May 7 2007

 2:42 PM ET

President George W. Bush, no stranger to the occasional verbal misstep, nearly placed Queen Elizabeth II in the 18th century on Monday in welcoming her to the White House on a state visit.

Britain's queen and Prince Philip were treated to a formal arrival ceremony on the White House South Lawn, complete with a marching fife-and-drum corps.

Trumpets heralded the arrival of the dignitaries. The U.S. Air Force Band played national anthems before 7,000 invited guests on a sunny spring day.

Both Bush and the queen addressed the crowd as the royal couple approached the end of a six-day U.S. visit that included ceremonies marking the 400th anniversary of the British settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, and the Kentucky Derby.

Bush noted the queen's long history of dealing with successive American governments, just barely stopping himself before dating her to 1776, the year the 13 British colonies declared their independence from Britain.

Elizabeth has occupied the British throne for 55 years and is 81.

"The American people are proud to welcome your majesty back to the United States, a nation you've come to know very well. After all you've dined with 10 U.S. presidents. You've helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- in 1976," Bush said.

Bush looked at the queen sheepishly. She peered back at him from beneath her black and white hat.

"She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child," Bush said as the crowd burst into laughter.

Taking the podium, the queen quickly swung into her prepared speech, hailing the closeness of U.S.-British relations.

"It is the moment to take stock of our present friendship, rightly taking pleasure from its strengths while never taking these for granted," she said. "And it is the time to look forward, jointly renewing our commitment to a more prosperous, safer and freer world."

White House spokesman Tony Snow made light of the incident.

"I don't know that a lot of people joke with the queen but the president did and it worked out just fine," he said.

Bush and his wife, Laura, were to play host to the queen later at a formal white-tie state dinner at the White House on Monday night.

 

An odd-looking Canadian quarter with a bright red flower was the culprit behind a false espionage warning from the Defense Department about mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters, The Associated Press has learned.

The harmless "poppy quarter" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy — Canada's flower of remembrance — inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nano-technology on the coin actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

"We'll have a good laugh over it," said John Regitko, who writes a newsletter for a leading coin-collecting organization, the Canadian Numismatic Association. "We never suspected there was such a thing (as spy coins) anyway."

Regitko predicted the quarter will become especially popular among collectors because of its infamy as the culprit behind the spy warning, despite the quarter's wide availability. "Everybody has some in their drawer at home," he said.

One contractor believed someone had placed two of the quarters in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

The Defense Department subsequently acknowledged it could never substantiate the espionage warning, but until now it has never disclosed the details behind the embarrassing episode.

In Canada, senior intelligence officials had expressed annoyance with the American spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims.

"That story about Canadians planting coins in the pockets of defense contractors will not go away," Luc Portelance, now deputy director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, wrote in a January e-mail to a subordinate. "Could someone tell me more? Where do we stand and what's the story on this?"

Others in Canada's spy service also were searching for answers. "We would be very interested in any more detail you may have on the validity of the comment related to the use of Canadian coins in this manner," another intelligence official wrote in an e-mail. "If it is accurate, are they talking industrial or state espionage? If the latter, who?" The identity of the e-mail's recipient was censored.

Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted over the warning when it was first publicized earlier this year. The warning suggested that such transmitters could be used surreptitiously to track the movements of people carrying the coins.

"I thought the whole thing was preposterous, to think you could tag an individual with a coin and think they wouldn't give it away or spend it," said H. Keith Melton, a leading intelligence historian.

But Melton said the Army contractors properly reported their suspicions. "You want contractors or any government personnel to report anything suspicious," he said. "You can't have the potential target evaluating whether this was an organized attack or a fluke."

The Defense Security Service disavowed its warning about spy coins after an international furor. The U.S. said it never substantiated the contractors' claims and performed an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page published report about espionage concerns.

The Defense Security Service never examined the suspicious coins, spokeswoman Cindy McGovern said. "We know where we made the mistake," she said. "The information wasn't properly vetted. While these coins aroused suspicion, there ultimately was nothing there."

A numismatist consulted by the AP, Dennis Pike of Canadian Coin & Currency near Toronto, quickly matched a grainy image and physical descriptions of the suspect coins in the contractors' confidential accounts to the 25-cent poppy piece.

"It's not uncommon at all," Pike said. He added that the coin's protective coating glows peculiarly under ultraviolet light. "That may have been a little bit suspicious," he said.

Some of the U.S. documents the AP obtained were classified "Secret/Noforn," meaning they were never supposed to be viewed by foreigners, even America's closest allies. The government censored parts of the files, citing national security reasons, before turning over copies under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Nothing in the documents — except the reference to nanotechnology — explained how the contractors' accounts evolved into a full-blown warning about spy coins with radio frequency transmitters. Many passages were censored, including the names of contractors and details about where they worked and their projects.

But there were indications the accounts should have been taken lightly. Next to one blacked-out sentence was this warning: "This has not been confirmed as of yet."

The Canadian intelligence documents, which also were censored, were turned over to the AP for $5 under that country's Access to Information Act. Canada cited rules for protecting against subversive or hostile activities to explain why it censored the papers.

A gargantuan explosion ripped apart a star perhaps 150 times more massive than our sun in a relatively nearby galaxy in the most powerful and brightest supernova ever observed, astronomers said on Monday.

And there is one such star in our own Milky Way galaxy that appears to be on the brink of dying in just such a supernova.

The exploding star's dramatic death may have come in a rare type of supernova reserved for "freakishly massive" stars that astronomers had speculated about but never previously witnessed.

The supernova, designated as SN 2006gy, occurred 240 million light years away in a galaxy called NGC 1260, and was studied using observations from NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as earthbound optical telescopes.

The explosion occurred long ago but was detected last year after its light traveled many, many trillions of miles (km) before it could be observed from Earth.

"That sounds far away but it's actually quite nearby on the vast scale of the universe," astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led the research, told a news conference.

The supernova was discovered in September 2006, and stands as far and away the most powerful and brightest ever observed, Smith said.

"In fact, even after the better part of a year, well after 200 days, it has faded somewhat but it's still about as bright as a normal supernova at its peak," Smith said.

A supernova marks a star's death in a spectacular explosion. Scientists say these events play a crucial role in creating heavy elements through nuclear fusion and synthesis and then expelling them into space, seeding the cosmos with metals.

The scientists ruled out a possible alternative explanation that what they were witnessing was the explosion of a white dwarf star with a mass only a bit more than the sun.

OBLITERATED CORE

Astrophysicist Mario Livio said the supernova may have resulted from a type of explosion mechanism that had existed only in theoretical calculations. He said the first generation of stars in the universe may have died in such a manner.

In a normal supernova, the core of a star collapses when it exhausts its fuel, and forms either a neutron star or a black hole, with scant heavy elements blown into space.

But this supernova appears to be the result of the core not collapsing but being obliterated in an explosion blasting all its material into space, the scientists said.

Dave Pooley of the University of California at Berkeley said this star appears similar to Eta Carinae, a star perhaps 100 to 120 times the mass of the sun located 7,500 light years away within the Milky Way. There has not been a supernova in our galaxy in more than 400 years, Pooley said.

A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

If Eta Carinae were to burst into a supernova, Pooley said, "It would be so bright that you would see it during the day, and you could even read a book by its light at night."

Livio said Eta Carinae had an incredible eruption during the 19th century that left it in an hourglass shape. He said it could explode at any time.

"This could happen tomorrow, it could happen 1,000 years from now," Livio said. "Is there a risk to life on Earth as a result of this explosion? Well, not very likely."

Livio said Earth could be affected if there were a gamma ray burst that potentially could harm the atmosphere and life, but the chances of this aiming directly at Earth are slim.

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