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Archeologists Find Evidence of St Peter's Prison in Italy

Nick Squires
The Telegraph
Fri, 25 Jun 2010 06:00 UTC
Image
© Alamy
The Crucifixion of St Peter by Michelangelo
Archaeologists have discovered evidence to support the theory that St Peter was imprisoned in an underground dungeon by the Emperor Nero before being crucified.

The Mamertine Prison, a dingy complex of cells which now lies beneath a Renaissance church, has long been venerated as the place where the apostle was shackled before he was killed on the spot on which the Vatican now stands.

It been a place of Christian worship since medieval times, but after months of excavations, Italian archaeologists have found frescoes and other evidence which indicate that it was associated with St Peter as early as the 7th century.

Dr Patrizia Fortini, of Rome's department of archaeology for Rome, said: "It was converted from being a prison into a focus of cult-like worship of St Peter by the 7th century at the latest, maybe earlier.
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Document

Adolf Hitler Wrote Begging Letter for Mercedes Loan

Allan Hall
The Telegraph
Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:35 UTC
Image
© Press Association
The letter was found at a flea market and authenticated by the Bavarian State Archive in Munich.
Adolf Hitler wrote a begging letter to a Mercedes dealership asking for a loan for a limousine until his royalties for Mein Kampf came through.

The letter, was written in 1924 from his jail cell at Landsberg Fortress prison where he was imprisoned that year for his role in the "Bierkeller Putsch" when his nascent Nazi party tried, and failed, to seize power in Munich.

In jail he wrote Mein Kampf, the blueprint for power that would make him rich. However, when he penned a letter to Jakob Ferlin, owner of a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Munich, there was little money to be had.

Hitler, who one day would own a fleet of Mercedes' cars, had his heart set on the 11/40 model which at the time cost 18,000 Reichsmarks. He had set his heart on one in grey with spoked wheels and white-wall tyres.
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Sun

Mystery glitch? Blame it on the sun

David Shiga
New Scientist
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:05 UTC
Image
© NASA
Trouble ahead
Ever think to check the space weather forecast? Power suppliers and the operators of oil pipelines and railroads might want to start.

Although it would take a truly massive space storm to cause a catastrophe, it is becoming clear that even modest solar activity poses a threat in our technology-dependent world. It makes railway signals go haywire and rusts oil pipelines to the point that they may leak, not to mention wearing down key components in power grids, which could drive up the cost of electricity.

If our planet happens to be in the line of fire when the sun belches out clouds of plasma, these coronal mass ejections (CMEs), can greatly disturb Earth's magnetic field. Such magnetic disturbances in turn can generate currents in power transmission lines, which act like giant antennas to pick up the disturbances.
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Laptop

VeriSign SSL certs open to tampering, competitor warns

Dan Goodin
The Register
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 07:02 UTC
Bank of America attacks made easy

VeriSign and one of its partners have come under fire for publicly exposing webpages used to process customer security certificates, a practice a competitor claims puts some of the biggest names on the web at risk of serious targeted attacks.

According to Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO of internet security firm Comodo, publicly accessible pages such as those here and here needlessly disclose sensitive internal information about VeriSign customers Bank of America and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts respectively. By exposing the email address of the organizations' security certificate managers and providing a comprehensive list of web addresses that use secure sockets layer protection, VeriSign puts them at risk of targeted phishing attacks, he said.
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Network

Security fears slow government Web 2.0 adoption

Dan Worth
V3
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:12 UTC
LondonvView
© V3
Web 2.0 uptake remains slow in the government sector
Analysts say government departments fear data loss through use of social media sites

The government's take-up of Web 2.0 technologies is being slowed by fears over security, according to Ovum.

The analyst firm's Business Trends: understanding your government customer 2010 report found that 50 per cent of respondents in Europe cited security issues as their greatest concern about the implementation of social media technologies, compared to 46 per cent in North America.

"With more stringent regulations in the EU than the US, and more of a culture of privacy in Europe, it's perhaps not surprising it's a bigger concern than in North America," said Jessica Hawkins, associate analyst at Ovum, who compiled the report.
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Sherlock

Lake Michigan Shipwreck Found After 112 Years

Dinesh Ramde
The Associated Press
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:12 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Great Lakes Shipwreck Research
The gangway under the boiler house of the wooden steamship L.R. Doty found off the Milwaukee, Wis. shoreline.
A great wooden steamship that sank more than a century ago in a violent Lake Michigan storm has been found off the Milwaukee-area shoreline, and divers say the intact vessel appears to have been perfectly preserved by the cold fresh waters.

Finding the 300-foot-long L.R. Doty was important because it was the largest wooden ship that remained unaccounted for, said Brendon Baillod, the president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.

"It's the biggest one I've been involved with," said Baillod, who has taken part in about a dozen such finds. "It was really exhilarating."

The Doty was carrying a cargo of corn from South Chicago to Ontario, Canada in October 1898 when it sailed into a terrible storm, Baillod said. Along with snow and sleet, there were heavy winds that whipped up waves of up to 30 feet.
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Cell Phone

Data roaming megabill clampdown starts next week

Team Register
The Register
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:59 UTC
Roaming pornmeisters beware

From next week travellers using mobile data in Europe will be cut off from the internet if they hit a €50 bill limit.

New EU regulations designed to prevent huge surprise bills come into force on 1 July.

Mobile operators will be required to warn customers when they reach 80 per cent of the bill ceiling. Those who want to continue using mobile data abroad will have to call to have it lifted.
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Bulb

Big EU imports of Sahara sun-power coming soon ?

Lewis Page
The Register
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:49 UTC
Headlines to which the answer is no

The European Union might subsidise "interconnector" undersea power lines beneath the Mediterranean for the purpose of importing solar energy from the Sahara desert, according to reports.

"I think some models starting in the next 5 years will bring some hundreds of megawatts to the European market," European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told Reuters on Sunday, following a meeting with energy ministers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
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Rocket

Huge new airships for US Army: designed in Blighty

Lewis Page
The Register
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:09 UTC
British engineers are to partner with a major US defence contractor to build a large "optionally manned" robot spy airship, intended to lurk for three weeks at a time in the skies above Afghanistan.

US army floating robot
© The Register
Now that's a big robot.
American arms'n'aerospace goliath Northrop Grumman announced the deal last week, revealing that the US Army has ordered "up to three" Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) ships in a $517m deal. Northrop will lead a consortium of several firms on LEMV, but it is acknowledged that the actual airships will be based on Brit company Hybrid Air Vehicles' 300-foot-long HAV304 design.
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Info

Psychopathy - Academic Battle Delays Publication by 3 Years

Benedict Carey
New York Times
Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:51 UTC
Academic disputes usually flare out in the safety of obscure journals, raising no more than a few tempers, if not voices. But a paper published this week by the American Psychological Association has managed to raise questions of censorship, academic fraud, fair play and criminal sentencing - and all them well before the report ever became public.

The paper is a critique of a rating scale that is widely used in criminal courts to determine whether a person is a psychopath and likely to commit acts of violence. It was accepted for publication in a psychological journal in 2007, but the inventor of the rating scale saw a draft and threatened a lawsuit if it was published, setting in motion a stultifying series of reviews, revisions and legal correspondence.

"This has been a really, really troubling process from the beginning," said Scott O. Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University and a collaborator with one of the paper's authors. "It has people wondering, 'Do I have to worry every time I publish a paper that criticizes someone that I'll get slapped with a lawsuit?' " The delay in publication, he said, "sets a very dangerous precedent" and censors scientific discourse.
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