Court papers filed in the US allege Christopher Peter Tarquini was behind the faked Facebook messages.

Users who clicked the link in the posts were redirected to sites that allegedly paid Mr Tarquini for hits.

In addition, clicking led to the posts being automatically shared with users' Facebook friends.

In its legal complaints, Facebook calls Mr Tarquini, of New Jersey, a "recidivist" spammer who has spent much of the past five years crafting computer programs that put "deceptive messages, images and links" on the site's pages.

One of the most notorious of the programs involved faked images purporting to take people to a video of actress Selena Gomez with her partner, singer Justin Bieber. Instead the link led to a pop-up message asking for access to a Facebook account that then let an app take control and spam the message out to a person's friends.

Mr Tarquini persisted in targeting the social network even after he was told that his actions violated Facebook's terms - his account was shut down and he was told never to use the site again, the papers state.

Facebook said it had a confession from Mr Tarquini that he had written the program that took over accounts and posted faked links. Now it says it wants to be reimbursed for the cost of clearing up after Mr Tarquini and for the work it has done to track him down. In addition, it wants him banned from ever using Facebook again.

Mr Tarquini has yet to file any legal response to Facebook's claims.

The action against the alleged spammer is the latest in a series of steps Facebook has taken to stem the flow of junk messages passing through the network.

In September, Facebook won a $3m (£1.8m) settlement against a spam company that sent tens of thousands of messages to users.

The television maker has apologised to its customers and told the BBC it would issue an update to correct the problem.

UK-based IT consultant Jason Huntley, who raised the issue in a blog, welcomed the "positive step".

Viewing information helps manufacturers deliver relevant advertising and programme recommendations.

"I hope that their future products will reflect this decision and keep customers clearly informed as to their data collection practices before they take place," he said.

LG launched an investigation in the wake of his blog, which was reported widely in the media.

'Not personal data'

"We have verified that even when this function is turned off by the viewers, it continues to transmit viewing information, although the data is not retained by the server," LG said in a statement.

"A firmware update is being prepared for immediate rollout that will correct this problem on all affected LG Smart TVs so when this feature is disabled, no data will be transmitted," it added.

Since the issue became public it has emerged that Sony's PlayStation also collects data from every Blu-ray disc that is played.

Samsung, the world's largest TV maker, is yet to respond to questions about its operations.

LG stressed that the information gathered was not personal but viewing information.

The company said in a statement on Thursday that Shih will take over as chairman and interim corporate president with immediate effect. Current corporate president Jim Wong will step down.

The company has been struggling to revamp in the face of sluggish growth in the PC market, in which it was once the world's No.2 vendor, and has failed to make meaningful inroads into the higher-growth mobile market.

Worldwide PC shipments have seen negative growth every quarter for the past year, including a nearly 10 percent year-on-year growth decline in the third quarter of 2013, according to research firm IDC.

The company had said two weeks ago that Wong would succeed J.T. Wang as chief executive while Wang would stay on as chairman until June. The role of CEO will be abolished with its duties transferred to the company chairman or president, the company said.

"Both J.T. Wang and Jim Wong have committed to remain with Acer as advisors to ensure a smooth transition and transfer of the management team and to help the company back to stability," the statement said, also noting that Shih will not take any salary for his new role.

Earlier this month the company reported a worse-than-expected quarterly loss of T$13.12 billion ($446 million) for the June-September period, which prompted then-CEO Wang to resign and the company to announce a 7 percent reduction in its workforce.

The company has reported losses or meager profit at best every quarter since the beginning of 2011.

Vincent Chen, an analyst with Yuanta Securities in Taipei, said that Stan Shih's return as chairman and the abolishment of the CEO position is a positive development that signifies a hands-on role for the 69-year-old founder.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in Barcelona, Chief Financial Officer Philippe Capron said the board had not yet decided on the exact size or form of the return to shareholders, which will come amid a broader revamp at the group as it seeks to exit telecoms to focus more on media.

The board's decision will also be affected by Vivendi's plan to split into two companies next year by publicly listing its largest unit, the French mobile telecoms network operator SFR, in the middle of the year.

The remaining businesses - Universal Music Group, pay-television operator Canal Plus and its Brazilian telecoms firm GVT - will be in the media-focused company, according to the plan. Some of the 10.2 billion euros to come from the sales of video games maker Activision and Maroc Telecom will go to reduce debt to permit the split of the group.

"In terms of the size of, if you look at the debt-carrying capacity of the two new groups ... and compare this to 7 billion euros of pro-forma debt we will have after the disposals, there is very significant headroom between the two," said Capron.

"Whether the board will decide to allocate this headroom to a dividend or buy-backs, and how generous it will be, is not really for me to say. But the message that the market expects something has been received in the boardroom loud and clear."

Shareholders have been waiting to share in the benefits of Vivendi's revamp, which is being piloted by Chairman Jean-Rene Fourtou and biggest shareholder Vincent Bollore.

Analysts have widely different predictions for how much Vivendi could return to shareholders from 700 million euros to 2 billion euros.

The talks are aimed at expanding a 16-year-old World Trade Organization agreement and updating it for the internet era, cutting the import cost of a long list of items such as personal computers, laptops, telephones, fax machines, computer software, semi-conductors and many office machines.

"China's refusal to show more ambition in product coverage under the WTO's Information Technology Agreement is disappointing for all of the countries, companies, and workers who stand to benefit from an expansion in information technology trade," U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a comment issued from Washington.

About $4 trillion in trade is covered by the current pact, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank that estimates an expanded agreement could cover $800 billion in additional trade.

Chinese officials were not immediately available to comment on Thursday. China has not publicly explained its sensitivities about the deal nor its demand for lots of exemptions, but officials have said they regret other members' decision to hold up the talks on account of China.

U.S. technology groups said in May they were optimistic about getting the deal sewn up by July. But China later weighed in with a list of 130 products that it deemed "sensitive", and hence worthy of exemption from the 256 items under discussion.

China has cut back its list of sensitive items several times since and removed another eight on Monday, during two weeks of intensive talks aimed at resolving differences in time for WTO ministers to sign off on the pact when they meet for a conference in Bali in early December.

China is still seeking exemptions on 59 items.

"Rather than heading toward a meaningful agreement at the WTO Ministerial, this puts the talks at serious risk of breaking down altogether and raises questions about China's commitment to meet the standards of negotiations in which it seeks to participate," Froman said.

China's concessions are only partial: instead of agreeing to duty-free trade in sensitive products, it has moved them to a list of tariffs that are to be phased out, often over a time frame as long as a decade, one diplomat involved in the talks said.

“So here’s the big question before the country and the world and the State Department after the last eight years,” Kerry said in a speech to State Department employees on his first day on the job. “Can a man actually run the State Department? I don’t know.”

As the crowd roared with laughter, Kerry pushed the joke too far.

“As the saying goes,” he said, “I have big heels to fill.”

Nearly three weeks later, Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop. The Washington Post gave it 500 words. The New York Times ignored it. (He was also accused of accidentally inventing a new country called “Kyrzakhstan,” an apparent conflation of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.)

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons. For starters, he was arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too. Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department. Kerry hadn’t even been Obama’s first choice for the position, getting nominated only when the candidacy of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice was derailed by her tenuous association with the Benghazi-consulate tragedy in 2012. (Rice ended up running the National Security Council.)

About 2,500 tribal elders and political leaders from all around Afghanistan gathered in the capital, Kabul, for a Loya Jirga, or grand council, to debate whether to allow U.S. troops to stay after the 2014 drawdown of foreign forces.

Without an accord on the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), the United States says it could pull out all its troops at the end of 2014 and leave Afghan forces to fight the Taliban insurgency on their own.

In a statement certain to irritate the United States, which is keen to clinch the deal as soon as possible, Karzai told the assembly any agreement on the status of U.S. forces would have to wait until after a presidential election in April.

"This pact should be signed when the election has already taken place, properly and with dignity," Karzai, who cannot run in the 2014 vote under the constitution, told the elders.

A senior Afghan official speaking on condition of anonymity said Karzai intended to leave the pact unsigned until he was sure the international community would not interfere in the election.

Karzai's spokesman, Aimal Faizi, confirmed that, adding that the grand assembly and parliament also had to approve the pact.

"Once we are assured of peace and security, and transparent elections, then President Karzai will sign this pact after the election if this is approved by the Loya Jirga and passed by the parliament," Faizi said.

He did not explain how Karzai intended to sign the document after a new president had been elected.

Karzai has told Washington that if both countries were unable to agree on the document, the issue could be taken up again after the next election. But the future of the agreement was thrown back into confusion following Karzai's remarks.

The U.S. embassy in Kabul declined to comment on Karzai's statement. U.S. officials have said they would not allow the pact to be delayed that long, as it would be too close to the end of next year when the NATO combat mission ends.

Over the next four days delegates will debate the draft and decide whether they want U.S. troops to stay.

Karzai told the assembly he broadly supported the security pact but said there was little trust between him and U.S. officials.

"My trust with America is not good. I don't trust them and they don't trust me," Karzai said. "During the past 10 years I have fought with them and they have made propaganda against me."

THORNY ISSUE

Current methods rely on surgery to find out if a man has viable sperm that can be retrieved for fertility treatment.

The research, in Science Translational Medicine, suggests two biomarkers can identify who will benefit from surgery.

A UK fertility expert said the test, which will take at least a year to bring to the clinic, was "encouraging".

Male infertility is responsible for about half of cases of infertility.

Men who produce no sperm can sometimes be helped to father a biological child through fertility treatment if they have normal sperm that can be extracted surgically.

Others will never be able to father a child naturally and need to use donor sperm. With current technology, the only way to find out if a man has viable sperm is to carry out surgery to look for sperm in the testes.

The new test, developed by scientists in Canada, has identified two biomarkers in sperm, which can be used to predict whether sperm retrieval will be successful.

Dr Keith Jarvi of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, said the holy grail of his research was to find a way to help men avoid unnecessary testicular biopsies.

He told BBC News: "The benefit of this is that we can predict without surgery whether or not a man has sperm or does not have sperm in the testicles.

"You could avoid unnecessary surgery for a number of these men."

He said work was under way to adapt the test for use in fertility clinics.

"Optimistically, it would be a year away," he added. "Pessimistically, two years - we're moving along really quickly."

Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield and chairman of the British Fertility Society, said the diagnosis of male infertility was tricky and it was hard to determine whether a man was producing sperm or not.

The conventional method was to first examine semen under a microscope to see if sperm was there, he said.

If no sperm was seen, the next step was to take tissue from a man's testicle and examine it with a microscope.

"Quite understandably, many men would rather not undergo this procedure if they didn't have to," said Dr Pacey.

"Therefore, having an accurate biochemical test which might help doctors advise men whether taking a piece of the testicle is worth doing or not, would be very useful.

"It could help men make better decisions, avoid unnecessary surgical procedures and potentially help save money by not having to do surgical procedures that aren't needed.

Lack of trust in employers has often led Chinese workers to balk at takeovers they fear will harm employment conditions.

Workers massed outside the factory gates in the industrial city of Dongguan said they were battling new contracts worsening employment terms that they had been forced to sign after the U.S. software giant bought Nokia's unit in a September deal.

"We will definitely continue to fight until we get what's fair," said a young male worker wearing a checked shirt, who gave only his surname, Zhang.

Local riot police beat up four workers on Wednesday morning and took them away, several witnesses told Reuters.

About 30 police officers kept watch as workers clad in white Nokia uniforms held up banners with the slogans "Legally protect our rights" and "Demand fair compensation."

Nokia is continuing to talk to the protesters, the Finland-based company told Reuters in an e-mailed statement.

"Our manufacturing operations in Dongguan continue," it said. "To accommodate the temporary situation, we have also adjusted our operations in other manufacturing facilities."

But six protesters interviewed by Reuters said they had not heard from management at all.

"They haven't shown any sincerity in talking to us, and they won't do anything until things reach a critical stage," said one worker, who gave only his surname, Yang, and said he had worked at the factory for two years.

Nokia balked at what it saw as a demand for severance packages to workers who would not be fired, said an industry source with direct knowledge of the protest, who asked not to be named to avoid inflaming the situation.

"A small group of employees is taking this as an opportunity to demand severance packages despite the fact that their jobs will continue," the source said, adding that he did not expect lay-offs as a result of the deal with Microsoft.

The protesters represent just a few hundred of the 5,000 workers in the Dongguan factory, the industry source said.

Factory workers interviewed by Reuters said the Microsoft deal affected the compensation of thousands of workers, a claim the industry source characterized as untrue. Nokia declined to elaborate on its statement.

Nokia agreed in September to sell its devices and services business and license its patents to Microsoft after failing to recover from a late start in smartphones.

The sale is set to close in the first quarter of next year, after regulatory approvals.

Data from three sources indicates that spam, viruses and other malicious messages regularly emerge from machines sitting on banks' corporate networks.

It is likely that the computers were compromised when bank staff and contractors were caught out by booby-trapped email attachments.

They may also have visited sites seeded with code that infected their PCs.

Some of those infected machines are also likely to have been enrolled in a botnet - a large network of hijacked computers that are used by cybercriminals to distribute spam and viruses, attack other websites or as a source of saleable personal data.

But, say experts, banks are doing a better job than most at protecting their machines from malware. Sending junk

The BBC found that in 2013 there were more than 20 incidents involving UK bank networks indicative of malicious activity. Similar, though lower, numbers were seen in 2012 and 2011. Some incidents involved addresses that have been sending junk for months but others were addresses seen sending spam for the first time.

Further analysis revealed that some of the junk was benign in that it was the banks' own marketing messages arriving at email addresses set up to capture spam. In most of the other cases the spam was distributing malware, involved in phishing or "pump and dump" scams or sought to trick people into visiting dangerous sites.

A separate dataset for 2012/13 shows fewer incidents year-on-year but revealed that seven corporate bank networks are regularly sending out junk, five are home to machines that are part of the well known Conficker botnet and eight are regular sources of malicious activity.

In addition, sources inside UK banks told the BBC that they deal with up to a dozen incidents a month of employees' machines getting infected with malware.

James Lyne, global head of security research at security firm Sophos, said evidence of a botnet on a bank network would be "exceptionally concerning".

"It would give attackers a foothold that they can exploit," he said.

The BBC was aided in its research project by an organisation that runs a huge collection of "spam traps" that log the sources of junk mail and also by researchers at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, who study botnets. Anti-spam firm Cloudmark provided corroboration of some of the BBC's findings.

There should be no spam coming out of these networks," said Prof Michel van Eeten from Delft who leads the team gathering data on botnets, adding that some of the bank networks studied had a "relatively consistent" problem with infections.

Seeking to end a long standoff and head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany came close to winning concessions from Iran on its nuclear work in return for some sanctions relief at negotiations earlier this month.

Policymakers from the six have since said that an interim accord on confidence-building steps could finally be within reach, despite warnings from diplomats that differences remain and could still prevent an agreement.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the remaining differences are narrow and a historic deal is within reach.

"It is the best chance for a long time to make progress on one of the gravest problems in foreign policy," Hague told a news conference during a visit to Istanbul.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier: "We hope the efforts that are being made will be crowned with success at the meeting that opens today in Geneva."

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tehran would not step back from its nuclear rights and he had set "red lines" for his negotiators in Geneva. But Tehran wanted friendly ties with all countries.

"We want to have friendly relations with all nations and peoples. The Islamic system isn't even hostile to the nation of America, although with regards to Iran and the Islamic system, the American government is arrogant, malicious and vindictive," Khamenei said, according to his official website.

Khamenei also criticized France, which had spoken against the deal as proposed earlier, for "succumbing to the United States" and "kneeling before the Israeli regime". France said the comments were unacceptable.

TOUGHER TERMS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Russia on Wednesday to appeal for tougher terms in any accord with Iran after failing to convince the United States that world powers are pursuing a bad deal.

Israel, thought to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, sees a nuclear-armed Iran as a mortal threat and wants its uranium enrichment capabilities dismantled and its enriched uranium removed.

The last meeting with the six powers stumbled over Iran's insistence that its "right" to enrich uranium be recognized, and disagreement over its work on a heavy-water reactor near Arak, which could yield plutonium for atomic bombs once it becomes operational.

The testimony at a congressional hearing could increase concerns among many Americans about Obama's healthcare overhaul, popularly known as Obamacare. Opinion polls show the botched rollout of the online marketplace for health insurance policies has hurt the popularity of the effort.

The website collects personal data such as names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses and other information that criminals could use for a variety of scams.

In a rapid "yes" or "no" question-and-answer session during a Republican-sponsored hearing by the House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee, Republican Representative Chris Collins of New York asked four experts about the security of the site:

"Do any of you think today that the site is secure?"

The answer from the experts, which included two academics and two private sector technical researchers, was a unanimous "no."

"Would you recommend today that this site be shut down until it is?" asked Collins, whose party is opposed to Obamacare and has sought to capitalize on the failures of the website since it opened for enrollment on October 1.

Three of the experts said "yes," while a fourth said he did not have enough information to make the call.

"The privacy and security of consumers' personal information are a top priority," White House spokesman Jay Carney said after the hearing.

"When consumers fill out their online marketplace applications they can trust that the information that they are providing is protected by stringent security standards."

HealthCare.gov allows consumers to shop for insurance plans under Obama's Affordable Care Act, which passed in 2010 and mandated that Americans have health insurance. It also created new marketplaces to buy and sell policies.

The portal has been bedeviled by technical glitches and reports of security bugs, although officials say they are making progress with repairs and that it should be accessible to the "vast majority" of consumers by November 30.

"The Obama administration has a responsibility to ensure that the personal and financial data collected by the government is secure," said Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House science panel.