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The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announced the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this summer.

Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase “plausible deniability” to describe the weapon’s benefits in a briefing (powerpoint format) on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June.
Plausibly deniable

John Corley, director of USAF’s Capabilities Integration Directorate, used the same phrase to describe the weapon’s benefits at an Air Armament Symposium in Florida in October 2007 (see page 15, pdf format).

As the term suggests, “plausible deniability” is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it.

Corley and Kaiser did not respond to requests from New Scientist to expand on their comments. But John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear.

“The target would never know what hit them,” says Pike. “Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike.”
Silent strike

A laser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night.

With no previous examples for comparison, it may be difficult to discern whether damage to a vehicle or person was the result of a laser strike.

In its latest monthly energy forecast, the EIA said the huge drop in demand was due to slower U.S. economic growth and the impact of high petroleum prices.

The drop in U.S. oil demand helped offset a 1.3-million-barrel-per-day increase in petroleum consumption in nonindustrial countries during the first half of the year.

As a result, preliminary data shows that global oil consumption rose by 500,000 barrels a day in the 6-month period, the EIA said.

High gasoline prices have cut into U.S. demand, but the EIA expects lower pump costs through December than previously forecast.

However, U.S. consumers will be hit with much higher heating fuel costs this winter, the agency warned.

The average residential price for heating oil during the upcoming heating season, which runs from October through March, is forecast to be $4.34 a gallon, up 31 percent from last winter.

New York City is going to great lengths to make sure that bomb-toting terrorists can’t reach us.

“New York City is something special,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday. “It’s not just a very big city in this world. It is, in many senses, the iconic city. It represents Western Democracy.

As part of the plan the NYPD is creating a huge buffer zone, working with cops in a 50-mile radius of the city. Officials in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Long Island are given radiation detectors to stop terrorists as far away from New York City as possible.

Police also plan to track every vehicle that enters Manhattan.

“We’re going to be adding cameras as we go forward,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

That part of that plan calls for photographing and scanning license plates of cars and trucks at all bridges and tunnels. Even small ones like the Willis Avenue Bridge will also be used to detect radiation.

“I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call this Big Brotherish,” said Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The New York City Police Department is creating a huge computer database of the movement of everyone in a vehicle in Manhattan.”

Civil libertarians take issue with one aspect of that plan – data on each vehicle entering Manhattan would be stored for at least one month. Bloomberg, however, defended the idea.

The announcement came minutes before French President Nicolas Sarkozy was to land in Moscow to meet with Medvedev to negotiate terms for a possible cease-fire.

“I have reached a decision to halt the operation to force the Georgian authorities to peace,” Medvedev said. “The aggressor has been punished and has incurred very significant losses. Its armed forces are disorganized.”

The decision ends five days of fighting that began in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia and spread well into Georgia. Video Watch more on the fighting in South Ossetia »

Before the Russian president said he would halt military operations, a Georgian Interior Ministry official said Tuesday that Russian bombs hit one of the three pipelines carrying oil to the Black Sea port of Poti. There was no oil in the pipeline at the time, the ministry official said.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has accused Russia of provoking the war to justify a full-scale invasion of the former Soviet state. The Russians say Saakashvili attacked first in an attempt to gain control of South Ossetia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an earlier news conference Tuesday that Russia wanted a demilitarized zone to be created in Georgian territory before a cease-fire took effect. Video Watch Lavrov speak about Georgia »

The zone had to be big enough to prevent Georgia’s military from again attacking the breakaway province, Lavrov said.

He said Russian troops already in the breakaway province on peacekeeping duty should remain, but that Georgian troops who were part of that force should not return.

The study by the Government Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.

Georgia is a crucial transit point for oil and gas. Three major pipelines connecting energy sources in the Caucasus and Central Asia to European markets pass through its territory. One of these, the South Caucasus pipeline, is an important part of the plan for the Nabucco pipeline to Austria, which would deliver natural gas directly to the European Union, bypassing Russia entirely, if built.

The Russian government, which controls Gazprom, the world’s largest gas company, has tried frantically to cajole its European customers into ignoring Nabucco and investing instead in its own new pipelines.

That arm-twisting has been unsuccessful in blocking the Nabucco plan, which has firm backing from the EU and could vastly reduce its dependence on Moscow for energy. But even if the result of the war in Georgia is not the overthrow of the Saakashvili government, it is likely to make pipeline investments there look very risky indeed.

The outsized Russian response to Mr. Saakashvili’s provocation, which is beginning to look like a full-scale invasion, must be understood in this context.

To suggest that Russia would ignite a regional war for the sake of controlling energy supplies might seem fanciful, were it not for the extraordinary connections between the Kremlin and the energy industry, and the centrality of its operations to Russian policy.

Mr. Medvedev was the chairman of Gazprom’s board until late 2007. The current chair is also Russia’s deputy prime minister.

About a tenth of Russia’s tax revenue comes directly from Gazprom, which is one of the world’s largest corporations. The company also has a habit of cutting supplies to states with which the Kremlin has disagreements in the dead of winter, as it has to Georgia and Ukraine.

The stakes of the Georgian conflict for energy security, to say nothing of the suffering it has caused, make it imperative that the West find a way to respond, although it is not clear how.

Gold for December delivery fell to a low of $825 an ounce in Globex electronic trading. That’s gold futures’ lowest price since late December. It was last down $31.80, or 3.7%, at $833.

The contract dropped $34.80, or 4%, to $830 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

“Following a feeble and half-hearted recovery attempt, gold prices suffered an even greater wash-out than last Friday’s disastrous run to the downside,” said Jon Nadler, a senior analyst at Kitco Bullion Dealers.

On Friday, gold dropped $13.10 an ounce to chalk up a weekly loss of nearly 6%.

The former all-time high of $845 did not appear to have any significant support, and the steep drop in prices “may be very difficult to recover from,” Nadler said.

In a gambit with such low odds of success that traders question its legitimacy, someone wagered $1.7 million that Bear Stearns shares would suffer an unprecedented decline within days. Options specialists are convinced that the buyer, or buyers, made a concerted effort to drive the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm out of business and, in the process, reap a profit of more than $270 million.

Whoever placed the bet used so-called put options that gave purchasers the right to sell 5.7 million Bear Stearns shares for $30 each and 165,000 shares for $25 apiece just nine days later, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That was less than half the $62.97 closing price in New York Stock Exchange composite trading on March 11. The buyers were confident the stock would crash.

“Even if I were the most bearish man on Earth, I can’t imagine buying puts 50 percent below the price with just over a week to expiration,” said Thomas Haugh, general partner of Chicago-based options trading firm PTI Securities & Futures LP. “It’s not even on the page of rational behavior, unless you know something.”

The 57,000 puts that traded March 11 at the $30 strike price and the 1,649 that traded at $25 were collectively worth about $1.7 million, Bloomberg data show. Each put is equal to 100 shares of stock.

`Lottery Ticket’

“That trade amounted to buying a lottery ticket,” said Michael McCarty, chief options and equity strategist at New York-based brokerage Meridian Equity Partners Inc. “Would you buy $1.7 million worth of lottery tickets just because you could? No. Neither would a hedge fund manager.”

During the next four days, New York-based Bear Stearns unraveled in the swiftest investment-banking failure in Wall Street history. Speculation about a cash shortage proved self- fulfilling, causing customers and lenders to demand their money back. Bear Stearns’s stock sank 47 percent to $30 on Friday, March 14. That’s when the Fed moved to stave off a panic by helping the U.S. Treasury arrange JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s purchase of the company for $2 a share, a price unimaginable to the firm’s 14,000 employees and more than 500 shareholders.

In the aftermath, Bear Stearns Chief Executive Officer Alan Schwartz told Congress that the firm was toppled by rumor- mongering and abusive trading. Regulators have begun peeling back trading records, hunting for suspects.

The closing of IndyMac in July, the third-biggest U.S. bank failure, may cost the fund $4 billion to $8 billion, in addition to an estimated $1.16 billion for seven closures through Aug. 1. Premiums for deposit insurance will likely rise, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said in a July 30 interview. A decision on the increase is due by the fourth quarter.

“It’s going to be a bloody, expensive mess for the banking industry,” said Bert Ely, president of Ely & Co. Inc., a bank consulting firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. “Healthy banks are paying for the mistakes made by failed banks.”

The pace of bank closings is accelerating as financial firms have reported almost $495 billion in writedowns and credit losses since 2007. The FDIC’s “problem” bank list grew by 18 percent in the first quarter from the fourth, to 90 banks with combined assets of $26.3 billion. A revised list is due this month. The insurance fund had $52.8 billion as of March 31.

The FDIC estimated its shutdown of California-based mortgage lender IndyMac might drain as much as 15 percent from the fund. Seven other banks will take about $1.16 billion, or about 2 percent.