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The military assessment came as the US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (ARDEC) inked a new $3.1m deal with Applied last week.

“Now that the technology is approaching the level of maturity needed to begin weaponization we will be more closely coordinated with Applied Energetics through this contract to fulfil Army mission needs,” said Ben Lagasca, chief of “Advanced Energy Armaments” at ARDEC.

The technology in question is a fairly old idea: that of using a laser beam to create a plasma “tunnel” or “channel” through the atmosphere which would be more conductive than ordinary air. This would allow a powerful electric spark discharge – an artificial lightning bolt – to be directed onto a target with some precision.

Arizona firm Ionatron began work on this plan in 2002. Originally the company thought that it would soon develop lightning blasters so portable and powerful that they would supersede conventional small arms. Any desired electric intensity from lethal force down to circuitry-disabling-but-harmless-to-people could be selected on one’s battery-powered electric blaster pistol. There would also be a wireless-Taser stun option in between.

Initially, however, the firm attempted to deploy its zappers as a bomb-disposal tool on robotic vehicles for use in Iraq. This ended in ignominious failure during 2006, and Ionatron stock fell off a cliff. The firm renamed itself, but nonetheless faced huge shareholder anger and earlier this month was forced to cough up $6.5m to settle a class-action lawsuit.

Still, normally the firm’s continued military research contracts would offer some confidence that at least some kind of electric bomb-zapper is in fact on the horizon – if not a proper sci-fi raygun.

The military initially developed the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, in 2002. The idea was let troops on the ground download footage from Predator drones and AC-130 gunships as it was being taken. Since then, nearly every airplane in the American fleet — from F-16 and F/A-18 fighters to A-10 attack planes to Harrier jump jets to B-1B bombers has been outfitted with equipment that lets them transmit to ROVERs. Thousands of ROVER terminals have been distributed to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But those early units were “fielded so fast that it was done with an unencrypted signal. It could be both intercepted (e.g. hacked into) and jammed,” e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program. In a presentation last month before a conference of the Army Aviation Association of America, a military official noted that the current ROVER terminal “receives only unencrypted L, C, S, Ku [satellite] bands.”

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The Detroit Health Department has already been working especially hard to get the vaccine into the community.

For instance, today parents attending the Christmas program at the Foreign Language Immersion School on Outer Drive had the chance to get shots for themselves and their children before or after the program.

Mom, Kimberley Wallace said, “This is the easiest for me. This way I don’t have to take them to the doctor’s office, take them out of school or anything so it works out real well.”

These companies, the American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and GMAC, are not only unable to repay the government, they are in need of continuing infusions that make them look increasingly like long-term wards of the state.

And the total risk they pose to the taxpayer far exceeds that of the big banks. Fannie and Freddie, in the final days of the year, are even said to be negotiating with the Treasury about greatly expanding the money available to them.

Initial jobless claims rose by 7,000 to 480,000 in the week ended Dec. 12, from a revised 473,000 the prior week, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance was little changed in the prior week, while those getting extended payments increased.

Federal Reserve policy makers yesterday said weakness in the labor market is restraining consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the world’s largest economy. Concerns over the lack of jobs prompted the central bank yesterday to reiterate a pledge to keep the benchmark interest rate low for an “extended period.”

“The level of new claims remains elevated,” said Steven Wood, president of Insight Economics LLC in Danville, California. “The labor market is improving, but remains soft.”

Stock-index futures were down after the report as Citigroup Inc. sold stock for a price so low the U.S. government delayed plans to shrink its one-third stake. The contract on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 0.9 percent to 1,096.2 at 8:49 a.m. in New York. Treasury securities rose.

Exceeds Forecast

Jobless claims were projected to drop to 465,000 from 474,000 initially reported for the prior week, according to the median forecast of 43 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from 450,000 to 475,000.

The report showed the four-week moving average of initial claims, a less volatile measure, fell to 467,500 last week, the lowest level since September 2008, from 472,750.

Continuing claims increased by 5,000 in the week ended Dec. 5 to 5.19 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of Americans receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

The lawsuits say that a company-wide policy exempting first-level managers from overtime pay was a violation of federal labor laws and California state laws, according to Sanford Wittels & Heisler, the law firm filing the case.

Arturo Beltran Leyva, the “boss of bosses,” and three members of his cartel were slain in the shootout in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City, according to a navy statement. A fifth cartel member committed suicide during the shootout.

Investors flocked to the safety of the dollar during Asian and European trading as they digested the Federal Reserve’s more upbeat message on the economy and its implication for monetary policy as well as Greece’s credit-rating downgrade. Appetite for risk was hurt further after U.K. retail sales declined in November, their first monthly drop in six months.

Global stocks tumbled, with futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index indicating U.S. equities are also set to open lower, while oil and gold are also down.

“It’s risk reduction profit-taking” across the board, said Neil Mellor, a currency strategist at BNY Mellon in London. “Investors are acknowledging the fact that it’s year-end and it’s time to take profits on the rally we’ve seen” in many riskier asset classes.

Many investors used cheap dollars to fund purchases in riskier assets throughout the year and are now unwinding these positions, boosting the dollar.

The euro sank as far as $1.4329 overnight, its lowest level since Sept. 8, while the dollar index, which tracks the currency against a basket of six others, surged to a more than three-month high.

“A combination of things are weighing on the euro, particularly the Greece story and the post-FOMC reaction,” said Geoffrey Yu, currency strategist at UBS AG in London.

Early Thursday in New York, the euro was at $1.4353 from $1.4531 late Wednesday, according to EBS via CQG. The dollar was at Y89.94 from Y89.78, while the euro was at Y129.08 from Y130.45. The pound was at $1.6118 from $1.6329. The dollar was at CHF1.0491 from CHF1.0387.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington’s growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration has come to rely heavily on the unmanned drones because they allow the U.S. to safely monitor and stalk insurgent targets in areas where sending American troops would be either politically untenable or too risky.

The stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies.

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

In the summer 2009 incident, the military found “days and days and hours and hours of proof” that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. “It is part of their kit now.”

A senior defense official said that James Clapper, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief, assessed the Iraq intercepts at the direction of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and concluded they represented a shortcoming to the security of the drone network.

“There did appear to be a vulnerability,” the defense official said. “There’s been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there’s an issue that we can take care of and we’re doing so.”

Senior military and intelligence officials said the U.S. was working to encrypt all of its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but said it wasn’t yet clear if the problem had been completely resolved.

Some of the most detailed evidence of intercepted feeds has been discovered in Iraq, but adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, according to people briefed on the matter. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said.

The Pentagon is deploying record numbers of drones to Afghanistan as part of the Obama administration’s troop surge there. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who oversees the Air Force’s unmanned aviation program, said some of the drones would employ a sophisticated new camera system called “Gorgon Stare,” which allows a single aerial vehicle to transmit back at least 10 separate video feeds simultaneously.

Gen. Deptula, speaking to reporters Wednesday, said there were inherent risks to using drones since they are remotely controlled and need to send and receive video and other data over great distances. “Those kinds of things are subject to listening and exploitation,” he said, adding the military was trying to solve the problems by better encrypting the drones’ feeds.

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Last December, U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered copies of Predator drone feeds on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. “There was evidence this was not a one-time deal,” this person said. The U.S. accuses Iran of providing weapons, money and training to Shiite fighters in Iraq, a charge that Tehran has long denied.

The militants use programs such as SkyGrabber, from Russian company SkySoftware. Andrew Solonikov, one of the software’s developers, said he was unaware that his software could be used to intercept drone feeds. “It was developed to intercept music, photos, video, programs and other content that other users download from the Internet — no military data or other commercial data, only free legal content,” he said by email from Russia.

Officials stepped up efforts to prevent insurgents from intercepting video feeds after the July incident. The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes. Additional concerns remain about the vulnerability of the communications signals to electronic jamming, though there’s no evidence that has occurred, said people familiar with reports on the matter.

Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren’t readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

In an email, a spokeswoman said that for security reasons, the company couldn’t comment on “specific data link capabilities and limitations.”

Fixing the security gap would have caused delays, according to current and former military officials. It would have added to the Predator’s price. Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies.

“There’s a balance between pragmatics and sophistication,” said Mike Wynne, Air Force Secretary from 2005 to 2008.

The Air Force has staked its future on unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones account for 36% of the planes in the service’s proposed 2010 budget.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.

Were it not for those “tools,” the U.S. Government would not have the statutory authority to borrow any more money. It might block issuance of Social Security checks and require a shutdown of some parts of the federal government.

Pending in Congress is a measure to increase the Debt Limit by $290 billion, which amounts to six more weeks of routine borrowing for the federal government. (The House just passed the increase, though the Senate has yet to act. It is expected to approve the measure.)

Republicans and conservative Democrats blocked moves by House leaders to pass a $1.8 trillion dollar increase in the Debt Limit so the Democratic majority would not have to face the embarrassment of raising the Debt Limit yet again before next November’s midterm elections.

The Debt Limit has been raised about a hundred times since 1940, when it was $49 billion – about five days worth of federal spending now.

The White House projects a record $1.5 trillion dollars deficit this year alone, and a 5-year deficit total of $4.97 trillion.