cryptogon.com

The amount banks charge each other for two-week loans in euros dropped a record 50 basis points to 4.45 percent, the European Banking Federation said today. The rate had soared 83 basis points in the past two weeks as banks hoarded cash in anticipation of a squeeze on credit through the year-end.

“These are strong-arm tactics intended to show the market they’re seriously committed to breaking the deadlock,” said Marc Ostwald, a fixed-income strategist at Insinger De Beaufort SA in London. “The ECB is helping to bankroll banks out of a problem that they themselves created.”

The decline is the first sign attempts by policy makers to revive interbank lending are succeeding since the Federal Reserve last week announced the biggest coordinated central bank action since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. More than $70 billion of losses on securities linked to U.S. subprime- mortgages have left banks reluctant to lend to each other.

The ECB loaned a record 348.6 billion euros ($501.5 billion) for two weeks at 4.21 percent today, almost 170 billion euros more than it estimated was needed. Bids were received from 390 banks, ranging from 4 percent to 4.45 percent. The central bank first offered extra cash on Aug. 9, when it lent 95 billion euros of emergency funds. Banks also borrowed about 2.4 billion euros at 5 percent yesterday, the most since Sept. 26, the ECB said.

Microsoft has added the random-number generator Dual_EC-DRBG to Windows Vista, as part of SP1. Yes, this is the same RNG that could have an NSA backdoor.

The benchmark S&P/ASX200 fell more than 3.5 per cent, or 228.2 points to 6263.5 points – exceeding the market rout which followed the September 11 attacks.

This equates to the shares in the index losing more than $54 billion of market value today.

The big drop followed an earnings downgrade by Centro Property Group, which caused carnage among local property trusts.

Centro warned that it was recently unable to refinance some maturing debt. The news saw its shares – which traded above $10 this year – down 74 per cent to $1.47, shedding around $3.5 billion of market value.

The day had already got off to a bad start after high inflation figures in the US dimmed hopes of rate cut there, prompting a big fall on Wall Street.

“A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.

Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – will let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents. These labs are expected to be deployed across Iraq in early 2008.

Duong said the next step will be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed.

Duong justified this biometric-data program as a humanitarian way of singling out “bad guys” for elimination while sparing innocent civilians.

“I don’t want My Lai in Iraq,” Duong said. “The biggest difficulty in the global war on terror – just like in Vietnam – is to know who the bad guys are. How do we make sure we don’t kill innocents?”

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military units already are operating under loose rules of engagement that allow them to kill individuals who are identified as suspected terrorists or who show the slightest evidence of being insurgents. American forces also have rounded up tens of thousands of Iraqi military-age males, or MAMs, for detention.

During a summer 2007 trip to Iraq, Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was briefed on U.S. plans to expand the number of Iraqis in American detention by the end of 2008.

“The detainees have risen to over 18,000 and are projected to hit 30,000 (by the U.S. command) by the end of the year and 50,000 by the end of 2008,” Cordesman wrote in his trip report.

RTL Radio revealed that a group identifying itself as FNAR, or Fraction Nationaliste Arme Revolutionnaire, sent the Interior minister a package several weeks ago containing both photos establishing their responsibility for the bombings and a letter providing a list of demands. The group insisted that attacks on the revenue generating devices would only stop once the French government lowered taxes and paid a ransom.

FNAR’s attacks began in April with an unsuccessful attempt against a camera in Aumont-en-Halatte near Senlis. A second bomb destroyed the camera June 6. Other speed cameras were blown to bits in the Yvelines, Apremont and Chantilly. Police are using anti-terrorist laws to hunt down those involved.

The Drug Enforcement Agency, for one, continued and expanded the data mining records of phone calls and emails from the United States to Latin American countries in order to catch smugglers, according to the New York Times. The program began under President Clinton in he 1990s and expanded under President Bush.

Officials say the government has not listened to the communications, but has instead used phone numbers and e-mail addresses to analyze links between people in the United States and overseas. Senior Justice Department officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations signed off on the operation, which uses broad administrative subpoenas but does not require court approval to demand the records.

At least one major phone carrier — whose identity could not be confirmed — refused to cooperate, citing concerns in 2004 that the subpoenas were overly broad, government and industry officials said. The executives also worried that if the program were exposed, the company would face a public-relations backlash.

“He took out his shotgun and he said if they are bad guys I’ll shoot, I’ll scare them away,” Dao Khang, the brother of the homeowner, Vang Khang, tells the Star Tribune. “He fired first, he told me it was two shots.”

Dao Khang says his brother was trying to protect his wife and six children. No one from the family was hit during the exchange of gunfire. Vang hit two officers, but the Pioneer Press says they were protected by ballistic vests and helmets.

“I must’ve heard over 20 or 30 shots, I swear, it was scary,” Ruth Hayes, the family’s next-door neighbor, tells WCCO-TV. “It was like 30 SWAT guys out here … it was crazy it was just like havoc.”

KARE-TV reports that Vang was detained at the scene and released a few hours later. Police say there may have been a “language barrier” between the residents and the officers.

“It was some bad information that was received on the front end that kind-of trickled all the way through,” police Sgt. Jesse Garcia tells the station. “It’s unfortunate because we have officers that were hit by gunfire and this truly, truly could have been a much worse situation.”

Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

“This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be,” said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science’s effects on society. “Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes.”

That unprecedented degree of control over creation raises more than philosophical questions, however. What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make? How will these self-replicating entities be contained? And who might end up owning the patent rights to the basic tools for synthesizing life?

Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core “operating system” for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people’s hands.

…

Safety concerns also loom large. Already a few scientists have made viruses from scratch. The pending ability to make bacteria — which, unlike viruses, can live and reproduce in the environment outside of a living body — raises new concerns about contamination, contagion and the potential for mischief.

“Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet,” concluded a recent report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ban on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation.

“The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error,” the report says.

Many scientists say the threat has been overblown. Venter notes that his synthetic genomes are spiked with special genes that make the microbes dependent on a rare nutrient not available in nature. And Pierce, of DuPont, says the company’s bugs are too spoiled to survive outdoors.

“They are designed to grow in a cosseted environment with very high food levels,” Pierce said. “You throw this guy out on the ground, he just can’t compete. He’s toast.”

“We’ve heard that before,” said Jim Thomas, ETC Group’s program manager, noting that genes engineered into crops have often found their way into other plants despite assurances to the contrary. “The fact is, you can build viruses, and soon bacteria, from downloaded instructions on the Internet,” Thomas said. “Where’s the governance and oversight?”

In fact, government controls on trade in dangerous microbes do not apply to the bits of DNA that can be used to create them. And while some industry groups have talked about policing the field themselves, the technology is quickly becoming so simple, experts say, that it will not be long before “bio hackers” working in garages will be downloading genetic programs and making them into novel life forms.