Free Republic

An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials. Shahram Amiri, a nuclear physicist in his early 30s, went missing last June three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, according to the Iranian government. The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, "an intelligence coup" in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran's nuclear program. A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment....

A Canadian nuclear scientist who has not been seen for more than a month has simply vanished, leaving "absolutely no trace at all," police say. Lachlan Cranswick, 41, a physicist from the Chalk River Laboratories nuclear facility in Ottawa, was last seen on Jan. 18, when he left his job and boarded a bus to Deep River, his hometown along the Ottawa River with a population of roughly 4,300. Later that day, or possibly the next morning, Cranswick took out the garbage -- and the single man described as a meticulous loner has not been seen since.

NOTE: Photo included. SNIPPET: "On Jan. 18, Lachlan Cranswick left the Chalk River nuclear facility, where he worked, and took a bus to Deep River, the small town on the Ottawa River where he lived. The 41-year-old physicist, whose job entailed running experiments for the National Research Council, had just finished some work for a researcher overseas and left his findings on his desk, to be mailed later. Sometime that night or the next morning, he took his garbage bins outside for pickup. Then, he vanished without a trace. When he didn't show up for work for several days and...

Philip K Dick is missing. Not the American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall - he died more than 20 years ago - but a state-of-the-art robot named after the author. The quirky android, which made a major splash at Wired Magazine's NextFest in Chicago in June, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner. "We can't find Phil," said Steve Prilliman of Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, which created the futuristic robot with the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, the Automation and Robotics...