cryptogon.com

The 41-year-old Old Harrovian was a vastly experienced China hand, who advised Chinese and Western businesses. He was an entrepreneur with an eye for deals and his insight was much sought after, as were his connections to Chinese officials, including Bo Xilai, one of the most powerful rising stars of the Communist party.

But it also emerged on Tuesday that he was an adviser to Hakluyt, a corporate intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers. Hakluyt has confirmed that Heywood prepared periodic reports for it, but said he had not been working for the company at the time of his death.

A friend who has known him since childhood described Heywood as “like a character in a Graham Greene novel – always immaculate, very noble, very erudite”.

“Privately, I always wondered if he was in MI6,” said the friend, who added that there was no evidence to suggest he had been a spy.

“He had his fingers in many pies, and often it is quite easy to make someone like that the scapegoat, to make them look suspicious, but he was not at all mysterious to the people who knew him.”

Mr Heywood’s death in the city of Chongqing in November was initially attributed to natural causes by the Chinese authorities. He was cremated quickly and his remains given to his unsuspecting family.

The British embassy in Beijing has now asked for a fresh investigation after Wang Lijun, the city’s former police chief, raised the possibility of foul play and a link emerged between Mr Heywood and Bo Xilai, the powerful politician who was purged from the Communist Party earlier this month.

Leonie Summers, Mr Heywood’s sister and an art historian, flew from London to collect his ashes together with his wife, Lulu. His body was cremated without an autopsy. His family was told he had died of a heart attack, while the British embassy was given another reason – excessive alcohol consumption – which friends say was unlikely as he was not a big drinker.

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Mr Heywood would have been well aware of potential pitfalls of doing business in China. He had spent two decades in the country, introducing Chinese firms to their Western counterparts and taking a fee if a deal was struck.

Washington and Canberra could also reportedly station US aircraft carriers and nuclear-powered attack submarines in the western Australian city of Perth, as part of a major expansion of military ties.

Under the expansion, the first US Marines out of a 2,500-strong deployment to Darwin in northern Australia — unveiled last November by President Barack Obama — are to arrive next month.

A tool equipped with a tiny video camera, a thermometer, a dosimeter and a water gauge was used to assess damage inside the No. 2 reactor’s containment chamber for the second time since the tsunami swept into the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant a year ago. The probe done in January failed to find the water surface and provided only images showing steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by exposure to radiation, heat and humidity.

The data collected from the probes showed the damage from the disaster was so severe, the plant operator will have to develop special equipment and technology to tolerate the harsh environment and decommission the plant, a process expected to last decades.

Tuesday’s examination with an industrial endoscope detected radiation levels up to 10 times the fatal dose inside the chamber. Plant officials previously said more than half of melted fuel has breached the core and dropped to the floor of the primary containment vessel, some of it splashing against the wall or the floor.

Particles from melted fuel have probably sent radiation levels up to dangerously high 70 sieverts per hour inside the container, said Junichi Matsumoto, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co.

“It’s extremely high,” he said, adding that an endoscope would last only 14 hours in that condition. “We have to develop equipment that can tolerate high radiation” when locating and removing melted fuel during the decommissioning.

The probe also found the containment vessel — a beaker-shaped container enclosing the core — had cooling water up to only 60 centimeters (2 feet) from the bottom, far below the 10 meters (yards) estimated when the government declared the plant stable in December.

Finding the water level was important to help locate damaged areas where radioactive water is escaping.

He said that the actual water level inside the chamber was way off the estimate, which had used data that turned out to be unreliable. But the results don’t affect the plant’s “cold shutdown status” because the water temperature was about 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), indicating the melted fuel is cooled.

Three Dai-ichi reactors had meltdowns, but the No. 2 reactor is the only one that has been examined because radiation levels inside the reactor building are relatively low and its container is designed with a convenient slot to send in the endoscope.

The exact conditions of the other two reactors, where hydrogen explosions damaged their buildings, are still unknown. Simulations have indicated that more fuel inside No. 1 has breached the core than the other two, but radiation at No. 3 remains the highest.

Normally I’m the first to drop my jaw in awe at MIT’s latest and greatest innovations, but this one really is a bit of a no-brainer. Basically, photovoltaic cells themselves aren’t all that expensive — according to MIT, they’re only around 35% of the total cost of a solar power installation. The main issue with solar power (and its main cost) is its low energy density, and thus the sheer surface area required to generate a sizable amount of electricity. This is why you need to cover your whole roof with cells to power your light bulbs, and why solar power plants would have to occupy tens of square miles of desert to produce as much power as a nuclear power plant.

Schneier is a long-time critic of the TSA’s policies for screening travelers, and was formally invited to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure hearings. However, the TSA objected to his presence because he is currently involved in a legal case over the use of said scanners in US airports.

“It’s quite astounding that documents as important as these went missing and the FBI says, ‘Well, they’re gone,'” U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups said during a motion hearing.

At issue is whether the FBI adequately responded to Jesse Trentadue’s Freedom of Information Act request for footage of Timothy McVeigh parking a truckload of explosives at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Specifically, the Salt Lake attorney is after a building surveillance tape and dashcam video from the Oklahoma state trooper who stopped McVeigh 90 minutes after the explosion that killed 168 people.

The FBI has submitted several declarations from its top records manager to show the agency has searched electronic databases and evidence warehouses without success. But Waddoups said the declarations lack credibility because they do not include firsthand knowledge or details about who, when, where or how the searches were conducted.

“That’s not good evidence,” he said.

Waddoups delayed ruling on the FBI’s motion to dismiss the case and allowed the agency until June 15 to provide a more complete explanation of the searches.

The court overturned patents belonging to Myriad Genetics Inc. of Salt Lake City on two genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

Myriad’s BRACAnalysis test looks for mutations on the breast cancer predisposition gene, or BRCA. Those mutations are associated with much greater risks of breast and ovarian cancer.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been arguing that genes couldn’t be patented, a position taken by a district court judge but overturned on appeal.

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