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According to a Times study of ammunition markings, of 30 rifle magazines removed from the corpses of insurgents in eastern Afghanistan last month, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, “identical” to ammunition the United States has provided to Afghan government forces.

Although “the scope of that diversion remains unknown,” the newspaper warned that “poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied” in the wake of “only spotty” US and Afghan controls of weapons and ammunition sent to Afghanistan.

Following criticism for failing to account for thousands of rifles provided to Afghan security forces, some of which have been found in the hands of militants, the Pentagon launched a database documenting small arms supplied to Afghan units.

And the US-led Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, which is responsible for training and supplying Afghan forces, has said it has prioritized accounting for all Afghan military and police property.

“The emphasis from our perspective is on accountability of all logistics property,” the transition command’s deputy chief, Brigadier General Anthony Ierardi told the newspaper.

Leakage of Pentagon-supplied armaments to insurgents is an “absolutely worst-case scenario,” he said.

But no similar system of accountability is applied to ammunition, which is more difficult to trace than firearms.

Military officers told the newspaper that US forces do not examine all captured arms and munitions to determine how they fell into the hands of insurgents and whether the Afghan government was supplying — even indirectly — the Taliban.

The source, who was not cleared to speak with the media and would not be identified, said the U.S. government would pay for the assets by assuming the automaker’s $6 billion of secured debt and forgiving the bulk of the $15.4 billion of emergency loans that the U.S. Treasury has provided to GM.

The government is negotiating the terms on which it will assume GM’s secured debt and might make an the offer to holders of the debt that is far superior to the one made to Chrysler LLC’s secured lenders, the source said.

Chrysler filed for bankruptcy in April and has proposed paying its secured lenders about 28 cents on the dollar.

At a Tuesday press conference held at the Daimler museum in Stuttgart, Germany, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Daimler management board member Thomas Weber said the contract between the two companies calls for joint collaboration on the Smart electric car and future models.

Daimler has invested a “double-digit million-dollar sum” to acquire about a 10 percent stake in California-based Tesla, Weber said.

“We are about to combine the best of the old and new school,” Weber said during a press conference, which was Webcast. “We are both deeply convinced that electric powertrains will play a major role in sustainability mobility.”

The two companies last year announced that Tesla would supply the lithium ion battery for the Electric Smart EV, a small town car. Telsa designs and makes the packs using battery cells used in consumer electronics.

Daimler plans to test those cars this year and to mass-produce the Electric Smart EV in 2012, Weber said.

The company, which has been working on electric-vehicle technology since the 1970s, chose to partner and invest in Tesla to help Daimler bring cars to market quickly, Weber added. “The first priority was to find the quickest and most straightforward solution,” he said.

The preservation is so good, it is possible to see the outline of its fur and even traces of its last meal.

The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a “missing link” between today’s higher primates – monkeys, apes and humans – and more distant relatives.

So says a new study that tracked DNA damage in 63 steel-foundry workers in Brescia, Italy, who, under their normal factory conditions, were exposed to particulate matter.

The same damage may occur in city dwellers exposed to normal air, the researchers say.

Particulate matter includes suspended, tiny bits of dust, metal, or soot in the air, which can lodge deep in the lungs. Exposure to the substance has been linked to respiratory diseases, lung cancer, and heart problems.

Scientists know little about how inhaling particulate matter can cause health problems, according to lead study author Andrea Baccarelli of the University of Milan.

But they did find that exposed workers’ DNA was damaged by a slowed rate of “methylation,” a biological process in which genes are organized into different chemical groups.

Fewer groups means that fewer genes are expressed—or made into proteins—a crucial process in the body’s regular maintenance.

And yet, they’re willfully consumed.

Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an “ethical governor,” a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire. His book on the subject, “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” comes out this month.

He argues not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers.

The move follows recent Chinese challenges to the status of the dollar as the world’s leading international currency.

Mr Lula da Silva, who is visiting Beijing this week, and Hu Jintao, China’s president, first discussed the idea of replacing the dollar with the renminbi and the real as trade currencies when they met at the G20 summit in London last month.

An official at Brazil’s central bank stressed that talks were at an early stage. He also said that what was under discussion was not a currency swap of the kind China recently agreed with Argentina and which the US had agreed with several countries, including Brazil.

“Currency swaps are not necessarily trade related,” the official said. “The funds can be drawn down for any use. What we are talking about now is Brazil paying for Chinese goods with reals and China paying for Brazilian goods with renminbi.”

Henrique Meirelles and Zhou Xiaochuan, governors of the two countries’ central banks, were expected to meet soon to discuss the matter, the official said.

Mr Zhou recently proposed replacing the US dollar as the world’s leading currency with a new international reserve currency, possibly in the form of special drawing rights (SDRs), a unit of account used by the International Monetary Fund.

A divided Court of Appeals, in a 4-3 decision, reversed the conviction of 41-year-old Scott Weaver, finding that his protection against unlawful search and seizure under the state constitution was violated. The court suppressed information obtained from the device from being used as evidence at a new trial as it was at the first trial.

Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, in the 20-page majority opinion, wrote: “What the technology yields and records with breathtaking quality and quantity is a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations — political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few — and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits.”