WW3

Biot #182: March 04, 2005

Thomas “Tommy” Gold, the brilliant and controversial 20th century Viennese-born science figure and professor emeritus of astronomy at Cornell University, died at the age of 84 years eight months ago on June 22, 2004 at Cayuga Medical Center, Ithaca, N.Y., after a long battle with heart disease. His Cornell obituary states: “Gold’s reputation as a Renaissance man was surpassed only by his penchant for unconventional theories — from the origin of the universe to the source of petroleum. Few scientists ever attempt what Gold made a career of, staking their reputations on ideas that radically challenge the methods and assumptions of an entire discipline.” (1-2) Fortunately, Gold has left many writings for posterity, including ones available on his still-functioning homepage website (3) and his book titled “The Deep Hot Biosphere (2001), which no Barnes and Noble or Borders Booksellers in Chicagoland currently carry in their stores. (4)

In his later years, Gold challenged the belief, deeply held by American and British geoscientists, that oil is fluid concentrated from huge amounts of vegetation and animal remains that have been buried in the sediments over hundreds of million of years. Instead, he and many other geophysicists, most notably in Russia and China (5), for decades have been providing evidence that oil and natural gas are generated from hydrocarbon substances in the Earth’s crust that were “brought in from space when the Earth was formed.” (6)

When asked what first prompted him to think that oil and natural gas are generated from hydrocarbons present at Earth’s formation, Gold replied, “The astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find [large quantities of hydrocarbons] in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system…Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born?” (7)

When the interviewer replied, “That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas,” Gold said, “That’s right. Yet, for some reason my theory was not heard. The theory that it was all made from fossils ha[s] become so firmly established that when the astronomers had perfectly definitive evidence on most of the other planets, it was just ignored, especially by the petroleum geologists who had, by then, called these things, ‘fossil fuels.’ So once they had a name, then every body believed it.”(8-9)

What IS the evidence for each of the two theories of the origin of oil? Two main observations have favored the biogenic (ferns and fish) origin of petroleum.

1. “Petroleum contains groups of molecules [e.g., “hopanoids,” a material coming from bacterial cell-walls], which are clearly identified as the breakdown products of complex, but common, organic molecules that occur in plants, and that could not have been built up in a non-biological process.” (6)

2. “Petroleum is mostly found in sedimentary deposits and only rarely in the primary rocks of the crust below; even among the sediments, it favors those that are geologically young. In many cases such sediment appears to be rich in carbonaceous materials that were interpreted as of biological origin, and as source material for the petroleum deposit.” (6)

The following four observations favor the abiogenic or “energy fuels” (present at origin of Earth) origin of petroleum:

1. “Petroleum and methane are found frequently in [surface] geographic patterns of long lines or arcs, which are related more to deep-seated large-scale structural features of the [deep] crust, than to the smaller scale patchwork of the sedimentary deposits.” Gold explains this idea through two examples: the distribution of oil deposits in the Middle East and in Indonesia.

a. The Middle East: “Everyone now thinks of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Iran and Iraq as being the oil region of the world. It is indeed one connected large patch that is oil-rich for 2,700 km from the mountains of Eastern Turkey down through the Tigris Valley of Iraq and through the Zagros Mountains of Iran into the Persian Gulf, into Saudi Arabia and further south into Oman. There is no feature that the geology or the topography of this entire large region has in common, and that would give any hint why it would all be oil and gas rich. The various oil deposits are in different types of rock, in rocks of quite different ages, and they are overlaid by quite different caprocks. They are in a topography of folded mountains in Turkey and the high Zagros mountains of Iran, in the river valley of the Tigris in Iraq, in the Persian Gulf itself, in the flat plains of Arabia and in the mountainous regions of Oman…These hydrocarbon-bearing formations represent times so different from each other that there would have no similarity in the climate or in the types of vegetations that existed there during deposition, just as there is no similarity in the reservoir rocks or in the caprocks of the different regions now. Yet it is a striking fact that the detailed chemistry of these oils is similar over the whole of this large region. Surely this is an example of the need to invoke a larger scale phenomenon for the cause of the oil supply than any scale we can see in the geology of the outer crust.” (6)

b. Indonesia: “The island arc of Indonesia, of which Java and Sumatra are the main components, belongs to a much larger pattern of an arc, that stretches from the western tip of New Guinea through these Indonesian islands in to the Indian Ocean, through the Andaman Islands up into the Irrawaddi valley of Burma, and on into the high mountains of Southern China, over a total length of 6,000 km. That it is one connected arc all the way cannot be doubted because the frequency of earthquakes along the whole of this arc is hundreds of times greater than outside. Along the whole of this arc petroleum is very abundant. But at one end this arc is made up of volcanic islands; at the other end, in Burma and China, it is continental materials with folded mountains. Again, there are great age differences and differences in every aspect of the geology in which the oilfields exists; but here we have a unifying feature, namely the belt of earthquakes and volcanoes which stretches over this entire length, and which points to causes in the deeper crust or in the mantle.” (6)

2. “Hydrocarbon-rich areas tend to be hydrocarbon-rich at many different levels [in the earth], corresponding to quite different geological epochs, and extending down to the crystalline basement that underlies the sediment. An invasion of an area by hydrocarbon fluids from below could better account for this than the chance of successive deposition.” (6) Also, such extrusion of hydrocarbons periodically over time from below could explain the findings of organic debris, such as ferns, saber tooth tigers, and even human fossil skulls, in seams of coal (think La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, California). Gold writes: “The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff [but] it was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved, with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened…[p]etroleum…gradually becomes stiffer and harder [and] that is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. The fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils you find in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved? That is absolute nonsense.” (6)

3. Hydrocarbons are found in areas where no sediments have ever been deposited. “Methane [a primordial hydrocarbon] is found in many locations where a biogenic origin is improbable or where biological deposits seem inadequate: in great ocean rifts in the absence of any substantial sediments; in fissures in igneous and metamorphic rocks, even at great depth; in active volcanic regions, even where there is a minimum of sediments; and there are massive amounts of methane hydrates (methane-water ice combinations) in permafrost and ocean deposits, where it is doubtful that an adequate quantity and distribution of biological source materials is present.” (6)

4. “The regional association of hydrocarbons with the inert gas helium, and a higher level of natural helium seepage in petroleum-bearing regions, has no explanation in the theories of biological origin of petroleum.” (6)

Where then did hopanoids (material from bacterial cell-walls), and other molecules found in oil deposits come from, if they didn’t come from squashed ferns? Gold rewords the question: “How much of the biological imprint of material in the sediments is due to surface life and how much to life at depth? Life at depth???? What does Gold mean here?

Gold explains in a 1992 article: “We are familiar with two domains of life on the Earth: the surface of the land and the body of the oceans. Both domains share the same energy source: namely sunlight, used in the process of photosynthesis in green plants and microorganisms. In this process the molecules of water and of carbon dioxide are dissociated, and the products of this then provide chemical energy that supports all the other forms of life [you and me]….This was the general concept about life and sources of its energy until approximately twelve years ago [1980], when another domain of life [anaerobic bacteria called ‘thermophiles’] was discovered. This new domain, the ‘ocean vents’, found first in some small regions of the ocean floor, but now found to be widespread (including Monterey Bay and Yellowstone), proved to have an energy supply for its life that was totally independent of sunlight and all surface energy sources. There the energy for life was derived from chemical processes, combining fluids—liquids and gasses—that came up continuously from cracks in the ocean floor [communicating with the mantle beneath the Earth’s crust], with substances available in the local rocks and in the ocean water.” (10)

In other words, bacterial life in this third deep-Earth life domain gets its energy from converting methane and hydrogen into carbon dioxide and water, all in the absence of sunlight. Gold continues: “The pore-spaces in the [Earth’s] rocks are quite sufficient to accommodate bacterial life [too], and the rocks themselves may contain many of the chemicals that can be nutrients together with the ascending [hydrocarbon] fluids. …[A]ctive bacterial life deep in the solid crust could have gone largely unnoticed,” in the same way that bacterial life in the ocean vents went unnoticed until secondary larger life forms that fed on the thermophiles drew scientists’ attention. The answer to the origin of the hopanoids is that they come from the deep-Earth bacteria.

How widespread is life based on internal energy sources of the Earth? “We do not know at present how to make a realistic estimate of the subterranean mass of material now living, but all that can be said is that one must consider it possible that it is comparable to all the living mass at the surface. Together with this consideration would go the consideration of the cumulative amount of chemical activity that could be ascribed to the deep biosphere, and with that the importance it may have had for the chemical evolution of the crust, the oceans and atmosphere, and the development of the surface biology.” (10)

Editor’s Note: Understanding the origin of petroleum is not an arcane subject of interest only among academics. Rather, it has vast political and economic ramifications including refuting the idea that oil is a finite resource found only in relation to sedimentary rock in certain areas of the world such as the Middle East. If Gold is correct, as he has been so many times before, imponderable amounts of oil are constantly being manufactured from hydrocarbon sources constantly upstreaming from the Earth’s upper mantle (beneath the Earth’s crust) by a vast domain of bacterial life. Indeed, we now know that oil and gas fields are not running out at the expected time, but seem to be recharging from below. (11) Probably the most frustrating aspect of this topic is that American geoscientists have shamelessly ignored the boatloads of evidence and seem locked into studying “fossil fuels” instead of “energy fuels.”

RHINEBECK, N.Y., Nov. 19 (UPI) — A financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said.

“We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen,” Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a “Panic of 2008.”

“The bigger they are, the harder they’ll fall,” he said in an interview with New York’s Hudson Valley Business Journal.

Celente — who forecast the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the dollar’s decline a year ago and gold’s current rise in May — told the newspaper the subprime mortgage meltdown was just the first “small, high-risk segment of the market” to collapse.

Derivative dealers, hedge funds, buyout firms and other market players will also unravel, he said.

Massive corporate losses, such as those recently posted by Citigroup Inc. and General Motors Corp., will also be fairly common “for some time to come,” he said.

He said he would not “be surprised if giants tumble to their deaths,” Celente said.

The Panic of 2008 will lead to a lower U.S. standard of living, he said.

A result will be a drop in holiday spending a year from now, followed by a permanent end of the “retail holiday frenzy” that has driven the U.S. economy since the 1940s, he said.

Luke Baker, Reuters
November 21, 2007

The conflict in Afghanistan has reached “crisis proportions,” with the resurgent Taliban present in more than half the country and closing in on Kabul, a report said on Wednesday.

If NATO, the lead force operating in Afghanistan, is to have any impact against the insurgency, troop numbers will have to be doubled to at least 80,000, the report said.

“The Taliban has shown itself to be a truly resurgent force,” the Senlis Council, an independent think-tank with a permanent presence in Afghanistan, wrote in a study entitled “Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the brink.”

“Its ability to establish a presence throughout the country is now proven beyond doubt,” it said. “The insurgency now controls vast swaths of unchallenged territory including rural areas, some district centers, and important road arteries.”

Senlis said its research had established that the Taliban, driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. invasion in late 2001, had rebuilt a permanent presence in 54 percent of the country and was finding it easy to recruit new followers.

It was also increasingly using Iraq-style tactics, such as roadside and suicide bombs, to powerful effect, and had built a stable network of financial support, funding its operations with the proceeds from Afghanistan’s booming opium trade.

“It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when,” the report said.

“Their oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever.”

TROOP BOOST

NATO has a little over 40,000 troops operating in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force. The United States and Britain are the largest contributors, with 15,000 and 7,700 soldiers, respectively.

Those numbers pale in comparison to Iraq where at the peak of operations there were nearly 200,000 troops on the ground and where around 160,000 remain.

While Iraq is showing the first signs of an improvement in security, Afghanistan’s situation is becoming more precarious, Senlis argued, underlining the need for a rapid increase in troop numbers in a country that is larger than Iraq.

“In order to prevent NATO’s defeat at the hands of the Taliban, a rejuvenated ‘coalition of the willing’ is needed,” the report said, calling the proposal ‘NATO Plus’.

“Every NATO state is mandated to contribute to this new force, with a firm level of commitment that will provide a total force size of 80,000.”

Bolstering NATO’s presence in Afghanistan, and getting member countries to contribute more, is expected to be a major issue on the agenda at a NATO summit in Romania in April.

Before then, Britain, which is responsible for security in the restive south of Afghanistan, where violence has been greatest, is expected to unveil new security strategies, including a possible increase in troops and proposals to deter Afghan poppy farmers from selling their crop to the Taliban.

Senlis said that without the troop “surge,” and renewed efforts to win over the Afghan population and make reconstruction take hold, the country was in danger of falling back into the hands of the Taliban.

FBI’s Forensic Test Full of Holes

By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” has found.

The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.

In 2004, however, the nation’s most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI’s testimony about the science “unreliable and potentially misleading.” Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect’s gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered “misleading under federal rules of evidence.”

A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.

But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau’s managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.

“We cannot afford to be misleading to a jury,” the lab director wrote to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in late summer 2005 in a memo outlining why the bureau was abandoning the science. “We plan to discourage prosecutors from using our previous results in future prosecutions.”

Despite those private concerns, the bureau told defense lawyers in a general letter dated Sept. 1, 2005, that although it was ending the technique, it “still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis.” And in at least two cases, the bureau has tried to help state prosecutors defend past convictions by using court filings that experts say are still misleading. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis.

For the majority of affected prisoners, the typical two-to-four-year window to appeal their convictions based on new scientific evidence is closing.

Dwight E. Adams, the now-retired FBI lab director who ended the technique, said the government has an obligation to release all the case files, to independently review the expert testimony and to alert courts to any errors that could have affected a conviction.

“It troubles me that anyone would be in prison for any reason that wasn’t justified. And that’s why these reviews should be done in order to determine whether or not our testimony led to the conviction of a wrongly accused individual,” Adams said in an interview. “I don’t believe there’s anything that we should be hiding.”

The Post and “60 Minutes” identified at least 250 cases nationwide in which bullet-lead analysis was introduced, including more than a dozen in which courts have either reversed convictions or now face questions about whether innocent people were sent to prison. The cases include a North Carolina drug dealer who has developed significant new evidence to bolster his claim of innocence and a Maryland man who was recently granted a new murder trial.

Documents show that the FBI’s concerns about the science dated to 1991 and came to light only because a former FBI lab scientist began challenging it.

…

From correspondents in Stockholm
November 02, 2007 11:56pm

A MAN in Sweden who was angry with his daughter’s husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported today.

The man, who admitted sending the email, said he did not think the US authorities were stupid enough to believe him.

The 40-year-old son-in-law and his wife were in the process of divorcing when the husband had to travel to the US for business.

The wife didn’t want him to travel since she was sick and wanted him to help care for their children, regional daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet said without disclosing the couple’s names.

When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.

He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.

The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida.

He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.

The FBI contacted Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, which discovered the email tipping off the FBI had been sent from the father-in-law’s computer.

The father-in-law has been charged with aggravated libel.

He has admitted sending the email, but said he didn’t think “the authorities were so stupid that they would believe anything. But apparently they are.”

He said he “couldn’t help the US authorities’ paranoid reaction”.

When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed.

At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world’s only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.

That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.

According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.

One Nato figure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik” - a reference to the Soviet Union’s first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.

The incident, which took place in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embarrassment for the Pentagon.

The lone Chinese vessel slipped past at least a dozen other American warships which were supposed to protect the carrier from hostile aircraft or submarines.

And the rest of the costly defensive screen, which usually includes at least two U.S. submarines, was also apparently unable to detect it.

According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a serious re-think of American and Nato naval strategy as commanders reconsider the level of threat from potentially hostile Chinese submarines.

It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was “shadowing” the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.

Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its “backyard”.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s submarine fleet includes at least two nuclear-missile launching vessels.

Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.

Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War.

He said: “It was certainly a wake-up call for the Americans.

“It would tie in with what we see the Chinese trying to do, which appears to be to deter the Americans from interfering or operating in their backyard, particularly in relation to Taiwan.”

In January China carried a successful missile test, shooting down a satellite in orbit for the first time.

Microsoft has publicly announced the intent to release Windows 7 (codename “Vienna”) by the end of 2009. This release is intended to be a major release and is rumored to have immense improvements over Windows Vista. Yet all of this makes me question why anyone would have purchased Vista in 2007 with this knowledge? Is Vista to blame for the early announcement of Windows 7?

Vista has many problems, and some of which that should be huge concerns:

* Windows Vista performs very poorly against its younger brother Windows XP.
* Vista has not really had the backing from game developers thus far.
* Vista is a disappointment when compared to features that were promised in development.
* There have not been any essential features added that would be useful to personal usage.
* Hardware compatibility is still not up to par when compared to XP.
* Open source alternatives to Vista are equal, if not considerably better in quality and security.

Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division even admitted to shortcomings in development, “We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile.” He further states, “Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn’t deliver in one release.

There is allegedly one good thing about Vista. The system has managed to implement tighter security, but even that is being questioned. Other than that, what happened to all the other great features that Vista was promised to have?

There is only so much that can be done with Vista development. The company needs to focus heavily on either the improvement of Vista, the development of Windows 7, or the development of both to ensure that the company does not make the same mistakes again.

However, we have Windows 7 to look forward to. The details of the Windows 7 release have been sketchy. It is very likely that the operating system will include the new file system, WinFS, that was cut from Vista. I would also expect to see significant performance improvements. It would be a wise plan for Microsoft to deliver on any features they announce will be in Windows 7.

The announcement of Windows 7 was clearly put into action because of the shortcomings of Windows Vista. The company must secretly feel that they have not fully delivered with Vista’s offerings and are working on a new product to make up for the failures.

This could be a wise move considering the rapid growth of open source operating systems. Microsoft certainly does not want all their future customers switching to Ubuntu, even though I believe it would serve as a great lesson to Microsoft if they did.

By Thomas Frank
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON � Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons � including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

The report looks only at those three airports, using them as case studies to understand how well the rest of the U.S. screening system is working to stop terrorists from carrying bombs through checkpoints.

The failure rates at Los Angeles and Chicago stunned security experts.

“That’s a huge cause for concern,” said Clark Kent Ervin, the Homeland Security Department’s former inspector general. Screeners’ inability to find bombs could encourage terrorists to try to bring them on airplanes, Ervin said, and points to the need for more screener training and more powerful checkpoint scanning machines.

In the past year, the TSA has adopted a more aggressive approach in its attempt to keep screeners attentive � the agency runs covert tests every day at every U.S. airport, TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said. Screeners who miss detonators, timers, batteries and blocks that resemble plastic explosives get remedial training.

The failure rates at Los Angeles and Chicago are “somewhat misleading” because they don’t reflect screeners’ improved ability to find bombs, Howe said.

TSA chief Kip Hawley, responding to previous reports about screeners missing hidden weapons, told a House hearing Tuesday that high failure rates stem from increasingly difficult covert tests that require screeners to find bomb parts the size of a pen cap. “We moved from testing of completely assembled bombs … to the small component parts,” he said.

Terrorists bringing a homemade bomb on an airplane, or bringing on bomb parts and assembling them in the cabin, is the top threat against aviation. “Their focus is on using items easily available off grocery and hardware store shelves,” Hawley said.

A report on covert tests in 2002 found screeners failed to find fake bombs, dynamite and guns 24% of the time. The TSA ran those tests shortly after it took over checkpoint screening from security companies.

Tests earlier in 2002 showed screeners missing 60% of fake bombs. In the late 1990s, tests showed that screeners missed about 40% of fake bombs, according to a separate report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The recent TSA report says San Francisco screeners face constant covert tests and are “more suspicious.”

The White House on Monday said it had little information about Egypt’s plans to relaunch its nuclear power program but declared itself “generally supportive” of civilian atomic power.

“I don’t know a lot about it. In general, we are supportive of countries pursuing civil nuclear energy. It’s clean burning. It provides electricity in a clean-burning and affordable way for citizens,” said spokeswoman Dana Perino.

“We are working with some countries in order to help them get there. But in regards to the Egyptian program, that report just came across. I don’t know any more specifics about it,” Perino told reporters.

She was speaking shortly after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that Egypt planned to build several nuclear power stations, relaunching a nuclear program frozen more than 20 years ago.

Egypt initiated a nuclear energy programme in the 1970s but abandoned it in 1986 after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Mubarak’s regime recently outlined plans to revive it.

Published: Monday October 29, 2007

Iran would need three to eight years to produce a nuclear bomb, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview published today.

“I cannot judge their intentions, but supposing that Iran does intend to acquire a nuclear bomb, it would need between another three and eight years to succeed,” Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told France’s Le Monde newspaper.

“All the intelligence services agree on that,” he said.

Dr ElBaradei said force should be used only when all diplomatic options have failed, adding there was plenty of time for diplomacy, sanctions, dialogue and incentives to bear fruit.

“I want to get people away from the idea that Iran will be a threat from tomorrow, and that we are faced right now with the issue of whether Iran should be bombed or allowed to have the bomb,” he said.

“We are not at all in that situation. Iraq is a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solving it.”

22/10/2007
© 2007 ireland.com