If your computers become infected by malware, do you simply chuck them on the garbage heap and buy a new one?

I hope your answer would be no. After all, most malware infections can either be removed by decent anti-virus tools, or infected drives can be wiped clean and restored from a recent backup.

There really should be no need to dump the hardware entirely.

And yet, it has come to light that after computers at German teacher training institutes in Schwerin, Rostock and Greifswald became infected with the notorious Conficker worm in September 2010, 170 of them were disposed of and replaced with new equipment at the taxpayers’ expense.

In all, the replacement of the infected computers (some of which were considered brand new), and subsequent restoration of data, cost 187,300 Euros.

The vast bulk of the cost was not spent resinstalling the hard drive images, but on purchasing new PCs. Ouch! I just hope that they securely wiped the computers they were chucking away.

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Moving to quell concerns, the newest version of the Senate’s immigration bill keeps the E-Verify electronic check system in place so that states that already require its use can continue to do so, even while the rest of the country is getting up to speed.

The bipartisan negotiators who wrote the Senate bill submitted an 867-page new version to their colleagues on Tuesday, in preparation for beginning to vote next week in the SenateJudiciary Committee.

Backers have been facing a barrage of criticism from senators and interest groups that want to see a crackdown on illegal immigration, and had vowed to make any reasonable changes they could.

The E-Verify language is one of those.

The bill says that the Homeland Security secretary “shall continue to operate the E-Verify Program … as in effect the minute before the date of the enactment of this Act, until the transition” to the new employment verification system the bill calls for.

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In theory, this electronic processing of food stamp benefits should have provided a data-processing defense against abuse. In practice, tales of outrageous abuse have only grown more common, as EBT cards are used to purchase everything from unhealthy groceries the Nanny State otherwise discourages – such as sugary carbonated beverages – to luxury foods, and even more creative uses like posting bail or tipping exotic dancers. The latter incidents are among the many bizarre abuses that arise from the ability of EBT card holders to withdraw cash from ATM machines, at which point all public accountability for the money is lost.

Amazingly enough, there isn’t any serious effort currently being made to process data from EBT card transactions, although Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) has been trying to change that with a bill called the SNAP Transparency Act. The Washington Times describes the goal of this bill as the creation of “an online, searchable database that uses bar codes to break down how many taxpayer dollars in food stamps are spent on individual products, from Kit Kat bars to whole milk.”

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An new auto index.

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Two years after a triple meltdown that grew into the world’s second worst nuclear disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is faced with a new crisis: a flood of highly radioactive wastewater that workers are struggling to contain.

Groundwater is pouring into the plant’s ravaged reactor buildings at a rate of almost 75 gallons a minute. It becomes highly contaminated there, before being pumped out to keep from swamping a critical cooling system. A small army of workers has struggled to contain the continuous flow of radioactive wastewater, relying on hulking gray and silver storage tanks sprawling over 42 acres of parking lots and lawns. The tanks hold the equivalent of 112 Olympic-size pools.

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Police said this afternoon that Sunday’s fire at the Resistance Museum, which they initially believed was likely an electrical fire, was apparently set.

“This seems to be arson,” Jens Møller, of the Copenhagen Police, told media.

Møller said that fire investigators had identified two sites, about ten metres apart, on the outside of the wooden building where the blaze appears to have started.

Yesterday investigators said the fire had started in a portable toilet, but concluded today that there was nothing to indicate that it began there.

The building, built in 1995 and which housed the country’s largest collection of Second World War items, was destroyed in the fire that took Copenhagen firefighters 10 hours to extinguish. Miraculously, most of the museum’s collection was removed from the building before suffering permanent fire or water damage.

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Willem-Alexander has been sworn in as king of the Netherlands following the abdication of Queen Beatrix.

He became the country’s first king since 1890 when his 75-year-old mother signed the abdication deed earlier on Tuesday after 33 years on the throne.

Huge crowds of orange-clad partygoers are in Amsterdam to pay tribute.

Now known as Princess Beatrix, the former queen maintained a recent Dutch tradition of monarch’s handing over power to a new generation.

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Six men from the West Midlands have pleaded guilty to planning to bomb an English Defence League rally.

Omar Mohammed Khan, Mohammed Hasseen, Anzal Hussain, Mohammed Saud, Zohaib Ahmed and Jewel Uddin admitted preparing an act of terrorism. All six will be sentenced on 6 June.

Five of them took a homemade bomb to an EDL rally in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, last June but arrived after it ended.

They were caught after their car was stopped and found to have no insurance.

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North America isn’t known as a hotspot for crop plant diversity, yet a new inventory has uncovered nearly 4,600 wild relatives of crop plants in the United States, including close relatives of globally important food crops such as sunflower, bean, sweet potato, and strawberry.

The findings, which were published today (Apr. 29) in the journal Crop Science, are good news for plant breeders, who’ve relied increasingly in recent years on the wild kin of domesticated crops as new sources of disease resistance, drought tolerance, and other traits.

The not-so-good news is that many of these “crop wild relatives” are currently threatened by habitat loss, pollution, and climate change, says lead author Colin Khoury of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia.

For instance, a wild sunflower species that breeders have used to restore fertility and create salt tolerance in cultivated sunflower is also globally imperiled. Another 62 taxa in the inventory are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

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The Obama administration’s controversial proposal to “means-test” Medicare recipients is ostensibly aimed at generating more cash for the government from those who can afford it — or squeezing more money out of upper-income seniors, depending upon one’s point of view. But according to a University of Illinois expert on retirement benefits, the Medicare program is already means-tested.

Law professor Richard L. Kaplan says whenever the issue of cutting Medicare emerges, one of the first ideas to “fix” the program is to make its upper-income beneficiaries pay more.

“Indeed, the claim is often advanced that it is silly — if not offensive — to have low-income workers pay higher taxes so that wealthy beneficiaries can receive subsidized benefits from the Medicare program,” said Kaplan, the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor at Illinois. “But the underlying premise is that Medicare is not already means-tested, and that is simply not the case.”

Medicare Part A is financed by a 2.9 percent payroll tax imposed on all wages, salaries and income from self-employment, so higher-earning people already pay more for their Part A benefits. Starting this year, individuals with annual earnings above $200,000 and married couples with annual earnings above $250,000 will owe an additional 0.9 percent in Medicare tax, according to Kaplan.

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A research team from the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at the University of New South Wales has found that women find men most attractive when they have approximately ten days of beard growth. In their paper published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, the team describes how volunteers asked to look at pictures of men with various stages of beard growth, found men with ten days growth to be the most attractive and those with five days growth to be the least.

Of course if your beard contains a lot of gray then it’s considered ‘grizzled’.

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Police in Italy have arrested six men they suspect of planning terrorist attacks.

Arrest warrants were issued for the Muslim men, who are accused of targeting the US as well as Italy.

Two men are believed to have escaped to Tunisia.

Police say they found jihadist training videos connected to the men, who were located in Lombardy, Sicily and Puglia and Belgium.

“Due to their important international contacts and to the kind of indoctrination they received, we’re sure they would have been able to carry out an attack,” said Mario Parente, General Head of ROS, a special operations group that is part of Italy’s carabinieri police force.

The suspects are accused of conspiracy to commit international terrorism and inciting racial hatred.

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Recall petition drives are well under way for four pro-gun control Democrats in the Colorado state legislature. …

… Sen. John Morse is the president of the senate and thus responsible for sheparding the gun bills through. He was famously shown on the Rachel Maddow TV show explaining how he told “his” senators to ignore the objections of their constituents and vote for the rights-restricting legislation.

The rallying slogan for the Morse recall is “Got ReMorse?” with a web page of the same name. The effort is run by a professional project manager and petitions are circulating daily.

Morse has said that he can’t be recalled.

Evie Hudak, the legislator who told rape victim Amanda Collins that even had she been allowed to carry her concealed firearm on the night of her attack, she would statistically have been dead anyway, is also being recalled as is the other senator besides Morse who was elected with a minority of the total vote.

When she went grocery shopping a week ago, Hudak encountered a woman with a big sign saying “Recall Hudak,’ so Hudak approached her.

Apparently Hudak made a big fuss, blowing up about the woman being able to petition outside the store and complaining to management—a store which Hudak referred to as “her store.”

The story did not make the press but Hudak did tell the Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels that she had a brief run in with a petitioner. …

… The third Democrat facing recall, Mike McLachlan, doesn’t think much of the First Amendment either. On his recall website he is quoted as saying:

“…the right of the First Amendment is not absolute. It is like every right in that in the proper circumstances the government may infringe, take away, or completely reduce that right.” …

… Angela Giron, the fourth, is in a similar situation. She is in heavily Democratic Pueblo, but the response to the recall, according to one activist, is amazing. At a rally in a Kmart parking lot Saturday, many people said they did not own guns, but simply wanted to support Second Amendment rights.

People drove by honking and waving. There were very few negative responses.

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Twitter accounts belonging to The Guardian newspaper have fallen at the hands of hackers belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army.

The hackers have been making a habit of breaking into high profile Twitter accounts in recent weeks – their attack on AP’s Twitter account where they posted fake news of an explosion at the White House, actually managed to cause a drop in the Dow Jones.

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Seventeen-year-old Caitlin Talley, of the US state of Tennessee, was killed in October after being thrown from a pickup truck in a violent crash that police believe involved a drunken driver.

As many mourners have done, those who loved Talley erected a memorial Facebook page in her honor.

Reece Elliott, 24, of South Shields, UK, has admitted that in February, he signed on to that tribute page under a false name and threatened to kill “at least” 200 people.

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Responding to complaints that food stamps are widely spent on junk food and that the Agriculture Department makes no attempt to even track, much less restrict, what kind of food is being purchased, a Pennsylvania Republican will introduce legislation Friday called the SNAP Transparency Act to create an online, searchable database that uses bar codes to break down how many taxpayer dollars in food stamps are spent on each individual product, from Kit Kat bars to whole milk.

“It’s downright irresponsible that such a massive government program — which cost the taxpayers $80 billion in 2012 alone — is subject to virtually no oversight,” Rep. Tom Marino, the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement. “There’s no sense in establishing parameters or guidelines for these programs if we do not have a system in place to ensure the program is operating efficiently and within its boundaries.”

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China has arrested more suspects over clashes in the ethnically divided region of Xinjiang last week that left 21 people dead, state media said Monday.

China blamed the violence in the western Chinese region on “terrorists”, but rights groups say the charge is used to justify the authorities’ use of force against members of a Muslim minority.

State-run broadcaster CCTV said Monday that “another group of terrorists has been arrested”, citing senior security official Meng Hongwei and adding that police had seized weapons and flags belonging to a separatist group.

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Then they will say they’re going to fix it. They won’t actually fix it of course.

Must Washington fix our broken southern border? You bet.

Will the comprehensive immigration reform bill help? You bet it won’t.

The number one flaw of the bill is it starts by giving amnesty to the unlawfully present population in the United States. As soon as the bill passes, those in the country contrary to U.S. immigration law are granted status to stay.

Amnesty immediately creates an incentive for illegal border crossings and overstays. Thus, the bill’s strategy would drive up the cost of securing the border. To make matters worse, the draft law states that anyone who was present in the U.S. before 2012 qualifies—creating massive opportunity for fraud, since there is no proof required that applicants have been here for several years.

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Our friends at F-Secure have blogged today about a boobytrapped Word document, that appears to be designed to infect computer systems running Mac OS X.

The malicious Word file, examined by the experts in SophosLabs, claims to be about the “6th International Uyghur Women’s Seminar & 1st World Uyghur Women’s Congress”, run by the International Uyghur Human Rights & Democracy Foundation.

Vulnerabilities, exploited in malformed Word documents, install malicious code onto the recipients’ computer and a legitimate-seeming Word file with content relevant to the victim is displayed as a smoke screen.

It’s clear that the attack is targeted against Uyghur Mac users, and we have seen similar attacks in the past.

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The debate is raging over whether the latest immigration bill is an amnesty for illegal immigrants, but one part is clear: The legislation would forgive businesses that have employed those immigrants illegally.

Employers who have allowed illegal immigrants to work off the books can come forward safely and provide their work history without fear of prosecution, and businesses that knowingly employed someone using a bogus or stolen Social Security number likewise would get a pass, according to an analysis of the bill by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that wants a crackdown on immigration.

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At least 13 people are dead after a battle broke out between prisoners at a jail in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.

A group of inmates used homemade knives and picks to attack rivals at the La Pila prison, the state attorney general’s office was quoted as saying.

Authorities took several hours to bring the fighting under control.

Deadly outbreaks of violence are common in Mexico’s overcrowded jails, which house inmates from rival drug gangs.

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German security officials believe that a number of Germans have teamed up with radical Islamists on the frontlines in Syria. What worries them most are the training and ties they’ve gained abroad — and whether they’ll continue the jihad once home.

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Two military police officers were shot and wounded on Sunday in a crowded square outside the prime minister’s office close to where the new government of Enrico Letta was being sworn in.

The shooting was broadcast live by the state broadcaster RAI, which had a television crew in the square in front of Palazzo Chigi, where the ministers were to go after the ceremony at the presidential palace. Italians who had tuned in to the swearing-in ceremony of the long-awaited government — finally formed nine weeks after national elections — watched the unfolding events.

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In the aftermath of 9/11 , Congress discovered that a “wall” had been established by the Clinton Administration to restrict vital communications between agencies responsible for protecting the American people from terror attacks.

Remember Clinton official Jamie Gorelick and her infamous wall memo, which, in part, made 9/11 possible?

Most Americans probably assume that the Gorelick wall was torn down and that the issue is moot at this point.

However, as reported, those investigating the Boston bombings are finding that the Ghost of Jamie Gorelick appears to be alive and kicking:

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