August 13, 2008 by Tim McDowell.

A Coast Guard cutter will embark on an Arctic voyage this week to determine the extent of the continental shelf north of Alaska and map the ocean floor, data that could be used for oil and natural gas exploration. U.S. and University of New Hampshire scientists on the Coast Guard Cutter Healy will leave Barrow, Alaska, on Thursday on a three-week journey. They will create a three-dimensional map of the Arctic Ocean floor in a relatively unexplored area known as the Chukchi borderland. The Healy will launch again on September 6, when it will be joined by Canadian scientists aboard an icebreaker, who will help collect data to determine the thickness of sediment in the region. With oil at $114 a barrel, after hitting a record $147 in July, and sea ice melting fast, countries like Russia and the U.S. are looking north for possible energy riches. “These are places nobody’s gone before, in essence, so this is a first step,” said the director of the oceanic affairs office at the U.S. State Department. She said the data collected may provide information to the public about future oil and natural gas sources for the U.S. This will be the fourth year that the U.S. has collected data to define the limits of its continental shelf in the Arctic. Source: http://www.khbz.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=104668&article=4082240

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August 13, 2008 by Tim McDowell.

 BP shut down a pipeline carrying Caspian oil from Azerbaijan to the Georgian Sea on Tuesday citing concern about security in Georgia. A BP spokesman said the 150,000 barrels a day pipeline from Baku to Supsa on the Georgian Black Sea had been closed as a “security precaution.” He said “very small volumes of Azeri oil, less than 100,000 barrels a day,” are now being exported via railways across the Caucasus and a pipeline to Russia. He said BP was unaware of any attacks on oil and gas pipelines in Georgia, despite Georgian claims that Russian warplanes had bombed the pipelines. The Georgian prime minister said Tuesday that Georgian railways and oil ports and Black Sea ports were in working order. The prime minister of Kazakhstan said “no harmful action had been taken at Batumi,” a Georgian port owned by KazMunaigas, the Kazakh state oil company. However, the prime minister ordered a halt to exports across the Caucasus to Batumi on Monday. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Tuesday that the conflict in Georgia threatens the strategic energy export corridor linking the Caspian and central Asia with western oil and gas markets. “Recent escalation in the military engagement between Russia and Georgia poses a threat to certain key oil and gas pipelines which transit Georgia,” the IEA said in a report issued shortly before Russia declared a ceasefire in Georgia. The pipelines, built by foreign consortia with strong political backing from the U.S., have eased Russia’s stranglehold over oil and gas exports from the landlocked Caspian region. Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8e85a732-6866-11dd-a4e5-0000779fd18c,dwp_uuid=e8477cc4-c820-11db-b0dc-000b5df10621.html

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August 13, 2008 by Tim McDowell.

Hackers, perhaps affiliated with a well-known Russian criminal network, have attacked and hijacked Web sites belonging to Georgia, the former Soviet republic now in the fourth day of war with Russia, a security researcher claimed on Sunday. Some Georgian government and commercial sites are unavailable, while others may have been hijacked, said a researcher who tracks the notorious Russian Business Network (RBN), a malware and criminal hosting network. “Many of Georgia’s Internet servers were under external control from late Thursday,” he said early Saturday in an entry on his Web site. According to his research, the government’s sites dedicated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the country’s president have been blocked completely, or traffic to and from those sites’ servers have been redirected to servers actually located in Russia and Turkey. Statements from Georgia’s foreign ministry have appeared in a blog hosted on Google, perhaps in an attempt to circumvent attacks. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9112201&intsrc=hm_list

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August 13, 2008 by Tim McDowell.

 Coda Octopus Group Inc.’s Underwater Inspection System (UIS), developed in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard, has been purchased by the Sheriff’s Office of Contra Costa County, California. Contra Costa County will be the first on the West Coast to permanently deploy the UIS, developed after the 9/11 attacks to address the need for a new generation of port security technology to respond to underwater threats. Source: http://mae.pennnet.com/display_article/336628/32/NEWS/none/none/1/Underwater-Anti-Terrorism-Technology-to-Patrol-San-Francisco-Bay/

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August 13, 2008 by Tim McDowell.

 U.S. Army officials continue to push for speedy production of Future Combat Systems (FCS), saying they are confident the system will save lives after observing its performance in a limited preliminary user test near Fort Bliss, Texas, in late July. Army officials tested the FCS ‘Spin Out 1’ kit during a training exercise from 27 to 31 July, operating the network of weapon systems in a mock village between White Sands Missile range and Fort Bliss. “Our recommendation from everything we’ve learned so far is these [systems] are really going to help our soldiers down range,” in Afghanistan and Iraq, said the director of the army’s Future Force Integration Directorate. FCS Spin Out 1 consists of a Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS) for precision fires; a ‘B-kit’ computer system to share imagery; unattended sensors; an aerial drone known as the Class I Block 0 Micro Air Vehicle (MAV); and a ground-based robot known as the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle. Source: http://www.janes.com/news/defence/land/jdw/jdw080808_1_n.shtml

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August 13, 2008 by Tim McDowell.

 A New Westminster, British Columbia, man has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for plotting to blow up the Trans-Alaskan oil pipeline in January 2000. The man pleaded guilty in March to aiding and abetting terrorism transcending national boundaries at the U.S. District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was arrested in August 1999, in a joint operation by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They -2-accused him of soliciting the help of a U.S. citizen to bomb the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Prosecutors said the Canadian man acquired explosives and sought to plant 14 timed bombs at three points along the pipeline in an attempt to disrupt energy supplies over the turn of the millennium. He also planned to buy energy securities at low prices before the attack and hoped to profit by selling them at a higher price amid market turmoil afterward, prosecutors said. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System runs north-south about 800 miles from the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay to the Gulf of Alaska at Valdez. Source: http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=033aabcf-9aab-4e42-bc16-7ab3b25d3232

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