U.K. says country is a good place for scientific research

U.K. government body releases a reference work showing major research infrastructures, including light sources, research ships, innovative laboratories, and social data sets

Cybercrime gangs highly structured

The chain of command of a cybercrime gang is not unlike the Mafia, an evolution which shows how online crime is becoming a broad, well-organized endeavor

New Jersey's Stevens Tech to lead research on port security

Hoboken is poised to become a center for research into port security

Powerful laser blinds Moscow partygoers

Organizers of a rave party north of Moscow use a powerful laser to beam the partygoers, causing retinal burns and permanent eye damage to many; engineers accuse party organizers of "technical illiteracy"

GAO strongly criticizes DoE over Hanford clean-up

More than 210 million liters of radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford in Washington State; most are more than fifty years old; GAO says there now "serious questions about the tanks' long-term viability"

U.S. intelligence services aware of vast Chinese espionage campaign

Multifaceted Chinese espionage campaign in the United States and other Western countries aims not only to steal military secrets, but also industrial secrets and intellectual property in order to help Chinese companies better compete in the global economy; Chinese government and state-sponsored industries have relied not only on trained intelligence officers, but also on the Chinese diaspora -- using immigrants, students, and people of second- and third-generation Chinese heritage

Bioterrorism rule ineffective in salmonella outbreak

Rules and regulations passed in the wake of 9/11 were supposed to tighten monitoring and tracking food items, so an outbreak of food-borne illness could be quickly traced to its source; food supply-chain practices make these rules and regulations difficult to implement

The crisis of U.S. infrastructure, I

Appearances may deceive: The U.S. infrastructure has problems, but overall the nation's roads and bridges, tunnels and canals, dams and reservoirs are in pretty good shape (although traffic congestion is becoming a serious problem); there is a need to maintain all these structures, and the question is whether there is a political will to pay what is needed

Biodefense and food supply safety

Avalanche of drugs, scarcely any oversight, II

Yesterday we wrote about the growing discrepancy -- a yawning gap --between the sheer amount of drug and food imported into the United States, and the resources available to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to inspect these imports and the companies which manufacture them to make sure they meet U.S. safety and health standards. Instead, U.S. drug companies, battling mightily to protect public health and their corporate reputations -- and congressional pressures -- often step in where FDA inspections have not. The Chicago Tribune's David Greising and Bruce Japsen write that Baxter, for example, attempted to do so: In September 2007 a Baxter team visited the Chinese plant from which it was buying herapin. By that time, though, timelines produced by Baxter, the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show the suspect heparin already was making its way through the Baxter supply chain.