WASHINGTON: An angry, humiliated, and wounded A.Q.Khan has finally made public and official what has long been suspected: his nuclear proliferation activities that included exchanging and passing blue-prints and equipment to China, Iran, North Korea, and Libya was done at the behest of the Pakistani government and military, and he was forced to take the rap for it. ( Watch Video ) Read the full story

Scientists trawling 1,500 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico have netted a 20-foot giant squid, only the second such find in the Gulf.

“This was beyond everyone’s expectations,” said Deborah Epperson, the U.S. Minerals Management Service biologist leading the study. Read the full story

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Watching the Dave Matthews Band moments before they take the stage is like watching a football team bursting out of the locker room before a big game.

They slap hands. Bump fists. Jump up and down, exclaiming “Feel the love, feel the love!” The energy in the air is electric. Read the full story

I’m unsure of what Mr. Bernanke’s idea of ‘likely over’ is after reading this article. All signs clearly point to a continued downward trend in our economy, because all the figures used in this article are padded due to “cash for clunkers” sales. Without this added short-term boost, how will the economy fair in the future months…?

(All emphasis is my own personal emphasis to point out the numbers I just mentioned.)

Bernanke: Recession ‘Likely Over’

Fed Chief Doesn’t Expect Many New Jobs to Appear Soon; Retail Sales Climb 2.7%

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday that the recession was “very likely over,” as consumers showed some of the first tangible signs of spending again.

Mr. Bernanke, who had become cautiously more upbeat in recent weeks amid signs of third-quarter growth, said for the first time that forecasters agree “at this point that we are in a recovery.”

The rebound, he added, would likely be so moderate it wouldn’t produce many jobs.

“Even though from a technical perspective the recession is very likely over at this point, it is still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time as many people still find their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was,” he said. Read the full story

BOSTON (AP) — James S. McDonald, president and chief executive of investment management firm Rockefeller & Co., has died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, Massachusetts authorities said Tuesday. Read the full story

Trying to outsmart Obama Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors are exerting their best efforts in the search for ways to avoid a confrontation with the president of the United States, who has publicly called for a cessation of construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem. Read the full story

By David Olmos

Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) — Drug-resistant bacteria that causes serious infections and is most commonly spread in hospitals was found on nine beaches in Washington state, scientists said. Read the full story

ABC News reported that a bomb threat forced Tea Party planners to evacuate their building last night:

On the eve of what organizers call a ‘Big Ol’ TEA Party’, the Washington, D.C., offices of FreedomWorks were evacuated by DC Metro police on Friday afternoon after the conservative organization reported to authorities at 3:42 pm ET that it had received a bomb threat. Read the full story

ALBANY — Workers at Capital Region hospitals are going to have to get a flu shot this year or face losing their jobs.

The requirement is part of a new emergency regulation adopted earlier this month by the State Hospital Review and Planning Council that requires that all hospital workers get the flu vaccine — and that it be a requirement for employment. Read the full story

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet.

The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet’s zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star.

The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star.

It’s a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at the Keele University in England. Hellier’s report on the suicidal planet is in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

“It’s causing its own destruction by creating these tides,” Hellier said.

The star is called WASP-18 and the planet is WASP-18b because of the Wide Angle Search for Planets team that found them.

The planet circles a star that is in the constellation Phoenix and is about 325 light-years away from Earth, which means it is in our galactic neighborhood. A light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles.

The planet is 1.9 million miles from its star, 1/50th of the distance between Earth and the sun, our star. And because of that the temperature is about 3,800 degrees.

Its size — 10 times bigger than Jupiter — and its proximity to its star make it likely to die, Hellier said.

Think of how the distant moon pulls Earth’s oceans to form twice-daily tides. The effect the odd planet has on its star is thousands of times stronger, Hellier said. The star’s tidal bulge of plasma may extend hundreds of miles, he said.

Like most planets outside our solar system, this planet was not seen directly by a telescope. Astronomers found it by seeing dips in light from the star every time the planet came between the star and Earth.

So far astronomers have found more than 370 planets outside the solar system. This one is “yet another weird one in the exoplanet menagerie,” said planet specialist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

It’s so unusual to find a suicidal planet that University of Maryland astronomer Douglas Hamilton questioned whether there was another explanation. While it is likely that this is a suicidal planet, Hamilton said it is also possible that some basic physics calculations that all astronomers rely on could be dead wrong.

The answer will become apparent in less than a decade if the planet seems to be further in a death spiral, he said.

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PASADENA, Calif. — NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft.

“Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,” said Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.” Read the full story

Traces of cocaine taint up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, a new study finds.

A group of scientists tested banknotes from more than 30 cities in five countries, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, and Japan, and found “alarming” evidence of cocaine use in many areas.

U.S. and Canadian currency had the highest levels, with an average contamination rate of between 85 and 90 percent, while Chinese and Japanese currency had the lowest, between 12 and 20 percent contamination.

The findings were presented yesterday at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C.

Study leader Yuegang Zuo of the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth said that the high percentage of contaminated U.S. currency observed in the current study represents nearly a 20 percent jump in comparison to a similar study he conducted two years ago.

“To my surprise, we’re finding more and more cocaine in banknotes,” Zuo said.

Scientists have known for years that paper money can become contaminated with cocaine during drug deals and directly through drug use, such as snorting cocaine through rolled bills. Contamination can also spread to banknotes not involved in the illicit drug culture, because bills are processed in banks’ currency-counting machines.

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