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The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command agents have been visiting Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, to investigate the disappearance of the vials. Christopher Grey, spokesman for the command, said this latest investigation has found “no evidence of criminal activity.”

The vials contained samples of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, a virus that sickens horses and can be spread to humans by mosquitoes. In 97 percent of cases, humans with the virus suffer flu-like symptoms, but it can be deadly in about 1 out of 100 cases, according to Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. There is an effective vaccine for the disease and there hasn’t been an outbreak in the United States since 1971.

The vials had been at the research institute’s facility at Fort Detrick, home of the Army’s top biological research facility, for more than a decade. The three missing vials were among thousands of vials that were under the control of a senior scientist who retired in 2004. When another Fort Detrick scientist recently inventoried the retired scientist’s biological samples, he discovered that the three vials of the virus were missing. The original scientist’s records about his vials dated back to the days of paper-and-pen inventories.

During the investigation, the retired scientist and another former Fort Detrick researcher cooperated with investigating agents and, according to Vander Linden, they came back to the facility to help look for the vials.

Vander Linden said the investigators know that several years ago an entire freezer full of biological samples broke down and all the samples had to be safely destroyed. But a complete inventory of what was in the freezer was not done before the samples were destroyed. Vander Linden said there’s a “strong possibility” the vials were in that freezer and destroyed, but that isn’t known for sure.

This investigation comes two months after all research at the research institute facility at Fort Detrick was halted for a complete computer-based inventory of all disease samples at the fort. That inventory is expected to be complete before summer and may help solve the mystery of the three missing vials, officials said.

The embattled auto firm, which has been given 13.4 billion dollars by the US government, is set to shutter the plants as part of a bid to reduce production by around 170,000 vehicles this year.

An announcement is expected Friday the paper said.

GM spokesman Chris Lee told AFP the company would first announce any closures to staff, but refused to say whether it had plans to do so, describing the reports as “speculative.”

“We have made not made any down-working announcements,” he said.

Auto workers union representatives were not immediately available for comment.

The news come after the US government on Tuesday agreed to lend a further five billion dollars to GM as it works on a long-term viability plan.

The firm has received 13.4 billion dollars in public aid in an effort to stave off collapse of the sector, which employs thousands.

President Barack Obama’s administration has given GM until June 1 to present an aggressive restructuring plan, after the government rejected its previous proposals in late March.

The firm has said it wants to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection, but is preparing for it nevertheless.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the “guides” themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

What’s most widely agreed upon—based on the evidence available—is that the Guidestones are meant to instruct the dazed survivors of some impending apocalypse as they attempt to reconstitute civilization. Not everyone is comfortable with this notion. A few days before I visited, the stones had been splattered with polyurethane and spray-painted with graffiti, including slogans like “Death to the new world order.” This defacement was the first serious act of vandalism in the Guidestones’ history, but it was hardly the first objection to their existence. In fact, for more than three decades this uncanny structure in the heart of the Bible Belt has been generating responses that range from enchantment to horror. Supporters (notable among them Yoko Ono) have praised the messages as a stirring call to rational thinking, akin to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Opponents have attacked them as the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.

Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do.

The story of the Georgia Guidestones began on a Friday afternoon in June 1979, when an elegant gray-haired gentleman showed up in Elbert County, made his way to the offices of Elberton Granite Finishing, and introduced himself as Robert C. Christian. He claimed to represent “a small group of loyal Americans” who had been planning the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument. Christian had come to Elberton—the county seat and the granite capital of the world—because he believed its quarries produced the finest stone on the planet.

Joe Fendley, Elberton Granite’s president, nodded absently, distracted by the rush to complete his weekly payroll. But when Christian began to describe the monument he had in mind, Fendley stopped what he was doing. Not only was the man asking for stones larger than any that had been quarried in the county, he also wanted them cut, finished, and assembled into some kind of enormous astronomical instrument.

The tax band had originally been due to rise to 45 percent from 40 percent in April 2011 as Britain seeks to claw back lost tax revenue caused by a deep recession.

The 50-percent rate will apply to any income above 150,000 pounds.

“In November, I announced a new rate of income tax of 45 percent on incomes above 150,000 pounds — the top one percent of taxpayers,” Darling said in his budget speech.

They are military robots and their rapidly increasing numbers and growing sophistication may herald the end of thousands of years of human monopoly on fighting war. “Science fiction is moving to the battlefield. The future is upon us,” as Brookings scholar Peter Singer put it to a conference of experts at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania this month.

Singer just published Wired For War – the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, a book that traces the rise of the machines and predicts that in future wars they will not only play greater roles in executing missions but also in planning them.

Numbers reflect the explosive growth of robotic systems. The U.S. forces that stormed into Iraq in 2003 had no robots on the ground. There were none in Afghanistan either. Now those two wars are fought with the help of an estimated 12,000 ground-based robots and 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the technical term for drone, or robotic aircraft.

Ground-based robots in Iraq have saved hundreds of lives in Iraq, defusing improvised explosive devices, which account for more than 40 percent of U.S. casualties. The first armed robot was deployed in Iraq in 2007 and it is as lethal as its acronym is long: Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS). Its mounted M249 machinegun can hit a target more than 3,000 feet away with pin-point precision.

From the air, the best-known UAV, the Predator, has killed dozens of insurgent leaders – as well as scores of civilians whose death has prompted protests both from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Predators are flown by operators sitting in front of television monitors in cubicles at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 8,000 miles from Afghanistan and Taliban sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. The cubicle pilots in Nevada run no physical risks whatever, a novelty for men engaged in war.

TECHNOLOGY RUNS AHEAD OF ETHICS

Police officers have for a generation understood themselves to be free to search vehicles based on nothing more than the fact that they had just arrested an occupant. That principle, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his majority opinion, “has been widely taught in police academies” and “law enforcement officers have relied on the rule in conducting vehicle searches during the past 28 years.”

The majority replaced that bright-line rule with a more nuanced one, and law enforcement officials greeted it with dismay. “It’s just terrible,” William J. Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said of the decision. “It’s certainly going to result in less drug and weapons cases being made.”

In a dissent, four justices said the majority had effectively overruled an important and straightforward Fourth Amendment precedent established by the court in a 1981 decision, New York v. Belton.

Justice Stevens denied that. The precedent of Belton had often been applied too broadly, he said. Vehicle searches should be allowed only in two situations, he wrote: when the person being arrested is close enough to the car to reach in, possibly to grab a weapon or tamper with evidence; or when the arresting officer reasonably believes that the car contains evidence pertinent to the very crime that prompted the arrest.

…

Though Justice Stevens did not concede that Tuesday’s decision overruled Belton, he did say that fidelity to precedent was no reason to allow constitutional violations to continue.

Gordon Brown’s sin as Chancellor was to run a fiscal deficit of 3pc of GDP at the top of the long boom, when other countries were prudently using their windfall tax revenues to build a storm buffer. Many ran surpluses in 2007: Finland (+5.3pc), Denmark (+4.9pc), Sweden (+3.5pc), Spain (+2.2pc), Australia (+1.6pc) and Canada (+1.4pc). Germany was near balance.

The result is that the UK national debt will jump from 44pc of GDP in 2007 to 78pc by the end of next year, according to Fitch Ratings. But at least we have the adult company of the US and Japan in our immediate debacle, and sibling allies in Europe’s Club Med and most of the ex-Soviet bloc.

The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects America to run a deficit of 13pc this year following the US bank rescue and President Obama’s fiscal package. The US national debt will rise from 41pc in 2008 to 65pc next year.

Even so, there is some anecdotal evidence that would-be parents are factoring the rough economic times into the most personal of reproductive choices, some experts said.

In 2005, the last year for which data is available, the U.S. abortion rate fell to the lowest level since 1974, according to the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a nonprofit group focusing on reproductive issues.

But at the National Abortion Federation, a hotline for women seeking abortion information has been “ringing off the hook,” according to the group’s president, Vicki Saporta.

“We are currently getting more calls from women who report that they or their partner have recently lost their job, and we are also hearing from more women facing eviction,” she said.

One recent inquiry came from a 24-year-old married woman in Colorado who was evicted after her landlord went into foreclosure. Another came from a 32-year-old pregnant mother in Virginia who had lost her job and health insurance.

“As more and more women and families are struggling due to the crisis, it’s affecting more than just low-income families. Now more middle-class and working class families are facing the types problems that we’ve heard from low-income women,” Saporta said.

As with many other nonprofits, abortion assistance groups are being inundated with requests for aid just as funding is drying up.

In the first quarter of 2009, the New York Abortion Assistance Fund increased funding for abortions 60 percent from year-ago levels, and the number of women receiving assistance more than doubled.

The reach of the recession may stretch beyond women’s reproductive decisions to those of men.

Lawrence Ross, a urologist and former president of the American Urological Association, said he and his colleagues have noticed a roughly 50 percent increase in vasectomies in the past four to six months, which he attributes in part to the ailing economy.

About half a million men opt for vasectomies in the United States each year, a number which has remained flat over the years, Ross said.

“Many of them are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs and their health insurance. So while they are covered, a lot more patients, it pushed them over the edge to get it done more quickly,” he said.

“A lot of them are saying that we’ve decided to limit our family, the costs of education and raising kids is so high.”

Kellermann, 41, was found by Fairfax County Police after being called to his home in Hunter Mill estates in the Reston, VA area Wednesday morning.

However, there were “no signs of foul play. It’s under investigation. Police were called at 4:49 a.m.,” Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Lucy Caldwell told AHN Media in a telephone interview.

Asked if the death was a suicide, Caldwell said they were leaving that determination up to the county medical examiner. She wasn’t sure if the body had been removed yet or not when AHN spoke to her at 8:30 a.m.

“We were just called to respond to an unattended death and it’s under investigation,” Caldwell said.

The death is under investigation, Fairfax County Police Officer Shelley Broderick said. Broderick said early reports from others in the department indicated Kellermann’s wife reported a suicide, though the cause of death hasn’t been determined by officers at the scene.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department have been questioning executives about accounting practices, according to company filings. Freddie and Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance companies seized last year by the U.S. government, reported in September that they had received federal grand jury subpoenas and were the subject of an SEC inquiry.

Kellermann’s body was found at about 4:48 a.m. local time at a home in Reston, Virginia, police said. There were no signs of “foul play,” Broderick said.

Kellermann, who joined Freddie Mac in 1992, was promoted from corporate controller to acting CFO in September after the government seized control of the mortgage-finance company following losses amid the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.

As controller, Kellermann was the principal accounting officer, dealing with financial statements and disclosures, according to the company’s Web site.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments – not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) – the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman – had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

About the same time of the contract award, Mr. Blum’s private investment firm reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it and related affiliates had purchased more than 10 million new shares in CBRE. The shares were purchased for the going price of $3.77; CBRE’s stock closed Monday at $5.14.

Spokesmen for the FDIC, Mrs. Feinstein and Mr. Blum’s firm told The Times that there was no connection between the legislation and the contract signed Nov. 13, and that the couple didn’t even know about CBRE’s business with FDIC until after it was awarded.

Senate ethics rules state that members must avoid conflicts of interest as well as “even the appearance of a conflict of interest.” Some ethics analysts question whether Mrs. Feinstein ran afoul of the latter provision, creating the appearance that she was rewarding the agency that had just hired her husband’s firm.

“This clearly gives the appearance of a conflict of interest,” said Kent Cooper, a former federal regulator who specializes in government ethics and disclosures. “To maintain the people’s trust in government, it is incumbent on a legislator to take the extra steps necessary to ensure that when she introduces any legislation that it does not cause people to question her motives or the business activities of her spouse.”