News From All Over

Houston's Franklin Bank Closed, 18th Failure This Year

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Houston, Texas-based Franklin Bank S.S.B. was closed by regulators Friday, the 18th bank failure this year amid the ongoing credit crisis. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a statement that Franklin Bank had total assets of $5.1 billion as of Sep. 30, and $3.7 billion in total deposits. El Campo, Texas-based Prosperity Bank will assume Franklin Bank's deposits, and Franklin's 46 offices will reopen as Prosperity branches, the FDIC said.

Florida High School Keeps KKK Founder's Name

JACKSONVILLE, FL - A Florida high school named for a Confederate general who was also a leader of the Ku Klux Klan will be keeping its name - thanks to a vote of the county school board. More than half the students at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., are black, and some members of the community object that they are forced to attend a school that was named in honor of a racist.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave trader before the Civil War, a top-notch Confederate cavalry leader during the war, and the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee when it was over, according to University of North Carolina-Greensboro emeritus professor Allen Trelease, a Civil War scholar.

Forrest High got its name in 1959, when the Daughters of the Confederacy, angry about the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forcing school integration, pushed for the name. All 2,300 of the school's students were white at the time. Now, 54 percent are black, and some feel it's time to change the school's name.

On Nov. 3, the Duval County School Board voted 5 to 2 against changing the name. The five members who voted to keep the name were white. The two who voted against it were the board's only black members. Changing the school's name was brought before the board in 2006, and the board put off a vote for almost two years, said Brenda Priestly Jackson, who voted "no" with board chairwoman Brenda Burney.

Coweta County, Georgia Man Uses Blowtorch To Clean Cobwebs; Sets Home On Fire

SARGENT, GA - Men take note: a blowtorch is not the same as a broom. Coweta County authorities say Galen Winchell set fire to his west Georgia home this week as he cleaned cobwebs from exterior eaves with a blowtorch. Winchell noticed the blaze when he saw smoke pouring from the attic. Coweta Fire Investigator James Gantt says the fire was contained to one part of the house, but the entire home sustained smoke and water damage."This was an unfortunate accident," Gantt told the Times-Herald newspaper. No one was hurt in the blaze.

Hackers Buy 'Obama' Google Search Results Ad

LONDON - Hackers seeking to exploit the global interest in Barack Obama's sweeping election victory have bought their way to the top of the Google results page. For most of this week, searches involving the keyword "Obama" generated a sponsored link reading "Download Now" at the top of the results page. People who clicked on the link would reach a Web page infected with malicious software.

Security experts confirmed that the site could compromise PC users' security.

"The Web site is infected with a malicious i-frame," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the online security company Sophos. "This code then downloads further malware onto your PC, including something called Mal/Pdfex-B. Ultimately this code is designed to compromise your computer and allow hackers to have remote control over your PC."

Unlike early virus writers, who were motivated mainly by the desire for notoriety, today's hackers work for profit.

"We are also seeing a major malicious spam campaign featuring Obama at the moment, which points to a malware download," Mr Cluley said. "We're gathering information about that right now."

Man Charged with Terrorism Plot, Found With Nazi Book

LONDON - British police charged a 43-year-old man Thursday with plotting an act of terrorism and having two improvised explosive devices, chemicals, timers, and a Nazi-themed handbook. Neil Christopher Lewington was first arrested last week after police discovered a suspected explosive device when they searched him at a railway station in Lowestoft, a coastal city in eastern England.

He was originally charged with possessing an item to cause criminal damage and was released on bail Saturday. But he was immediately re-arrested by Scotland Yard.

Scotland Yard said in a statement that Lewington carried two improvised explosive devices to Lowestoft from Reading, a city near London where he lives, on Oct. 30. It said Lewington was being charged with making or having an explosive substance intended to "to endanger life, or cause serious injury to property in the U.K."

The police statement said Lewington had four containers of weed killer, seven timers, three tennis balls, fire lighters, and a book entitled: "Waffen SS U.K. Members Handbook." The statement said he also had drawings and notes "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."

A spokesman for Scotland Yard did not go into further detail, saying only that the incident was not Al-Qaeda-related. He spoke anonymously in line with force policy. The Waffen SS was the name of a feared Nazi military organization.

Army Working on 'Ghost' Soldiers, Mind-Controlled Guns

WASHINGTON - Self-regenerating body parts. Intelligent "virtual soldiers." Mind-controlled weapons. Brain "wipes" to purge traumatic memories. "Quantum ghost imaging." The U.S. Army's working on all of these concepts, according to a report on Military.com, a private military-oriented Web site.

"Making science fiction into reality" is the goal, says Dr. John Parmentola, the Army's director for research and laboratory management.

"You can imagine people who have horrifying memories, it would be great if we could eliminate them so this way they're not plagued by these memories uncontrollably," he says, explaining research into cleaning soldiers' minds of recollections that cause post-traumatic stress disorder. Salamanders have long been known to grow back fingers and even limbs, and the Army's trying to figure out how.

"We're beginning to understand how this occurs and if we can, it holds the hope of, being able to regrow limbs on people," says Parmentola.

As for "quantum ghost imaging," it involves the strange but well-documented phenomenon of "twinned" particles that communicate instantaneously -- if something happens to one, the other reacts accordingly, no matter how far away.

"It's like having a tracing tool ... that goes over the image and that's connected to another one on a piece of paper that exactly imitates what it is that you are tracing with the other pen," says Parmentola.

In this way, soldiers, tanks and other military assets could be projected on a battlefield to intimidate the enemy, even though the real objects are far away. Neural implants fine-tuned to individual soldiers' brain waves could allow G.I.s to operate equipment with only their thoughts.

"So if you think of a thought 'turn on,' it will automatically turn on a computer or that device," says Parmentola.

Last but not least, the Army's trying to create "virtual soldiers" who look, act and sound like the real thing, independently.

"I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they're responding," Parmentola told Military.com.

The best place to test these virtual soldiers? Online role-playing games such as "World of Warcraft," of course.

"We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they're good enough to convince humans that they're actually human," Parmentola explained.

MICHELLE

FDIC, Times-Herald, London Times, Scotland Yard, Military.com