martial reports of soldiers getting imprisoned for rape and murder and drug abuse. At the Johnson Space Centre he spied on photographs of cigar-shaped objects that might have been UFOs but - he says - were probably satellites.

"You end up lusting after more and more complex security measures," he says. "It was like a game. I loved computer games. I still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive, hugely addictive."

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1523143,00.html

- OUR MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE DEPARTMENT -

Planet With Three Suns Challenges Astronomers

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - In a scenario out of "Star Wars," astronomers have detected a planet outside our solar system with not one, but three suns, a finding that challenges astronomers' theories of planetary formation.

The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus ("The Swan").

The stellar trio and its planet are about 149 light-years from Earth and about as close to each other as our sun is to Saturn, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday in the current edition of the journal Nature.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

If you stood on the planet's surface, you would see three suns in sky, although its orbit centers around the main yellow star among the trio. The larger of the other two suns would be orange and the smaller would be red, astronomers at California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

An artists' rendering of the planet and three stars, as seen from a hypothetical moon, is available at http:/pr.caltech.edu/media/trinary_sunset_small-1.jpg.

The new finding could upset existing theories that planets usually form out of gas and dust circling a single star, and could lead scientists to look in new places for planets.

"The implication is that there are more planets out there than we thought," the commentary said.

Caltech astronomer Maciej Konacki, who wrote the research article, refers to the new type of planets as "Tatooine planets," because of the similarity to Luke Skywalker's view of his home planet by the same name, with its multiple suns, in the original "Star Wars" film.

The fact that a planet can even exist in a multiple-star system is amazing in itself, according to Konacki. Binary and multiple stars are quite common in the solar neighborhood, and in fact outnumber single stars by some 20 percent.

But so far, most extrasolar planets -- those discovered outside our planetary system -- have been detected by watching for a characteristic wobble in the stars their orbit, reflecting the gravitation pull the planets exert on their suns.

This method is less effective for binary and multiple star systems, and existing theories said planets were unlikely to form in this kind of environment.

Konacki found a new way to identify planets by measuring velocities of all bodies in a binary or multiple star system.

Source: Yahoo News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/space_suns_dc;_ylt=As5sGTfpeEBTeSHl0QMTT
cgiANEA;_ylu=X3oDMTA4NmhocGZ1BHNlYwMxNzAw

The brief disappearance of a four-year-old child did not mean much to the family of a farmer in Murang'a District, Mr David Kirathe.

However, a few months later, shocking incidents started occurring at the family's homestead.

First, the family found some of their house's windowpanes broken. Later and despite having securely locked the doors, they would find bedding and clothing drenched in water.

A scare wave hit them when huge stones started hitting their house's roof and the remaining windowpanes. That is when they realised that all was not well.

Sometime in May 2003, Mr Kirathe's wife, Mrs Nelius Nyambura, gave birth to twins, who were named after her mother, Peris Murugi and brother, Norman Ndirangu. Eight months later, the toddlers started crawling. This was the beginning of the family's nightmare.

Mrs Nyambura recalls that one day, in October 2003, as she was chatting with some people at their home in Marimari Village, the young Peris Murugi crawled around them and mysterious disappeared after some time.

"No one could tell where the child was. We were at home and we could not comprehend how a toddler could just disappear. She was too young to move for more than 20 metres but we found her more than 500 metres away from the homestead," said Mrs Nyambura. "After more than six hours of searching, the baby was found in a thicket in the family land."

Life continued normally until three months later when stoning, wetting and destruction of foodstuffs started.

"We lived in fear at Marimari Village until we said enough was enough and left our permanent house to be housed by my mother at Gakira Village," explained Mr Kirathe, sadly.

Initially, Mr Kirathe and his brother Mr Samuel Mugwe were settled at Marimari area, about two kilometres from Gakira Village, which is near Kangema Town. They left Marimari in November last year and were given a house adjacent to their mother to live in as they sorted out their problem.

And life seemed to have returned to normal until early last month when the ghosts started visiting them, again.

"The ghosts started following our first son, Peter Gathara, to school. He could go with food and lock the food dish in his desk, but come lunch time, he could find it empty with the dish broken," said Mrs Nyambura.

The young boy, who was in Standard Five at Muguru primary school stopped going to school three weeks ago when the ghosts attacks persisted. He was stoned and hit with cow dung several times on his way to school, they said.

Last week, the family's only dairy cow was seriously slashed on the legs. And like the affected houses, the cow has also become a sight for the locals who flock to the homestead to see the ghosts' victims.

The attacks worsened on Sunday night when Mrs Murugi's house and that of her son caught fire. The mysterious fire erupted as they were preparing to retire to bed, destroying the Nairobi businesswoman's six bed-roomed permanent house and another one, in which her sons have been living.

In one of the destroyed main house's rooms, only a wooden plaque with inscriptions: "Commit your work to the Lord and your thought will be established, Prov. 16:18", was left intact.

Hundreds of Gakira Village residents have been thronging the home to catch a glimpse of the homestead that has become the talk of the populous district.

Only two sons out of Mrs Murugi's eight children are affected by the evil spirits. One of them, Mr David Kirathe, 33, attributed his attack and that of his elder brother Samuel Mugwe to the fact that they are the ones who live there.

"I would like to appeal to anyone who we could have wronged to come forward and tell us what he or she wants instead of terrorising us in this manner," said Mr Kirathe.

Apart from the fire, the family said that the ghosts have been taking away their food, once it is cooked and ready to be served, and discarding it.

Various people led the family in prayers in a bid to exorcise the evil spirits from the homestead.

Neighbours said the attacks could result from the family having short-charged a relative or a business associate.

Some other neighbours accused the family of closing a road that Kangema township residents used to reach Marimari area.

But Mr Kirathe said he could not explain under what circumstances the road was closed since his parents bought the land nearly 30 years ago.

One of the neighbours, Mr James Gichengo, urged the family to open the road "and see whether the ghosts will stop attacking you."

District police boss Rose Mbae said her officers were investigating the incident.