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WASHINGTON – The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 69 computers, including at least a dozen that were stolen last year, a lab spokesman said. No classified information has been lost, spokesman Kevin Roark said. The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on Wednesday released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration that said 67 computers were missing, including 13 that were lost or stolen in past 12 months.

Plague has been confirmed in a cat in Los Alamos, and the state Department of Health is urging New Mexicans to keep pets from hunting and take other precautions against the disease. An Eddy County man who caught plague in January from hunting rabbits is New Mexico's sole case of human plague this year. Last year, New Mexico recorded five human cases, one of them fatal. Plague is a bacterial disease of rodents generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas, but can be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals. It was found earlier this year in...

It's unlikely that Gov. Bill Richardson will be reminding voters in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination of this part of his fabled resume. Former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee pleaded guilty on Sept. 13, 2000 to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets, ending an ordeal in which the Taiwanese-American scientist had spent 278 days in solitary confinement after being arrested in December 1999 for allegedly violating the Atomic Energy Act and stealing nuclear secrets. Seven years ago today, federal prosecutors dropped 58 counts of illegally downloading classified data from Los Alamos National Laboratory computers, and Lee...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A stockpile of plutonium and other nuclear weapons materials stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn't been fully accounted for in 13 years or more, a government audit has found. The northern New Mexico lab's workers have done regular, partial inventories of the material, which the government considers to be at high risk of theft, the audit by the Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, found. Yet an inventory of all the material hasn't been done in "perhaps 13 years or more," Friedman wrote. It wasn't even done when the lab's management contract changed last year, investigators...

WASHINGTON, July 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy has started an enforcement action against Los Alamos National Laboratory. The department and its National Nuclear Security Administration announced Friday they had started a "formal enforcement actions ... against the University of California and the Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the prior and current management and operating contractors of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico." The action was being taken "for violations of classified information security requirements under their respective contracts," the NNSA said in a statement. "Investigations revealed that management deficiencies of both contractors were a central...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 3 -- The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has resumed production of plutonium detonators, the first production since 1989. The first detonator, known as a "pit," was completed last month and shipped to Texas, but on Monday, the laboratory hosted a ceremonial stamping of approval of a second pit for dignitaries, including U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., The Albuquerque (N.M.) Journal reported. The devices are designed for W88 warheads used on nuclear submarines and the lab intends to produce 10 of them a year to replace older ones in rotation, lab Director Michael Anastasio...

What's going on at Los Alamos? The nation's premier nuclear-weapons laboratory appears plagued with continuing security problems. Barely 10 days after revelations of a leak of highly classified material over the Internet, NEWSWEEK has learned of two other security breaches. In late May, a Los Alamos staffer took his lab laptop with him on vacation to Ireland. A senior nuclear official familiar with the inner workings of Los Alamos—who would not be named talking about internal matters—says the laptop's hard drive contained "government documents of a sensitive nature." The laptop was also fitted with an encryption card advanced enough that...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) - A Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist, after more than two decades of work, has figured out how to liquefy natural gas using sound waves _ which could open up more gas fields. "This is a low-cost, low-maintenance technology that can access fields that as of today have a zero value," said John Gorman, a 30-year veteran of the energy industry who runs Houston-based Swift LNG, which has licensed the lab's technology. Gorman and lab physicist Greg Swift _ who has no stake in the company of the same name _ expect the liquefaction technology will...

Congressional leaders aren't finished scrutinizing Los Alamos National Laboratory over its security failures. Members of a powerful House committee have asked Congress' investigative arm, the General Accountability Office, to evaluate the feasibility of moving classified activities to other laboratories "where there is a better track record with respect to security." In a Feb. 16 letter to Comptroller General David Walker, House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders said repeated security problems have cast doubt on whether lab manager Los Alamos National Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration "are capable of assuring adequate safety, security, and sound business management practices." The...

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....