None of the "links" to those actions have been heard in a court of law. He was never charged with a crime, and never indicted. In fact when asked about it the Dept. of Justice says that all such evidence are state secrets and we'll just have to take their word and arbitrary assertions as fact.

Does this effect the Flash 11 beta?

The best videos, processed and raw, are available in javascript, flash, and mpg from the lockheedmartin/solarsoft group that handles SDO AIA: http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/ssw/ssw_client/data/ssw_service_110606_235609_98013/www/

If you look at the proton monitors in L1 http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/SIS_24h.html and earth geosynchronous http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/Proton.gif orbit there is a very suggestive correlation between this flare and a flux of high energy protons! The timing is about right and the flare itself is positioned such that the parker spiral http://spaceweather.uma.es/solarstorms_files/figura1bc.JPG of the interplanetary magnetic field http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2434rAbImf0 would put earth in sun spot 1226's path http://i.imgur.com/ZIffl.gif. This tight coupling of timing between the flare time (~06:30:00) and proton arrival (07:00:00) suggests not a coronal mass ejection (that takes days) but instead of weakly relativistic particle beam traveling down the magnetic field lines to earth in only tens of minutes. This interpetation is confirmed by the UMA automatic solar energetic particle forcaster http://spaceweather.uma.es/forecastpanel.htm and later in the day mentioned by a press release http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-unusual-solar-storm-disrupt-earth.html.

For those that avoid apple and want to use computers; you can view the model predictions with the 'iNTEGRATED SPACE WEATHER ANALYSIS SYSTEM' which is very cross platform and browser: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html , look under the "Events" tab.

Here's a direct link to the heliosphere model showing the coronal mass ejection and Messenger that was discussed: http://iswa.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSystemWebApp/StreamArgumentServlet?cygnetInstanceId=65209753&argumentId=1

I'm not sure why this is considered news, except for that Messenger is orbiting Mecury now and has been in the news recently. Messenger has been in the direct path of larger CMEs many times in it's looping paths to reach Mercury.