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Prosecutors say Serbian-born George Jakubec quietly packed the home with the largest amount of homemade explosives ever found in one location in the U.S. and was running a virtual bomb-making factory in his suburban neighborhood. How the alleged bank robber obtained the chemicals and what he planned to do with them remain mysteries.

Now authorities face the risky task of getting rid of the explosives. The property is so dangerous and volatile that that they have no choice but to burn the home to the ground this week in a highly controlled operation involving dozens of firefighters, scientists and hazardous material and pollution experts.

Authorities went into the home after Jakubec was arrested, but encountered a maze of floor-to-ceiling junk and explosives that included 13 unfinished shrapnel grenades.

Bomb experts pulled out about nine pounds of explosive material and detonated it, but they soon realized it was too dangerous to continue given the quantity of hazardous substances. A bomb-disposing robot was ruled out because of the obstacle of all the junk Jakubec hoarded.

That left only one option — burn the home down.

San Marcos Fire Chief Todd Newman acknowledges it is no small feat: Authorities have never dealt with destroying such a large quantity of dangerous material in the middle of a populated area, bordered by a busy eight-lane freeway.

“This is a truly unknown situation,” said Neal Langerman, the top scientist at the safety consulting firm, Advanced Chemical Safety in San Diego. “They’ve got a very good inventory of what’s in there. Do I anticipate something going wrong? No. But even in a controlled burn, things occasionally go wrong.”

He said the burning of the house would provide “an amazing textbook study” for bomb technicians in the future.

San Diego County authorities plan to burn the home Wednesday but need near perfect weather, with no rain, no fog, and only light winds blowing toward the east, away from the city. They have warned residents in the danger zone that they will be given less than 24 hours notice to evacuate their homes for a day, and that nearby Interstate 15, connecting the area to San Diego, will be closed.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency, and hospitals will be on standby in case there is a rash of people getting sick, Newman said.

Some 40 experts on bombs and hazardous material from across the country and at least eight national laboratories are working on the preparations.

They have analyzed wind patterns to ensure the smoke will not float over homes beyond the scores that will be evacuated. They have studied how fast the chemicals can become neutralized under heat expected to reach 1800 degrees and estimate that could happen within 30 minutes, which means most of the toxins will not even escape the burning home, Newman said.

The county has installed 18 sensors that will measure the amount of chemicals in the smoke and send the data every two minutes to computers monitored by the fire and hazardous material departments.

Experts also have mapped how far the plume will travel and predict it will not go beyond Interstate 15. They calculate that if there is an explosion, it would probably throw the debris only about 60 feet.

“It certainly would not be a detonation that would level a neighborhood,” Newman said.

Crews are clearing brush, wood fences and other debris that could cause the blaze to spread beyond the property in a region hit by wildfires in recent years. They also are building a 16-foot-high fire-resistant wall with a metal frame between the property and the nearest home, which will be coated with a fire-resistant gel.

Firefighters, who will remain 300 feet away, are placing hose lines in the front and back yards and will have a remote-controlled hose aimed at the nearest neighbor’s home. Ambulances also will be parked nearby.

The Sheriff’s Bomb Squad will ignite the fire remotely with a sequenced series of incendiary devices, Newman said.

Air pollution control experts have installed a portable weather station on a nearby fire station that will tell them immediately when the weather shifts, while authorities observe the burn from helicopters overhead.

Afterward, officials will monitor the air and groundwater for toxins. Hazardous material crews will be brought in to remove the top layer of dirt on the half-acre property, possibly digging down as much as 6 inches.

“It’ll be a tedious process that will probably take a long time,” Newman said.

It also will be expensive, he said, although no one knows yet how much the price tag could run or who will pay for it. They could not be reached for comment.

Prosecutors said the chemicals in the house include hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), erythritol tetranitrate (ETN), and pentaerythitol tetranitrate (PETN), which was used in the 2001 airliner shoe-bombing attempt. The home has been declared a public nuisance and therefore the county does not have to reimburse the owners, who were renting the house to Jakubec.

Authorities also found a grenade mold, a bag with pieces of metal, a jar with ball bearings, three wireless doorbells with remotes, molds of human faces, handguns and a blue Escondido police shirt, among other items, according to court records.

Jakubec, who is being held without bail, pleaded not guilty Monday to eight federal charges related to making destructive devices and robbing three local banks.

The federal grand jury alleges that Jakubec made nine detonators and 13 grenade hulls containing high explosives. They were discovered in the home after a gardener was injured in November in a blast that occurred when he stepped on chemical residue in the backyard, authorities said. Mario Garcia, 49, suffered eye, chest and arm injuries.

There are very few nations around the world that have not been almost entirely plundered by the global elite. When the elite speak of “investing” in poor countries, what they really mean is taking control of the land, water, oil and other natural resources. In dozens of nations around the world today, big global corporations are stripping fabulous amounts of wealth out of the ground even as the vast majority of the citizens of those nations continue to live in abject poverty. Meanwhile, the top politicians in those nations are given huge bribes to go along with the plundering.

So what we have in 2010 is a world that is dominated by a very small handful of ultra-wealthy elitists that own an almost unbelievable amount of real assets, a larger group of “middle managers” that run the system for the global elite (and are rewarded very handsomely for doing so), hundreds of millions of people who actually do the work required by the system, and several billion “useless eaters” that the global elite don’t really need and that they don’t really have much use for.

The system was not ever designed to lift up the poor. Nor was it ever designed to promote “free enterprise” and “competition”. Rather, the elite intend to funnel all wealth to themselves and to have the rest of us enslaved either to debt or to poverty.

The move has brought accusations that the Government is passing laws behind closed doors.

But Prime Minister John Key says the bill must be passed before the start of the cup tournament, which many world leaders will be visiting.

“We’re not predicting instability but we have to have the right legislation in place,” he said.

His decision on the Security Intelligence Service Amendment bill side-steps the advice of the Privacy Commissioner that of review of the security laws should take up to three years.

Parliament’s security and intelligence committee, chaired by Mr Key, is expected to accept public submissions on the bill, but hearings will be held in private for security reasons.

“It won’t be in the public interest to have it open, for a whole bunch of reasons I don’t want to go into,” Mr Key said.

One MP yesterday said the move was unprecedented and offensive, claiming drunken fans would be the biggest problem at the World Cup.

The bill, which will be introduced on Thursday, aims to update the 41-year-old law on how warrants for SIS agents can be granted for actions such as intercepting text messages, monitoring computers and spying on people online.

…

The threshold for granting warrants will not be changed, and Mr Key did not expect the bill to affect the average number of warrants – 11 to 15 – granted each year.

The present law has a rule of general permissibility, allowing SIS agents to do what is otherwise illegal if it is to protect national security.

But the Bill of Rights, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure, meant the law had to be made more specific.

Green MP Keith Locke yesterday said he would make submissions to the security and intelligence committee and it was “offensive” that the public would be shut out from the hearings.

“New Zealanders should be worried that proposed changes give the SIS more power to covertly intercept communications, invade computers, and put tracking devices on people’s cars.

Initially scheduled for release in February of 2011, the new bills were announced with great fanfare by officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve in April.

At the time, officials announced the new bills would incorporate sophisticated high-tech security features, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell designed to foil counterfeiters.

But the production process is so complex, it has instead foiled the government printers tasked with producing billions of the new notes.

An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the new bills have been printed, but they are unusable because of a creasing problem in which paper folds over during production, revealing a blank unlinked portion of the bill face.

A second person familiar with the situation said that at the height of the problem, as many as 30 percent of the bills rolling off the printing press included the flaw, leading to the production shut down.

The total face value of the unusable bills, $110 billion, represents more than ten percent of the entire supply of US currency on the planet, which a government source said is $930 billion in banknotes. For now, the unusable bills are stored in the vaults in “cash packs” of four bundles of 4,000 each, with each pack containing 16,000 bills.

Officials don’t know exactly what caused the problem. “There is something drastically wrong here,” a person familiar with the situation said. “The frustration level is off the charts.”

Because officials don’t know how many of the 1.1 billion bills include the flaw, they have to hold them in the massive vaults until they are able to develop a mechanized system that can sort out the usable bills from the defects.

Sorting such a huge quantity of bills by hand, the officials estimate, could take between 20 and 30 years. Using a mechanized system, they think they could sort the massive pile of bills, each of which features the familiar image of Benjamin Franklin on the face, in about one year.

The defective bills – which could number into the tens of millions, potentially representing billions of dollars in face value – will have to be burned, they say. American taxpayers have already spent an enormous amount of money to print the bills.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the bills are the most costly ever produced, with a per-note cost of about 12 cents – twice the cost of a conventional bill. That means the government spent about $120 million to produce bills it can’t use. On top of that, it is not yet clear how much more it will cost to sort the existing horde of hundred dollar bills.

First Bills Signed by Geithner

Officials say they remain optimistic that the majority of the 1.1 billion bills will eventually be cleared for circulation.

The problem with the new hundred-dollar bills has remained largely hidden from public view, despite a press release issued by the Federal Reserve on Oct. 1 that announced “a delay in the issue date” of the new bills and cited “a problem with sporadic creasing of the paper.”

The redesigned bills are the first $100 bills to feature Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s signature. But to stave off a cash crunch as existing $100 bills deteriorate and can’t be replaced, the Federal Reserve has ordered renewed production of the current-design $100 bills, which feature Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s signature and do not have the new security features.

Officials say that is an important step, because there are 6.6 billion $100 notes in circulation at any given time, and they wear out quickly. Reprinting the current design bills will prevent any disruption in the global circulation of US currency.

The production of American banknotes is a convoluted process. The paper is manufactured by Crane & Company, which has continually supplied the government since 1879. Design and production of the bills is handled by the Department of Treasury and its Bureau of Engraving and Printing. But the currency is actually issued by the Federal Reserve, which is why the bills are emblazoned with the phrase “Federal Reserve Note.”

The new $100 note is the latest denomination of U.S. currency to be redesigned with special anti-counterfeiting features. Treasury first introduced the redesigned $20 note in 2003 and has also redesigned the $50, $10 and $5 notes.

The government says that more than a decade of research and development went into the new security features on the redesigned $100.

The bill features a blue, three dimensional security strip that pictures bells that change to 100s as the strip is tilted. The ribbon is woven into the paper, not printed on it, which is why it is the focus of speculation as a potential cause of the paper creasing problem on the printing presses. The note also features another color-shifting image, of a bell inside an inkwell. The bell shifts color from copper to green as the bill is tilted.

As part of the rollout effort for the new $100 bills, the government set up a website explaining the changes, which can be seen at this website.

After they were printed, officials discovered that some of the new bills have a vertical crease that, when the sides of the bill are pulled, unfolds and reveals a blank space on the face of the bill. At first glance, the bills appear completely printed, but they are not.