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So warns a detailed report to be released on Wednesday morning by the United States Energy Department. The report, which predicts that it could take 15 years to break American dependence on Chinese supplies, calls for the nation to increase research and expand diplomatic contacts to find alternative sources, and to develop ways to recycle the minerals or replace them with other materials.

At least 96 percent of the most crucial types of the so-called rare earth minerals are now produced in China, and Beijing has wielded various export controls to limit the minerals’ supply to other countries while favoring its own manufacturers that use them.

Spain has to raise 170 billion euros ($226 billion) next year, while refinancing needs for its regions total 30 billion euros and for banks around 90 billion euros, Moody’s estimates.

“Spain’s substantial funding requirements, not only for the sovereign but also for the regional governments and the banks, make the country susceptible to further episodes of funding stress,” Kathrin Muehlbronner, an analyst at Moody’s, said in a report today.

Spain lost its top rating at Moody’s in September as euro- region leaders struggled to contain the debt crisis. Spain is raising taxes, slashing wages and privatizing state industries to persuade investors it can avoid a rescue. Ireland last month became the second euro nation to get a bailout.

According to a post by de Raadt on the [openbsd-tech] mailing list, he received an email from Gregory Perry, CEO of GoVirtual Education, a Florida-based VMWare training firm, in which Perry told de Raadt he was “aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system implemented by EOUSA [an acronym for the US Dept. of Justice], the parent organization to the FBI.”

In his message to de Raadt, Perry stated that while Perry was the CTO at NETSEC, “Jason Wright and several other developers were responsible for those backdoors.” Perry said that he was now able to share this information with de Raadt because his non-disclosure agreement with the FBI had “recently expired.”

If true, this type of government involvement would erode the already tenuous perception many open source developers have about the lack of respect the US government has for the privacy of its citizens.

But there are already challenges about the accuracy of Perry’s statements.

For instance, at the close of his message to de Raadt, Perry stated that the presence of these backdoors were why “several inside FBI folks have been recently advocating the use of OpenBSD for VPN and firewalling implementations in virtualized environments.”

“For example,” Perry concluded, “Scott Lowe is a well respected author in virtualization circles who also happens top [sic] be on the FBI payroll, and who has also recently published several tutorials for the use of OpenBSD VMs in enterprise VMWare vSphere deployments.”

I contacted Scott Lowe, VMWare-Cisco Solutions Principal at EMC this evening to ask if he had a comment about Perry’s statement to de Raadt. Lowe quickly responded via e-mail his denial:

“Mr. Perry is mistaken. I am not, nor have I ever been, affiliated with or employed by the FBI or any other government agency. Likewise, I have not ever contributed a single line of code to OpenBSD; my advocacy is strictly due to appreciation of the project and nothing more,” Lowe replied.

When I followed up with the question of why Perry might want to implicate Lowe for assisting the FBI in promoting OpenBSD, Lowe replied, “I do not know why Mr. Perry mentioned my name. I do know that there is another Scott Lowe, who also writes about virtualization, to whom Mr. Perry might be referring; I don’t have any information as to whether that individual is or is not involved.”

Mr. Lowe from North Carolina has been confused with the other Scott Lowe, Director of IT at Westminster College in Missouri, before.

In the mid-1990s, Duke had drifted to the Florida Panhandle — not the spring break-filled sugar sand beaches, but the remote and wooded inland.

The ’90s were a blur of court hearings and personal conflicts.

He divorced a woman named Anita in 1995 and at some point, had a daughter. He was sued by a property management company in 1999. In 2000, he was convicted for waiting in the woods for ex-wife with a rifle, wearing a mask and a bulletproof vest. She confronted him and then tried to leave in a vehicle, and Duke shot the tires. His second wife, Rebecca, said the incident was a misunderstanding and that he went to his ex-wife’s house because the ex-wife “wouldn’t leave them alone.”

Duke’s attorney on the case, Ben Bollinger, remembered Duke as especially paranoid about the new millennium.

“He was one of these Y2k people,” he said, referring to a computer bug that some people thought was going to cause massive problems and economic chaos Jan. 1, 2000. “He was one of those believers that the world was going to turn for worst and he was stockpiling weapons, assault weapons.”

Bollinger said Duke took a plea agreement: Five years in prison followed by 10-years probation. He sought psychiatric help and took his medications as ordered and completed his probation, his lawyer said.

“He was competent but he was one of those people had a mood disorder where they could be depressed one day and all excited another day. I just remember the doctor saying he had a personality disorder,” Bollinger recalled.

While in prison, Duke filed for bankruptcy.

He was released in January 2004. About a year later, he sued the Social Security Administration, which had denied his application for disability benefits and health insurance.

“He couldn’t work. He just mentally couldn’t make the connection for eight hours a day,” said David Evans, the attorney who represented Duke.

Evans said Duke had been diagnosed by several doctors as bipolar, but didn’t have enough money to buy the needed medication. “He was clearly in need of help,” Evans said.

They filed at least five appeals to the denials.

“The judges adjudicating the claims didn’t feel the claim was significant enough,” Evans said. “All he was asking for was $500 or $600 a month and medical insurance.”

Duke withdrew the suit in 2006.

He and Rebecca had married in 1999, just before his prison sentence. She said Wednesday that Duke faithfully took his medication for his bipolar disorder, but that he was under a lot of stress — she had been fired from the school district and her final unemployment check was due this week.

Tommye Lou Richardson, the executive director of human resources for the Bay District, said Rebecca Duke was hired in September 2009 as a primary school teacher for students with special needs. She was given a 97-day probationary period, and was terminated.

“She was not performing appropriately, we thought, the principal thought, and so she was let go,” Richardson said.

She wasn’t able to go into any further detail.

Richardson said Rebecca Duke had “indicated that she felt like there was a violation of her employment rights,” though she never filed a lawsuit.

About a week ago, Clay Duke joined Facebook. Over the past several days, he added photo stills from the movie and graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” a nihilistic account of a masked man who fights against a totalitarian government. The movie’s predominant symbol — a red “V” inside of a circle — was posted several times on Duke’s page.

He also quoted the final passage from Percy Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy”: “Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth, like dew/Which in sleep had fall’n on you/Ye are many-they are few.”

Duke had no Facebook friends — although by Wednesday afternoon, thousands of people responded to his earlier postings, many of them critical of Tuesday’s shooting. Others were more sympathetic, saying that Duke was driven to madness because of the difficult economy.

Duke had written something of a suicide note in his “About Me” section:

Witnesses said the gunman walked up to a podium, spray-painted a red “V” with a circle around it before he began firing.

Bay District School board member Ginger Littleton said she hit the gunman in the arm with her purse when some of the people in the room were ordered out.

“In my mind, that was the last attempt or opportunity to divert him,” she told The Associated Press.

The gunman got angry, turned around, and she fell to the floor. The man pointed the gun at her head and said, “You stupid b—-” but he didn’t shoot her, she said. She’s not sure why.

“He had every opportunity to take me out,” she said.

Initially, officials thought that district security chief Mike Jones may have killed the gunman. But police Sgt. Jeff Becker said that after authorities reviewed videotape of the shooting, investigators determined that the gunman, identified as Clay A. Duke, fatally shot himself after being hit by shots fired by Jones.

The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world’s computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

An autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday and police declined to confirm reports that Timothy Davlin, mayor of the Illinois state capital since 2003, had shot himself.

…

Davlin, 53, was involved in a long-running court case involving his late cousin’s $845,000 estate, which included a charity as a beneficiary, the Springfield Journal-Register reported.

Davlin was due to appear in court on Tuesday.

Halliburton, which has said the Nigerian charges have no legal basis, could not immediately be reached to comment on the outcome of the meeting. But EFCC spokesman Femi Babafemi said an offer had been made to pay fines totalling up to $250 million.

“They have made offers of fines to be paid in penalties. They offered to pay $120 million in addition to the repatriation of $130 million trapped in Switzerland,” Babafemi said.

For the study, during the fall and summer of 2004, 2005 and 2006, human milk was sampled from mothers who had given birth at the University Women’s Hospital in Basel, Switzerland. The research participants also answered detailed questionnaires in order to document their use of different types of cosmetic products and sunscreens.

When the women’s breast milk was analyzed, tests revealed the milk samples contained a huge list of chemicals including persistent organic pollutants (POPs), synthetic musk fragrances, pesticides, phthalates, parabens, flame retardants (polybrominated diphenylethers), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — and cosmetic UV filters. What’s more, the UV filter chemicals were surprisingly widespread; they were comparable in concentrations to PCBs, which have long been known to contaminate the environment.

“Research on the effects of endocrine disrupters (chemicals interfering with hormone actions) has shown that it is of utmost importance to obtain information on simultaneous exposure of humans to different types of chemicals because endocrine active chemicals can act in concert. Information on exposure is particularly important for the developing organism at its most sensitive early life stages. Human milk was chosen because it provides direct information on exposure of the suckling infant and indirect information on exposure of the mother during pregnancy,” research team leaders Margret Schlumpf and Walter Lichtensteiger said in a media statement.

AIB said last month that the amount of money on deposit at the bank has fallen by €13bn since the start of the year — although it blamed most of the reduction on withdrawals by companies and financial institutions.

Another reason for the increased use of home security safes is a growing fear of burglaries because of the recession.