The Russian-manned Finnish cargo ship Arctic Sea has been intercepted by the Russian navy 300 miles off Cape Verde, Times Online reported on August 17. Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has told Russia’s President Medvedev: “The crew are all alive and well.”

“A Russian-manned cargo ship that vanished last month in the Atlantic was found Friday [August 14] near Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa, according to French and Russian officials,” AP reported that same day. No information about the status of the ship’s crew or cargo was immediately available.

The Wall Street Journal reported on June 22 that the current repressive regime in Iran acquired its capability to spy on Internet communications from two European companies.

On June 16, the Public Broadcasting Service decided to forbid member stations from carrying any new religious TV programs while allowing the few stations that are already doing so to continue. As the Washington Post reported on June 17, this was a step back from a proposed ban on all religious programs except those that take a journalistic or documentary approach without favoring a particular religious view. Under a complete ban, some PBS stations would have had to give up their affiliation — and, presumably, the funding that comes with it — if they wanted to keep broadcasting local church services or devotional programs.

Aabar Investments of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates agreed on July 28 to buy a 32 percent stake in Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism venture known as Virgin Galactic. The $280 million deal was inked on the grounds of the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual AirVenture fly-in event held in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

“Obama's NASA selection is a boost for manned spaceflight” proclaimed the headline to the May 24 Los Angeles Times story. Apparently, “the choice of astronaut Charles Bolden as NASA administrator reassures many who feared that Obama was lukewarm on future manned missions,” and is being interpreted as supporting NASA’s goal of humans once again going to the moon by 2020.

President Barack Obama on December 22 named Howard Schmidt, an Internet security expert with experience in both the private sector and government, as the White House cybersecurity coordinator.

Bloggers who review products online are about to be hit with onerous new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations supposedly designed to foster transparency. If bloggers fail to reveal that their review copy was provided free of charge, or that some other compensation was received, they could face fines and other penalties.

A group known as the International EMF Collaborative has released a report stating that consistent cellphone use significantly increases the risk of brain tumors, the Los Angeles Times said on September 9.

The time has expired for interested parties to file either for or against Google’s proposed settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. As the September 8 deadline passed, the flurry of last-minute filings indicated that Google’s bid to create an unprecedented digital library had stirred up quite a storm.