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Chitra Chauhan, 33, wife and mother of a 3-year-old, was pronounced dead at a hospital about two hours later, victim of an apparent suicide. A small amount of potassium cyanide was found on a table in her room.

The nature of Chauhan’s work and the manner of her death turned what investigators characterized as a private act into a public spectacle.

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Chauhan worked in the USF Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research, which is housed at the USF Research Park on the south end of campus. The center was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study bioterrorism and emerging infections.

Security is tighter throughout the research park because work is done there with private companies and the Department of Defense.

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Chauhan was investigating treatments for tropical diseases common around the world, including malaria, USF said.

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Chauhan has worked at USF as a post-doctoral researcher since Dec. 26, 2007. Her annual salary was $45,183. Police gave her address as a condominium on Palm Springs Boulevard in Tampa Palms.

She obtained a doctorate degree in 2005 from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi, India. She went to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to join her husband, who had taken a faculty position there after finishing graduate school, said Professor Dave Severson, who runs the lab where she worked.

This massive redirection of data has received scant attention in the mainstream media because the mechanics of how the hijacking was carried out and the implications of the incident are difficult for those outside the cybersecurity community to grasp, said a top security expert at McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated Internet security company.

In short, the Chinese could have carried out eavesdropping on unprotected communications — including emails and instant messaging — manipulated data passing through their country or decrypted messages, Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee said.

Nobody outside of China can say, at least publicly, what happened to the terabytes of data after the traffic entered China.

The incident may receive more attention when the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional committee, releases its annual report on the bilateral relationship Nov. 17. A commission press release said the 2010 report will address “the increasingly sophisticated nature of malicious computer activity associated with China.”

Said Alperovitch: “This is one of the biggest — if not the biggest hijacks — we have ever seen.” And it could happen again, anywhere and anytime. It’s just the way the Internet works, he explained. “What happened to the traffic while it was in China? No one knows.”

The telephone giants of the world work on a system based on trust, he explained. Machine-to-machine interfaces send out messages to the Internet informing other service providers that they are the fastest and most efficient way for data packets to travel. For 18 minutes April 8, China Telecom Corp. told many ISPs of the world that its routes were the best paths to send traffic.

For example, a person sending information from Arlington, Va., to the White House in Washington, D.C. — only a few miles away — could have had his data routed through China. Since traffic moves around the world in milliseconds, the computer user would not have noticed the delay.

“They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays,” Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.

“No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner,” he said.

“The state council is formulating measures to curb the overly fast rises of prices,” he said in a statement on the government’s website.

He gave no details, but they are said to include price caps, subsidies and penalties for food hoarding.

Meanwhile the Shanghai stock exchange has fallen nearly 10% in four days on fears of interest rate rises.
Painful price rises

The People’s Bank of China raised rates unexpectedly in October in response to growing inflation pressures, and has adopted a more hawkish tone since.

Consumer price inflation rose to 4.4% in October, which was up from 3.6% a month earlier and its highest level in two years.

Food price inflation has become particularly acute in China, with food prices rising 10.1% last month.

Britain, not part of the eurozone, “stands ready to support Ireland” in whatever the debt-stricken country needs to do to stabilize its troubled banking system, Finance Minister George Osborne said.

“It is in Britain’s national interest that the Irish economy is successful and we have a stable banking system,” said Osborne, a day after the eurozone finance ministers failed to convince Ireland to accept a Greek-style bailout.

Irish and EU officials vowed Tuesday night to stabilize the banks at the center of Ireland’s financial crisis and keep it from spreading to other fragile euro-linked economies. Representatives of the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund will travel to Ireland this week to determine what to do about the banks.

Ireland has taken over three banks and is expected to take over more in a bailout that has already reached euro45 billion ($61 billion) and likely will push the nation’s 2010 deficit to a staggering 32 percent of GDP. The government in Dublin insists that it doesn’t need a bailout from Europe, but growing doubts about Ireland’s ability to pay its bills have sent interest rates soaring on Irish bonds.

“It is natural (that the U.K. would be interested in helping to stabilize Ireland), because the United Kingdom and U.K. banks have a very, very significant exposure in Ireland,” said the EU’s monetary affairs chief Olli Rehn. “There is a very strong interconnection in the banking sector and the financial system between the two countries.”

“It indicates that [Stuxnet’s creators] wanted to get on the system and not be discovered and stay there for a long time and change the process subtly, but not break it,” says Liam O Murchu, researcher with Symantec Security Response, which published the new information in an updated paper (.pdf) on Friday.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the number of households jumped to 5.6 from 3.9 million.

“Households also accessed additional assistance through USDA’s 15 food and nutrition assistance programs,” the article in the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) “Amber Waves” said.

The USDA oversees the government’s food stamp program, also known as SNAP or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for low-income families and other domestic feeding programs like school lunches.

In the 2009 fiscal year, “15.2 million households participated in SNAP in an average month, up from 12.7 million in FY 2008,” the article said.

In a separate report, the ERS said the percentage of U.S. households without food security — access to enough food for an active, healthy life — at some point during the year hit a record in 2009.

Portugal became the latest European nation to suggest it was on the brink of seeking help from Brussels after Ireland confirmed it had begun preliminary talks over its debt problems.

Greece also disclosed yesterday that its economic problems are even worse than previously thought. Last night, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the spectre of the euro collapsing as she warned: “If the euro fails, then Europe fails.”