The world's most popular search engine has been under investigation for three years by the European Commission, which acts as the bloc's antitrust regulator, over complaints it was blocking competitors in search results.

More than a dozen companies, including Microsoft, British price comparison site Foundem and German online mapping company Hotmaps, have accused it of squeezing them out of the market.

Google proposed concessions in September, hoping to end a case which could otherwise lead to a fine of up to 10 percent of its global revenue, or $5 billion.

Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told lawmakers in the European Parliament on Tuesday he believed the company's offer made it easier for web users to see results from Google's rivals in Internet searches.

While he said he could not lay out the precise concessions offered by the U.S. company, he said they went a long way to addressing the antitrust authority's concerns fully.

"We have reached a key moment in this case," Almunia said. "Now with the significant improvements on the table, I think we have the possibility to work again.

"I think that the settlement route remains the best choice," The commissioner said, adding that a decision on the case could be made next spring.

Almunia said the Commission would seek feedback on Google's offer from the companies which lodged the complaints.

MOBILES

Almunia said it would be much easier for a user to see competing services in Google search results irrespective of which device was being used. Rival firms had worried that even if concerns around computers were addressed, search results displayed on smaller devices such as mobiles could still prevent them from appearing prominently.

The new concessions would also give companies greater control to opt out of appearing in searches, Almunia said. Firms offering directories had complained that Google search showed too much of their content, making it less attractive for users to visit their site.

Google, which has a market share of over 80 percent in Europe's Internet search market, had previously come up with concessions in April, telling the Commission it would mark out its services from rival products in web search results.

It also proposed providing links to at least three competing search engines and making it easier for advertisers to transfer their search advertising campaigns to rival platforms.

Federal agencies were directed to cut back services after lawmakers could not break a political stalemate that sparked new questions about the ability of a deeply divided Congress to perform its most basic functions.

After House Republicans floated a late offer to break the logjam, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rejected the idea, saying Democrats would not enter into formal negotiations on spending "with a gun to our head" in the form of government shutdowns.

In the hours leading up to the deadline, the Democratic-controlled Senate repeatedly stripped measures passed by the House that tied temporary funding for government operations to delaying or scaling back the Affordable Care Act healthcare overhaul known as Obamacare.

Shortly after midnight, President Barack Obama tweeted: "The Affordable Care Act is moving forward. You can't shut it down."

Whether the shutdown represents another bump in the road for a Congress increasingly plagued by dysfunction or is a sign of a more alarming breakdown in the political process could be determined by the reaction among voters and on Wall Street.

The U.S. dollar slipped 0.2 percent against a basket of widely traded currencies. The price of the 10-year U.S. Treasury note, a bedrock reference for bond markets, fell 0.3 percent.

S&P stock futures rose 0.3 percent, pointing toward a higher Wall Street open. On Monday, the S&P 500 index closed 0.6 percent lower, weighed down by defense contractors since the shutdown would likely diminish its new business.

The political dysfunction at the Capitol also raised fresh concerns about whether Congress can meet a crucial mid-October deadline to raise the government's $16.7 trillion debt ceiling.

"A technical Treasury default could follow, sending financial markets into a tailspin," wrote ING analyst Tom Levinson.

After missing the midnight (0400 GMT) deadline to avert the shutdown, Republicans and Democrats in the House continued a bitter blame game, each side shifting responsibility to the other in efforts to redirect a possible public backlash.

The recently launched Surface 2, which runs the Windows RT 8.1 platform, will provide crews with key charts and navigation tools via a customised app.

The tablets will replace the 17kg (2st 10lb) flight bags currently carried by pilots, reducing fuel consumption.

The company expects all its cockpits to be paperless by the end of 2014.

Delta had previously tested Apple iPads as potential Electronic Flight Bags (EFB), but has recently embraced Microsoft devices.

It equipped 19,000 of its flight attendants with Nokia Lumia 820 smartphones in August, which run on a Windows operating system.

Essential documents

The sight of pilots wheeling heavy cases through airports is a familiar one, but electronic alternatives have been around for decades.

Many commercial airlines now use tablets as EFBs, and the devices are even common among single-seat, or recreational pilots.

Delta's senior vice president, Capt Steve Dickson, said the Surface tablets would "minimise time spent looking for flight information", and allow pilots the "opportunity for greater situational awareness in the air and on the ground".

The tablets will feature a custom-built app called FliteDeck Pro, developed by aerospace technology company Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing.

They will contain thousands of electronic documents, charts, navigational aids, checklists and other key reference materials.

The new Windows 8.1 platform allows users to view two applications side-by-side, a feature which Delta said made the Surface 2 tablets an attractive option for its cockpits. Delta says it will roll out the device to pilots on its Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 fleets later this year, subject to approval by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

About 500,000 hijacked computers have been taken out of the 1.9 million strong ZeroAccess botnet, the security company said.

The zombie computers were used for advertising and online currency fraud and to infect other machines.

Security experts warned that any benefits from the takedown might be short-lived.

The cybercriminals behind the network had not yet been identified, said Symantec.

"We've taken almost a quarter of the botnet offline," Symantec security operations manager Orla Cox told the BBC. "That's taken away a quarter of [the criminals'] earnings."

The ZeroAccess network is used to generate illegal cash through a type of advertising deception known as "click fraud".

Communications poisoned

Zombie computers are commanded to download online adverts and generate artificial mouse clicks on the ads to mimic legitimate users and generate payouts from advertisers.

The computers are also used to create an online currency called Bitcoin which can be used to pay for goods and services.

The ZeroAccess botnet is not controlled by one or two servers, but relies on waves of communications between groups of infected computers to do the bidding of the criminals.

The decentralised nature of the botnet made it difficult to act against, said Symantec.

In July, the company started poisoning the communications between the infected computers, permanently cutting them off from the rest of the hijacked network, said Ms Cox.

The company had set the ball in motion after noticing that a new version of the ZeroAccess software was being distributed through the network.

The updated version of the ZeroAccess Trojan contained modifications that made it more difficult to disrupt communications between peers in the infected network.

Symantec built its own mini-ZeroAccess botnet to study effective ways of taking down the network, and tested different takedown methods for two weeks.

The company studied the botnet and disabled the computers as part of its research operations, which feed into product development, said Ms Cox.

"Hopefully this will help us in the future to build up better protection," she said.

Internet service providers have been informed which machines were taken out of the botnet in an effort to let the owners of the computers know that their machine was a zombie.

Resilient zombies

Although a quarter of the zombie network has been taken out of action, the upgraded version of the botnet will be more difficult to take down, said Ms Cox.

"These are professional cybercriminals," she said. "They will likely be looking for ways to get back up to strength."

Francis and eight cardinals from around the world are holding three days of closed-door meetings to discuss the Vatican's troubled administration and to map out possible changes in the worldwide Church.

As the talks began, left-leaning La Repubblica newspaper published a long interview conducted by its atheist editor last week in which the Argentine pope spoke frankly about the problems facing the Vatican administration, known as the Curia.

He said too many previous popes in the Church's long history had been "narcissists" who let themselves be flattered by "courtier" aides in the Curia instead of concentrating on the wider mission of the universal Church.

"The (papal) court is the leprosy of the papacy," said Francis, who has brought a new style of openness, consultation and simplicity to the Vatican. He has shunned the spacious papal apartment and lives in small quarters in a guest house.

There are some "courtiers" among administrators in today's Curia, he said, adding that its main defect is that it is too inward-looking.

"It looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, in large part temporal interests. This Vatican-centric vision neglects the world around it and I will do everything to change it," he said.

Francis said the eight cardinals he had chosen to make up his advisory board did not have selfish motives.

"They are not courtiers but wise people who are inspired by my same feelings. This is the start of a Church with an organization that is not only vertical but also horizontal," he said.

The Curia has been riven by scandals over the years and has sometimes seemed to have taken on the trappings and intrigue of a Renaissance court. Bishops around the world have deemed it heavy-handed, autocratic, condescending and overly bureaucratic.

REVOLUTIONARY STEP

Francis announced the papal advisory board of cardinals, revolutionary for a Church steeped in hierarchical tradition, a mere month after his election as the first non-European pope in 1,300 years and the first from Latin America.

His decision to take advice from the cardinals from Italy, Chile, India, Germany, Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States, Australia and Honduras, is a clear sign that he intends to take seriously calls from within the Church for de-centralization in a traditionally top-heavy institution.

The doubts of Damascus's most important ally followed remarks in which the international envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, said the target date of mid-November was "not 100 percent certain" and cited disunity among rebel forces.

"Until recently we hoped our Western partners, who undertook to bring the opposition to the conference, could do it quite quickly, but they were unable to do it quickly, and I don't know whether they will be able to do so by mid-November," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

A pledge by the Syrian government to abandon chemical arms has increased prospects for the peace conference, proposed by Russia and the United States in May, to go ahead.

U.N. Security Council powers hope it can be held in mid-November. Lavrov said it must be organized soon since "radicals and jihadists are strengthening their positions" in Syria.

"The task is to not lose any more time, and to bring to the negotiating table with the government those opposition groups that ... think not about creating a caliphate in Syria or just seizing power and using it at their will, but about the fate of their country," Lavrov said after meeting Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

Lavrov also called into question the thoroughness of a U.N. chemical weapons mission after suggesting that it had not examined a site outside of Aleppo where Russia and the Syrian government say rebel forces likely used chemical weapons.

"The commission recently returned (to Syria) and already announced that it finished its work and is returning to New York," said Lavrov.

"As far as I understand, they examined several more places where there are claims chemical weapons were used near Damascus. And as before, the commission did not travel to the outskirts of Aleppo, where a serious incident of the use of chemical weapons occurred on March 19."

Syrian rebels blame Assad's government for that attack.

Russian experts visited the location earlier this year and took samples of material from the site that were later analyzed at a Russian laboratory certified by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Russia's U.N. envoy said previously.

The planet in question is Kepler-7b, a large gaseous world like Jupiter, roughly 1,000 light-years away.

The researchers used data from Nasa's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes to study the exoplanet, which orbits close to its parent star.

Their results suggest the hot giant is marked by high clouds in the west and clear skies in the east.

The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"By observing this planet with Spitzer and Kepler for more than three years, we were able to produce a very low-resolution 'map' of this giant, gaseous planet," said co-author Brice-Olivier Demory of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US.

"We wouldn't expect to see oceans or continents on this type of world, but we detected a clear, reflective signature that we interpreted as clouds."

Astronomers have previously been able to make temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars, but this is the first look at cloud structures on a distant world. Kepler-7b is something of an oddity - bigger than Jupiter, but lower in mass - with a density about the same as polystyrene.

Stable climate

The Kepler telescope's visible-light observations of this distant world's moon-like phases led to a rough map of the planet that showed a bright spot on its western hemisphere. But these data were not enough on their own to decipher whether the bright spot was coming from clouds or heat.

So the team used Spitzer to gather further clues about the planet's atmosphere. They determined that light from the planet's star was bouncing off cloud tops located on the west side of Kepler-7b.

"Kepler-7b reflects much more light than most giant planets we've found, which we attribute to clouds in the upper atmosphere," said Thomas Barclay from Nasa's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, US, who works on the Kepler telescope team.

"Unlike those on Earth, the cloud patterns on this planet do not seem to change much over time - it has a remarkably stable climate."

Nasa says the findings are an early step towards using similar techniques to study the atmospheres of exoplanets that are more like Earth in composition and size.

Paul Hertz, director of Nasa's astrophysics division in Washington DC commented: "We're at a point now in exoplanet science where we are moving beyond just detecting [them], and into the exciting science of understanding them."

The opening of the state marketplaces, or exchanges, went ahead despite a partial federal government shutdown precipitated by Republican opposition to the healthcare law that deadlocked a spending bill in Congress.

But a federally-run exchange for consumers in 36 states began posting error messages for at least 24 of them soon after the system opened for enrollment at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), citing online traffic as a reason for the difficulties. An administration official said experts were aware of the issue and were working on it.

"Consumers who need help can also contact the call center, use the live chat function or go to localhelp.healthcare.gov to find an in-person assistor in their community," the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

Exchanges run by 14 states and the District of Columbia presented a mixed picture. Some, like Massachusetts, were able to accept consumer log-ins. The state-run exchange in Maryland delayed its opening by four hours, while Minnesota said it would wait until the afternoon after checking its connection with federal databases.

The websites will give many Americans their first glimpse of new subsidized health plans that are being offered to millions of the uninsured, in the most ambitious U.S. social program since Medicare was introduced in the 1960s.

Administration officials said they had expected a rocky opening because of the challenge of building a massive technological infrastructure within a short time.

Obama was scheduled to promote his signature domestic policy achievement on Tuesday, including a meeting in the Oval Office with a group of Americans who stand to benefit from the program, while Vice President Joe Biden and first lady Michelle Obama will also promote the law in the media.

The marketplaces, or exchanges, require health plans to provide a broad range of essential benefits that were not necessarily part of individual policies in the past, including mental health services, birth control and preventive care. The coverage is linked to other insurance market reforms and new consumer safeguards, including a ban on discrimination based on gender and health history.

The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, also mandates that Americans obtain insurance or pay a fine.

Just months after Edward Snowden controversially lifted the lid on digital surveillance being conducted by the U.S. and other governments, the issue of online privacy is back in the spotlight.

Earlier this month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed concern that users' trust in internet companies had been damaged by the revelations. Google's Eric Schmidt also called for greater transparency from the U.S. government over surveillance.

Sang Mun's response was more direct -- the Korean designer has created four new fonts called ZXX that aim to disrupt the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems used by Google and others to analyze text.

"I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker)," Mun told CNN via email, "misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all."

Mun, who worked with the NSA during his time in the Korean military, says that a number of global developments motivated him to act: "The news about the NSA secretly building the country's biggest data center; the House passing the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA); the social network media accumulating abundant information on every individual's life; Google announcing its work-in-progress Glass project -- and the list goes on."

"Sometimes these ideas about privacy can feel large and abstract to the average person. I thought that addressing these issues through the design of a typeface -- a building block of language and communication -- would bring home the conversation to the average person," Mun says.

The four different fonts -- Camo, False, Noise and Xed -- were developed through a rigorous process of drawing a testing, Mun says: "The challenge was to make the OCR legible typeface illegible to computer vision, while keeping it readable to the human eye." Each font uses a different optical trick to make them difficult to scan: 'Camo' adds camouflage-like patterns over letters, 'Noise' overlays the letters with dots, 'Xed' puts a neat X across each character, and 'False' uses a small letter beneath a larger 'false' one.

Twitter, which is expected to be valued at up to $15 billion, filed with U.S. regulators on September 12 to go public, but did so confidentially and without providing a timeline under a process available to emerging growth companies.

Quartz said that Twitter's IPO could still be delayed by a variety of factors, from changes to the prospectus to market conditions, to a potential shutdown of the U.S. government. Representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment on the Quartz report.

Twitter is leaning toward picking the New York Stock Exchange over Nasdaq for its highly anticipated initial public offering, a person familiar with the matter said last week.

"We are now working closely with the tax authorities to ensure that the parties will find a comprehensive solution to the remaining open issues, and discussions have been constructive," the Finnish company said in a statement, declining to comment further.

Analysts have begun cutting third-quarter profit estimates for banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and Morgan Stanley (MS.N), citing an industry-wide fixed-income trading revenue decline of 20 to 30 percent compared with a year ago. The quarter's lull has made at least some Wall Street professionals nervous that a fresh round of job cuts may be coming, a trader said.

The third quarter is typically a weak period for banks' trading businesses, but the Fed's decision to keep its program of bond buying intact has hurt trading revenue even more than usual and weighed on the value of the bonds that dealers keep on hand for trading, bankers and analysts said.

Traders in some of the biggest fixed-income markets - including Treasury bonds, mortgage bonds, interest-rate derivatives and foreign exchange - were burned by their wrong assumptions about when the Fed would pull back from its massive bond-buying program. Many investors had expected the Fed to start gradually winding down the program, but instead the central bank in its September 18 policy statement said that it would maintain its $85 billion monthly purchases for the time being.

The decision led investors to hit the brakes on plans to adjust their portfolios, traders and analysts said, and less activity meant less money for banks' fixed-income trading desks.

"From what I can see, it's mainly weaker activity levels - activity levels are just very low," said Richard Ramsden, an analyst who covers banks for Goldman Sachs.

There are already signs of poor third-quarter results.

The investment bank Jefferies Group LLC said earlier this month that its fixed-income trading revenue plunged 88 percent in the three months ended August 31, to $33 million from $266 million a year earlier. Jefferies is not directly comparable to bigger Wall Street banks because of its size and because it reports on a fiscal calendar whose quarters are a month earlier, but the results were still surprisingly poor.

Last week, Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) co-CEO Anshu Jain said at a conference that he expected bond-trading revenue would "decline significantly" in the third quarter due to weak volumes. Bank executives from JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Morgan Stanley and Barclays PLC (BARC.L) have also recently warned in public comments that they expected trading revenues to be soft.

There were few bright spots in other capital markets businesses.