First Mobile Phone Virus Reported; Company Secrets Leak Via E-Mail; Nuclear Shutdown Dims Parts of the West; Alleged Bomb Plot on Ohio Mall Thwarted; Bin Laden Cannot Be Named in Trial

First Mobile Phone Virus Found

Antivirus company Kaspersky Labs Ltd. said yesterday that it discovered what is believed to be the first computer virus capable of spreading over mobile-phone networks. Computerworld reports that Cabir is a network worm that infects phones running Symbian Ltd.’s mobile-phone operating system. No infections have been reported. Cabir may be a proof-of-concept worm from an international group of virus writers known as 29a that’s credited with the release of a recent virus, Rugrat, that targets Windows 64-bit operating systems, Moscow-based Kaspersky said. Company Secrets Leak Via E-MailBBC News Online story today reports that nearly 40 percent of workers have received confidential information that was not meant for them, according to a poll conducted by e-mail filtering firm SurfControl. Another 15 percent admit sending confidential information by mistake and 17 percent of those are unable to retrieve the data. Over 90 percent of respondents said they use e-mail to send and receive confidential information.

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Nuclear Shutdown Dims Parts of the WestEast Valley Tribune, all three units of the Palo Verde nuclear plant and another conventional power plant west of Phoenix shut down yesterday, causing electrical blackouts from California to New Mexico but no threat to public safety. It could take days to restart the plant. By late Monday, the Tribune reports, engineers for Arizona Public Service Co., the operator of the Palo Verde plant, had yet to determine the cause of the shutdown. Officials said the problem was caused by a disruption in a transmission line in west Phoenix, which caused Palo Verde and the natural gas-fired Red Hawk power plant to shut down automatically. There was no indication of sabotage, terrorism or threat to public health, said Rebecca Jahn, spokeswoman for the Arizona Office of Homeland Security.

According to Arizonas

Alleged Bomb Plot on Ohio Mall ThwartedCincinnati Post. According to Ashcroft, Nuradin Abdi conspired on the shopping-mall scheme with Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who has pleaded guilty to plotting to derail trains in New York and Washington and to cause the collapse of the Brooklyn Bridge. That revelation comes just two weeks after court documents revealed that Jose Padilla, a Chicago gang member turned Islamic extremist, had allegedly been directed by al-Qaida leaders in 2002 to rent apartments in as many as three high-rise buildings in New York and trigger simultaneous gas explosions in them. These reported schemes add weight to the contention by terrorism that it is so-called “soft targets” that are now in terrorists’ sights, rather than government buildings, airports and power plants. The Toledo Blade reports that Abdi received “military-style” training in Ethiopia before working with Faris. It also said the indictment unsealed yesterday does not refer to any purported target, and federal authorities did not release any information alleging how far the plot had advanced. In addition to two charges of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida and terrorists, Abdi, who has been in custody for more than six months, faces two counts of fraud and misuse of documents.

Yesterday Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that 32-year-old Nuradin Abdi, , a native of Somalia living in Ohio had been indicted on suspicion of conspiring to detonate a bomb at an unidentified shopping mall in the Columbus area, according to a Scripps Howard News Service story in

Bin Laden Cannot Be Named in TrialThe Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that a federal judge, fearing the mention of Osama bin Laden would prejudice jurors, barred prosecutors from bringing up the terrorist’s name during the trial of imam Fawaz Damra, the leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, who is accused of concealing his ties to terrorism on immigration forms in 1994. The trial begins today in Akron. In a pretrial hearing Monday, prosecutors argued that evidence pertaining to bin Laden was relevant to the trial. Damra and bin Laden were linked to the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn in the 1980s, raising money and recruiting fighters for the Muslim holy war against the Soviets, authorities said. When the war ended, bin Laden formed al-Qaida. one of Damra’s lawyers, disagreed, saying that invoking the name of the man who led the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States would hurt Damra’s chances of receiving a fair trial. The judge agreed.

In other news from Ohio,