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The past four years had been remarkable, a climb to prominence a congressman from New Mexico could only have dreamed of. Bill Richardson's good fortune began in late 1996 with an early-morning phone call from President Clinton, who tapped him to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. It was a position he used to launch himself onto the international stage as a peacemaker, deal-broker and regular on the Sunday morning political week-in-review shows. Less than two years later, he had been promoted from Cabinet-light to a full member of the Clinton team, heading the 110,000-employee Department of Energy. It...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Fed-up lawmakers on a House oversight committee said Tuesday they want to strip a federal nuclear agency of its security responsibilities and threatened to shut down Los Alamos National Laboratory to correct a decade of security lapses there. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said he has sat through nearly a decade of hearings in which the Energy Department and the northern New Mexico nuclear weapons lab have promised to fix security problems. "I've been hearing these promises for a long time, and they've become somewhat tedious," he said. Lawmakers blistered the lab for its most recent security breach...

On Thursday, the Department of Energy canned the guy in charge of the country's nuclear weapons program. On Thursday, Los Alamos National Laboratory told staffers to get ready for random drug tests. On Thursday, Democrats took control of Congress. Looks like Department of Energy and LANL officials are running for political cover after another year of throwing millions of taxpayer dollars at security improvements to see if they stick. "Why" doesn't matter as much as "what took so long?" The latest DOE/LANL embarrassments involve a DOE computer security breach in Albuquerque (the theft of more than a thousand employee Social...

Study says bees can find explosives By DEBORAH BAKER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 27 minutes ago SANTA FE, N.M. - Here's the latest buzz on detecting explosives: bomb-sniffing bees. A study at Los Alamos National Laboratory has found that honeybees can be trained to detect explosives, even in tiny quantities. "These bees really perform," said bee biologist Timothy Haarmann, the study's leader. Whether honeybees will ever be enlisted in the war on terror looks doubtful at this point. In thousands of trials conducted over the past 18 months at the nuclear weapons lab, bees stuck out their tongues when...

Researchers in the US have used an artificially-structured "metamaterial" to build a device that can control highly-elusive terahertz (THz) radiation. The modulator is claimed to be ten-times better at switching a THz beam than previous designs and could pave the way for the use of the radiation in a wide range of applications in chemistry, astronomy and even airport security (Nature 444 597). Sandwiched between the microwave and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum (at about 300 GHz to 10 THz), THz radiation is notoriously difficult to work with. It is too high frequency to be manipulated electrically like microwaves...

An American engineer standing trial for spying and revealing secrets to China has been indicted for passing secrets to Israel. The indictment against Noshir Gowadia, 62, a U.S. citizen of Indian origin, provides no details to the nature of secrets passed to Israel or to whom they were given. If convicted, Gowadia could face the death penalty. Advertisement The secrets revealed to China are the primary allegations in the indictment, and those revealed to Israel secondary. Gowadia is also alleged to have delivered U.S. secrets to Germany and Switzerland. The indictment indicated that Gowadia's motivations were financial only. Gowadia is...

Data Found In Drug Raid Contains Weapons-Design Secrets. The recent security breach at Los Alamos National Laboratory was very serious, with sensitive materials being taken out of the facility — possibly including information on how to deactivate locks on nuclear weapons, officials tell CBS News. Officials say there is no evidence the information taken from Los Alamos was sold or transferred to anybody else, but there is no way to be sure right now. As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson was the first to report, secret documents apparently taken from the lab were found during a drug raid at a...

Group: Lab breach bigger than thought By Deborah Baker, Associated Press Writer 11/2/06 SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - A former nuclear weapons lab contract worker took home not only classified information on a portable computer storage drive, but also about 200 pages of printed documents, her lawyer said Thursday. The confirmation of the papers follows a watchdog group's report that an internal memo from the Los Alamos National Laboratory indicates the amount of classified information found at the woman's home is substantially larger than first thought. Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an activist organization, reported that the memo appeared to be...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - A self-described methamphetamine addict said he doesn't know anything about the classified Los Alamos National Laboratory data that authorities found in the mobile home where he was staying. "I was basically at the wrong place at the wrong time," Justin Stone, 20, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from jail.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the nation's key nuclear weapons research centers, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a potentially major security breach — discovered last week when police found three laboratory computer drives during a drug arrest at a New Mexico trailer park. Police reports released Wednesday identified the owner of the trailer, where officers found a sizable amount of drug paraphernalia associated with methamphetamine use, as Jessica Quintana. Law enforcement officials said Quintana was a former contract employee at the lab. The FBI executed a second search of the trailer in Los Alamos on Friday but sealed the...

A DRUGS BUST at a trailer park in New Mexico has turned up what appear to be classified documents from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, the latest in a series of embarrassing security leaks from the home of the atom bomb.Los Alamos police arrived at the trailer park after receiving a domestic violence call and discovered drug paraphernalia that suggested the home was being used as a factory for the production of methamphetamine, or crystal meth. While searching the records of the occupant for evidence of a drug-dealing business, officers stumbled across the documents stored on a computer file....

A search of a suspected meth lab turned up classified documents from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where, among other things, nuclear weapons research is conducted. According to the Associated Press, a researcher at the lab was under investigation for methamphetamine related offences, and the documents were discovered when police executed an arrest warrant against her. Police contacted the FBI, which has said only that the documents in question "appear to contain classified material," the AP reports. Los Alamos has developed a reputation for shoddy security, with a series of high-profile blunders over the past few years. These range from the...

A drug bust at a trailer park in New Mexico turned up what appeared to be classified documents taken from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, authorities said Tuesday. Local police found the documents while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home, said Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos, N.M., Municipal Police Department. The documents were discovered during a search of the man's records for evidence of his drug business, Ney said. Police alerted the FBI to the secret documents, which agents traced back to a woman linked to the drug dealer,...

(CBS) Another apparent breach of classified material is under federal investigation at the nation's premier nuclear weapons laboratory: Los Alamos National Laboratory, sources tell CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. The breach apparently was discovered when Los Alamos police recently conducted a methamphetamine raid on an area home. Inside the house, along with drug paraphernalia, police allegedly found classified materials apparently from the grounds of the Los Alamos Laboratory. How somebody involved in illegal drugs would also have access to classified materials from the nation's nuclear weapons facility is unknown but under investigation. The home is believed to belong to a...

WASHINGTON - A drug raid on a Los Alamos scientist's home in New Mexico turned up what appeared to be classified documents taken from the nuclear weapons lab, the FBI said Tuesday. Police discovered the documents at the scientist's home while making an arrest in a methamphetamine investigation, according to an FBI official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. The police alerted the FBI to the documents, prompting a federal search of the unidentified female scientist's home. The official would not describe the documents except to say that they appeared...

ST. LOUIS - Jim West figures he and his fellow residents of Los Alamos, N.M., are too busy biking, fishing and riding horses to spend much money. Perhaps that's part of the reason the town of 18,500 residents ranks No. 1 in this year's A.G. Edwards "Nest Egg Index," an annual ranking of how the nation's cities and states put away money for safekeeping. Los Alamos topped the list with a rating of 134.31 indexed to a national average of 100. Connecticut's Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk was second at 126.20, followed by last year's winner, San Jose, Calif., with a 125.93 rating. It...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- IBM will build a next-generation supercomputer for the U.S. Energy Department with the potential to achieve a sustained speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, the department said on Wednesday. The new computer, dubbed "Roadrunner", will be built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Congress provided $35 million in fiscal 2006, which ends on September 30, to launch the computer project. Roadrunner may eventually be used for an Energy Department program that ensures the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable without the resumption of underground testing, the department...

WASHINGTON— Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources. Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China. The Associated Press and four other news organizations have...

WASHINGTON -- Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources. Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China. The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed...

When the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory resigned last year, the University of California, which runs the lab, agreed to keep him on the payroll in a new job for up to 28 months so he would qualify for the university's retirement plan, according to a copy of the director's separation agreement obtained by The Chronicle. The university is paying the annual $235,000 salary of G. Peter Nanos -- at a likely total cost of about $548,333. He is now at a job with the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Virginia, which is trying to develop...