cryptogon.com

The largest unmanned American launch vehicle, the Delta-4 Heavy rocket, roared into the the night sky in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Sunday carrying the mysterious satellite on a mission dubbed NROL-32.

All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by Wageningen University. The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn’t be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.

Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.

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Sanborn gave the newspaper six letters from the remaining 97 letters that have yet to be solved in the sculpture’s final passage. The six letters — NYPVTT — are the 64th through 69th letters of the final 97 characters. When deciphered, they read “BERLIN.”

It’s the first clue Sanborn has revealed in four years, after he corrected a typo in his sculpture in 2006 to keep crypto detectives from being derailed in their search for solutions.

Sanborn told Threat Level last week that he wanted to reveal a clue to mark the 20th anniversary of the sculpture’s dedication at CIA headquarters in 1990. He said it would be a “significant clue” and hinted that it would “globalize” the sculpture. Asked if this meant it would take the sculpture off CIA grounds and out of the United States, he conceded it would.

Code detectives were already at work trying to crack the rest of the solution Saturday afternoon following the new clue revelation. Members of a popular Kryptos Yahoo Group were brainstorming during a 90-minute conference call.

“The ‘Berlin’ clue makes a lot of sense, in historical context of the Berlin Wall coming down that year,” says code cracker Elonka Dunin, a game designer who moderates the Yahoo Group and maintains a comprehensive website on Kryptos.

The Berlin Wall came tumbling down in Nov. 1989, almost exactly a year before the dedication of the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters, and would have been on Sanborn’s mind. Dunin also points out that three slabs of the Berlin Wall sit at CIA headquarters, a gift from the German government. Although the slabs weren’t dedicated as a monument until 1992, two years after Kryptos, Dunin thinks it’s possible the CIA had already chosen a spot for them when Sanborn was designing Kryptos and told him about it.

Kryptos is a 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture inscribed with four encrypted messages. The sculpture’s theme is intelligence gathering (Kryptos is Greek for “hidden”).

It features a large block of petrified wood standing upright, with a tall copper plate scrolling out of the wood like a sheet of paper. At the sculpture’s base is a round pool with fountain pump that sends water in a circular motion around the pool. Carved out of the copper plate are approximately 1,800 letters, some of them forming a table based on an encryption method developed in the 16th century by a Frenchman named Blaise de Vigenere.

Three of the four sections have already been solved. But the fourth — containing the 97 characters — has confounded crypto detectives for 20 years.

The first message, containing a deliberate misspelling, is a poetic phrase that Sanborn composed:

“Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.”

The second one, also with a misspelling, decrypts to:

“It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the earth’s magnetic field. x The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location. x Does Langley know about this? They should: it’s buried out there somewhere. x Who knows the exact location? Only WW. This was his last message. x Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north, seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west. Layer two.”

W.W. refers to William Webster, the former director of the CIA.

The third message, with another misspelling, is a take on a passage from the diary of English Egyptologist Howard Carter describing the opening of King Tut’s tomb in Nov. 1922.

“Slowly, desparatly slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q”

YTN said at least 200 North Korean shells hit Yeonpyeong island. Most of the shells landed on a South Korean military base there.

South Korea returned fire and scrambled F-16 fighter jets, military officials said. At least one South Korean marine was killed and 13 wounded, the military said.

However, North Korea’s state-run KCNA news service said that South Korea fired first, Reuters reported.

The clash came amid South Korean military drills in the area. North Korea’s military had sent a message to South Korea’s armed forces early Tuesday to demand that the drills stop, but the South continued them, according to an official at South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

During the drills, South Korean marines on the island shot artillery toward southern waters, away from North Korea, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of military rules.

The skirmish also follows high tension over North Korea’s claim that it has a new uranium enrichment facility and just over a month after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il unveiled his youngest son Kim Jong Un as his heir apparent.

YTN television said up to 70 houses were on fire on Yeonpyeong, about 75 miles west of the capital Seoul. The station broadcast pictures of thick columns of black smoke rising from the island. Screams and chaotic shouts could be heard on the video. YTN said between 1,200 and 1,300 people live on the island.

Speaking anonymously so as not to jeopardize the case, the official said the investigation has been underway for “several years” and is likely to result in the prosecution of traders “around the country.”
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“They are in the final stages with this,” the official said. “It could bear fruit by the end of this year.”

Speculation first arose that the FBI and other federal investigators were nearing the end of a years-long inquiry into irregularities when Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, gave a speech in October warning that “illegal insider trading is rampant and may even be on the rise.”

It may not look like much—a run-of-the-mill nuke—but inside the confines of the steel fence that rings the plant, resides one of the most lethal patches of ground in North America. Shearon Harris is not just a nuclear power-generating station, but a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants owned by Progress Energy.

Those railroad tracks? They’re for hauling nuclear waste. The spent fuel rods are carted by rail from the Brunswick and Robinson nuclear reactors to Shearon Harris, where they are stored in four densely packed pools, filled with circulating cold water to keep the waste from heating up. The pools are interconnected and enclosed within one building. That building is attached to the reactor itself. Together, they form the largest radioactive waste storage pools in the country.

All this makes Shearon Harris a very inviting target for would-be terrorists. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has fingered Shearon Harris as one of the most vulnerable terrorist targets in the nation.

Potential atomic terrorists don’t have to steal plutonium, take a crash course in physics, or concoct a bomb to manufacture a radiological nightmare scenario in the heart of the Carolinas. All they have to do is penetrate the security fence of a lightly guarded commercial reactor and find a way to ignite the pools of high-level radioactive waste. The easiest method is to disrupt the circulation of the water system that keeps the pools cool.

The resulting fire would be virtually unquenchable. Moreover, because the water system that feeds the waste pools is also connected to the Shearon Harris reactor, a pool fire could also trigger a nuclear meltdown. And so it goes.