Saturday News Roundup

Since I seem to have less to say than usual, here's some of the more interesting news items today, from the nytimes:

1. Toyota is stating that they plan, for some not yet concrete future date, to eventually be making all of their vehicles as gas-electric hybrids. They say the key to achieving this goal will be halving the current $3000-5000 premium brought on by the cost of the hybrid technologies. Though they can't yet come up with a target date, they're only shooting for one million hybrids by 2010, so presumably it's going to be significantly past that date. If that stated goal correctly sums up their position, it sounds like they're not expending too much energy examining hydrogen power technologies.

2. Some senior republican congresscritters are joining in the calls for CIA Director Porter Goss to release an internal report which "criticizes his predecessor, George J. Tenet, and others for lapses on terrorism in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks." The article seems to indicate that this report is fairly damning of the Tenet-led CIA, and that Goss is reluctant to release it because of concerns that the release "could be damaging to the agency's morale." I find it interesting that there is now some bi-partisan support for the public release of the report.

3. Four years on, the search for the Anthrax mailer appears to be stalled. The article discusses the lengths to which investigators have gone in order to try and track down the origins of the anthrax bacteria, paper, and photocopiers used by the mailer. The point is also made that many of the people involved in the search are highly committed to catch the culprit, because, without an eventual arrest, it certainly seems like it would embolden others to try a similar tactic. Hell, frankly, I'm a little surprised that we haven't heard of some well-connected wacko who tried something similar.

4. Finally, the White House has approved NASA's plan for the next generation of space exploration vehicles which would be desinged using exiting technologies currently in place on the shuttles. Re-use of the existing technologies will clearly allow for a quicker, cheaper transition to the new vehicles. Let's hope NASA has a sense of which technologies merit re-use, as opposed to the ones that tend to blow shit up.