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According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack.

The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.

Ultimately, the legislation is chiefly the brainchild of Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers have long clamored for a federal cybersecurity bill, charging that current measures — including the legislation passed by the House last year — are too piecemeal to protect the country’s Web infrastructure.

Their renewed focus arrives on the heels of two, high-profile cyberattacks last month: A strike on Google, believed to have originated in China, and a separate, more disjointed attack that affected thousands of businesses worldwide.

Rockefeller and Snowe’s forthcoming bill would establish a host of heretofore absent cybersecurity prevention and response measures, an aide close to the process said. The bill will “significantly [raise] the profile of cybersecurity within the federal government,” while incentivizing private companies to do the same, according to the aide.

Additionally, it will “promote public awareness” of Internet security issues, while outlining key protections of Americans’ civil liberties on the Web, the aide continued.

Privacy groups are nonetheless likely to take some umbrage at Rockefeller and Snowe’s latest effort, an early draft of which leaked late last year.

When early reports predicted the cybersecurity measure would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” online privacy groups said they felt that would endow the White House with overly ambiguous and far-reaching powers to regulate the Internet.

The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal.

But at a time when the United States and its allies are spending billions of dollars to prop up the fragile government of President Hamid Karzai, the volume of the outflow has stirred concerns that funds have been diverted from aid. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade. And officials in neighboring Pakistan think that at least some of the cash leaving Kabul has been smuggled overland from Pakistan.

“All this money magically appears from nowhere,” said a U.S. official who monitors Afghanistan’s growing role as a hub for cash transfers to Dubai, which has six flights a day to and from Kabul.

Meanwhile, the United States is stepping up efforts to stop money flow in the other direction — into Afghanistan and Pakistan in support of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Senior Treasury Department officials visited Kabul this month to discuss the cash flows and other issues relating to this country’s infant, often chaotic financial sector.

Tracking Afghan exchanges has long been made difficult by the widespread use of traditional money-moving outfits, known as “hawalas,” which keep few records. The Afghan central bank, supported by U.S. Treasury advisers, is trying to get a grip on them by licensing their operations.

In the meantime, the money continues to flow. Cash declaration forms filed at Kabul International Airport and reviewed by The Washington Post show that Afghan passengers took more than $180 million to Dubai during a two-month period starting in July. If that rate held for the entire year, the amount of cash that left Afghanistan in 2009 would have far exceeded the country’s annual tax and other domestic revenue of about $875 million.

The declaration forms highlight the prominent and often opaque role played by hawalas. Asked to identify the “source of funds” in forms issued by the Afghan central bank, cash couriers frequently put down the name of the same Kabul hawala, an outfit called New Ansari Exchange.

Early last month, Afghan police and intelligence officers raided New Ansari’s office in Kabul’s bazaar district, carting away documents and computers, said Afghan bankers familiar with the operation. U.S. officials declined to comment on what prompted the raid. New Ansari Exchange, which is affiliated with a licensed Afghan bank, closed for a day or so but was soon up and running again.

The total volume of departing cash is almost certainly much higher than the declared amount. A Chinese man, for instance, was arrested recently at the Kabul airport carrying 800,000 undeclared euros (about $1.1 million).

Cash also can be moved easily through a VIP section at the airport, from which Afghan officials generally leave without being searched. American officials said that they have repeatedly raised the issue of special treatment for VIPs at the Kabul airport with the Afghan government but that they have made no headway.

One U.S. official said he had been told by a senior Dubai police officer that an Afghan diplomat flew into the emirate’s airport last year with more than $2 million worth of euros in undeclared cash. The Afghan consul general in Dubai, Haji Rashoudin Mohammadi, said in a telephone interview that he was not aware of any such incident.

The high volume of cash passing through Kabul’s airport first came to light last summer when British company Global Strategies Group, which has an airport security contract, started filing reports on the money transfers at the request of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the domestic intelligence agency. The country’s notoriously corrupt police force, however, complained about this arrangement, and Global stopped its reporting in September, according to someone familiar with the matter.

Afghan bankers interviewed in Kabul said that much of the money that does get declared belongs to traders who want to buy goods in Dubai but want to avoid the fees, delays and paperwork that result from conventional wire transfers.

The cash flown out of Kabul includes a wide range of foreign currencies. Most is in U.S. dollars, euros and — to the bafflement of officials — Saudi Arabian riyals, a currency not widely used in Afghanistan.

Last month, a well-dressed Afghan man en route to Dubai was found carrying three briefcases stuffed with $3 million in U.S. currency and $2 million in Saudi currency, according to an American official who was present when the notes were counted. A few days later, the same man was back at the Kabul airport, en route to Dubai again, with about $5 million in U.S. and Saudi bank notes.

One theory is that some of the Arab nation’s cash might come from Saudi donations that were supposed to go to mosques and other projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, the American official said, “we don’t really know what is going on.”

In a record-breaking experiment, IBM researchers used the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world — a Blue Gene/P system at the Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany — to validate nine terabytes of data (nine million million or a number with 12 zeros) in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than a day. Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required.*

The breakthrough will be presented today at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle.

“In a world with already one billion transistors per human and growing daily, data is exploding at an unprecedented pace,” said Dr. Alessandro Curioni, manager of the Computational Sciences team at IBM Research – Zurich. “Analyzing these vast volumes of continuously accumulating data is a huge computational challenge in numerous applications of science, engineering and business. This breakthrough greatly extends the ability to analyze the quality of large volumes of data at rapid speeds.”

One of the most computation-intense, yet critical factors in analytics is the measurement of the quality of the data, which shows how reliable the data is that is being used and also generated by the model. In areas ranging from traffic management, financial management and water management this method could pave the way to create more powerful, complex and accurate models with greater predictability.

For example:

* A water authority could analyze real time, map-based information and geo-analytics to develop predictive models showing problems before they occur across the sprawling infrastructure of pipes, valves, public fire hydrants, collection pipes, man holes and water meters. This can be done by analyzing an enormous amount of data and uncovering patterns related to weather conditions, water use, and hundreds of other variables
* Supply chains face many challenges when it comes to logistics, such as road construction, traffic or poor weather that may get in the way of delivering the final product on time. With multiple suppliers to source parts from, along with a variety of transportation modes and tight deadlines the variables and challenges are endless. Using GPS-data, traffic sensors, a database of suppliers and demand forecasting, analytics can aid in making realtime decisions when these types of unforeseen obstacles arise

The amount of digital data is increasing at enormous rates – due also to the ever more ubiquitous presence of sensors, actuators, RFID-tags or GPS-tracking-devices. These miniature computers measure everything from the degree of pollution of ocean water to traffic patterns to food supply chains.

With all of this data come new challenges as organizations are now struggling to not only extract the relevant information out of it, but to also make sure it’s accurate. IBM researchers are pursuing leading edge research and actively engaging in client projects to extend the ability for analytics to predict outcomes and improve the speed and quality of business decisions.

“Determining how typical or how statistically relevant the data is, helps us to measure the quality of the overall analysis and reveals flaws in the model or hidden relations in the data,” explains Dr. Costas Bekas of IBM Research – Zurich. “Efficient analysis of huge data sets requires the development of a new generation of mathematical techniques that target at both reducing computational complexity and at the same time allow for their efficient deployment on modern massively parallel resources.”

The new method demonstrated by the IBM scientists brings down computational complexity and has very good scaling characteristics that reach to the full scale of the JuGene Supercomputer at the Forschungszentrum Julich with its 72 racks of IBM’s Blue Gene/P system, 294,912 processors and a peak performance of one petaflop.

“In the next years supercomputing will provide us with unique insights and will help to create added value with new technologies,” says Prof. Dr. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Julich Supercomputing Centre. “A cornerstone for the future will be innovative tools and algorithms helping us to analyze the huge amount of data provided by simulations on the most powerful computers.”

IBM’s intends to make this capability available to clients.

Works from the city’s reference library will be stored in the mines, hundreds of feet below ground, for the next three years while the landmark city centre site undergoes a massive refurbishment to save it from ruin.

Experts say the mine’s caverns – the size of 700 football pitches – provide the perfect environment for preserving the manuscripts, which include the works of eminent academics.

A phased shut down of the St Peter’s Square library will begin next month, with the site closing its doors in June. The Library Theatre, which will most likely relocate to the historic Theatre Royal, will close the following month with a celebratory show entitled Last Night at the Library.

A temporary city library will open in Elliot House, on Deansgate, where staff will also be able to arrange access to some rare reference works that are not available elsewhere in the country. All others will be stored in the salt mines from where they will be digitally catalogued but inaccessible for the duration of the refurbishment.

More than 22 miles of shelving and one million books – including more than 30 works dating back to the 15th century and 44,000 published before 1850 – will be relocated to the mines, Elliot House and other temporary locations including the Royal Northern College of Music. The project is part of multi-million pound plans to transform and modernise St Peter’s Square and the Town Hall Complex, bringing services and facilities up to date and carrying out vital restoration works to the listed buildings.

Central Library will re-open in 2013 with a new state-of-the-art lending library, electronic catalogue and archive centre, to bring historic local collections under one roof. A one-stop customer services centre will also be created on the ground floor of the town hall extension.

From April, some 1,800 council staff will be moved to First Street, at the city centre’s southern gateway, for four years while restoration work takes place. A temporary customer services point will open to the public there in early summer.

The Library Theatre Company will temporarily be based at Zion Arts, on Stretford Road, and stage regular performances at The Lowry.

Coun Mike Amesbury, Manchester’s spokesman for culture and leisure, said: “We recognise that Manchester’s Central Library is one of the finest buildings in the city and one of the finest libraries in the country. This refurbishment and restoration is absolutely necessary to ensure that the Library can continue to be a jewel in Manchester’s crown.”

Head of library services, Neil MacInnes, added: “When Central Library reopens, it will be a real world class facility that Manchester can rightly be proud of, completely in keeping with its history and heritage.”

Appearing before congressional panels to defend the State Department’s $52.8 billion budget request for 2011, Clinton said the massive U.S. foreign debt had sapped U.S. strength around the world.

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Clinton urged lawmakers to tackle the federal budget deficit, which reached a record $1.4 trillion for the fiscal year that ended last September.

“We have to address this deficit and the debt of the United States as a matter of national security not only as a matter of economics,” Clinton said. “I do not like to be in a position where the United States is a debtor nation to the extent that we are.”

Having to rely on foreign creditors hit “our ability to protect our security, to manage difficult problems and to show the leadership that we deserve,” she said.

“The moment of reckoning cannot be put off forever,” she said. “I really honestly wish I could turn the clock back.”