Free Republic

A top U.S. biosecurity lab is assuming responsibility for signing “poorly drafted” agreements with three high-level biosecurity labs in China that they concede may have broken the law.The three contracts, including one with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), gave the Chinese labs powers to destroy “secret files” from any stage of their collaboration.“The party is entitled to ask the other to destroy and/or return the secret files, materials, and equipment without any backups,” stated the 2017 memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) signed with the Wuhan lab, which first came to light in...

The Senate voted early yesterday morning to stop construction of the nation's costliest science project, a laser roughly the size of a football stadium that is meant to harness fusion, the process that powers the Sun. The project, the National Ignition Facility, or NIF (pronounced niff), is at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and has cost $2.8 billion. About 80 percent complete, NIF is scheduled to be finished in 2009 at a cost of $3.5 billion and operate for three decades at an annual cost of $150 million, for a total of $8 billion. The Senate's action, part...

WASHINGTON, May 6 - The cost to protect materials for nuclear bombs from terrorists is rising so high that the Energy Department will need to close some weapons laboratories, or at least consolidate the weapons fuel that they hold, government officials and outside experts are warning. Security costs threaten to eat into the budget for building and maintaining warheads, the experts say. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the department re-examined potential threats to the 13 laboratories and other plants across the country where it has what it calls "special nuclear materials," or plutonium and bomb-grade uranium. The department theorized...

The Philippines has deported two US citizens who were arrested last year on suspicion of links to Muslim separatist groups. Brothers Michael Ray Stubbs, 55, and Jamil Daud Mujahid, 56, have been turned over to American marshals, who escorted them back to the US. The Immigration Bureau says both were blacklisted as "undesirable aliens and threats to national security". The two have been in detention since December after being arrested south of Manila. Authorities say the suspects were earlier seen meeting with leaders of the Abu Sayyaf and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The Abu Sayyaf is a...

N.M. Lab Finds Missing Classified Disk ASSOCIATED PRESS ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - A classified floppy disk reported missing from a government nuclear weapons lab was found Friday, but officials were tight-lipped about details surrounding the incident. The disk was listed as missing during a June 30 inventory at Sandia National Laboratories. The lab said the floppy disk came from a military organization. "The disk was always under the control of individuals authorized to possess it," said Ron Detry, Sandia's vice president of integrated security and chief security officer. Detry cited a procedural error in the disk's transfer between lab organizations,...