The New York Times and German magazine Der Spiegel reported this weekend, citing documents leaked by former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden, that the NSA had obtained sensitive data and monitored Huawei executives' communications.

"If the actions in the report are true, Huawei condemns such activities that invaded and infiltrated into our internal corporate network and monitored our communications," Huawei's global cyber security officer, John Suffolk, told Reuters.

"Corporate networks are under constant probe and attack from different sources - such is the status quo in today's digital age," said Suffolk, defending Huawei's independence and security record, saying it was very successful in 145 countries.

The New York Times said one goal of the NSA operation, code-named "Shotgiant", was to uncover any connections between Huawei and the Chinese People's Liberation Army. But it also sought to exploit Huawei's technology and conduct surveillance through computer and telephone networks Huawei sold to other nations.

If ordered by the U.S. president, the NSA also planned to unleash offensive cyber operations, the newspaper said.

The paper said the NSA gained access to servers in Huawei's sealed headquarters in Shenzhen and got information about the workings of the giant routers and complex digital switches the company says connect a third of the world's people.

Der Spiegel said the NSA copied a list of more than 1,400 clients and internal training documents for engineers. It said the agency was pursuing a digital offensive against the Chinese political leadership, naming former prime minister Hu Jintao and the Chinese trade and foreign ministries as targets.

"If we can determine the company's plans and intentions," an analyst wrote in a 2010 document cited by the Times, "we hope that this will lead us back to the plans and intentions" of the Chinese government.

The Times noted that U.S. officials see Huawei as a security threat and have blocked the company from making business deals in the United States, worried it would furnish equipment with "back doors" that could enable China's military or Chinese-backed hackers to swipe corporate and government secrets.

"The guard over there won't let me in because I'm a youth, so I can't get up close and personal to the police. I don't know if you can see them over there in the distance," said Bondarenko on a video he recently posted online.

He narrated his walk through Kiev wearing a pair of Epiphany Eyewear.

"We were contacted by somebody in Ukraine and said it's really hard to capture video here especially if you're carrying around a camera," said Cory Grenier, the director of marketing for Epiphany Eyewear.

His company decided to send a pair of their glasses to Ukraine if it would help show the world what was happening and demonstrate another use for their high tech invention.

They call them smart glasses. They wirelessly shoot high definition video with sound yet look like normal sunglasses.

"Thirty-two gigabytes of storage, which is equivalent to eight hours of video on the frames themselves," Grenier said.

The field of view is 160 degrees, similar to the human eye. Once you capture the video, simply plug in a mini USB to download.

Epiphany Eyewear even comes with sharing ability.

"We also have cloud software where it can upload to the cloud and easily share. So, one button you can click and share it to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit," Grenier said.

There are many different uses for technology like this but showing the consequences of conflict may be one of the most important.

The latest lead came as the international search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 entered its third week, with still no confirmed trace of the Boeing 777 that vanished with 239 people on board.

"This morning, Malaysia received new satellite images from the French authorities showing potential objects in the vicinity of the southern corridor," the Malaysian Transport Ministry said in a statement. "Malaysia immediately relayed these images to the Australian rescue co-ordination center."

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said there was "increasing hope" of a breakthrough in the hunt for the plane on the strength of Chinese and Australian satellite images of possible large debris in the southern search area.

The French Foreign Ministry said radar echoes from a satellite put the new debris finding about 2,300 km (1,430 miles) from Perth, without giving a direction or a date.

The debris in the Australian image was about 2,500 km southwest of Perth and the Chinese sighting, captured two days later, was around 120 km (75 miles) "south by west" of that.

"These elements have immediately been passed on to the Malaysian authorities," the ministry said in a statement. "France had decided to mobilize complementary satellite means to continue the search in the identified zone."

Flight MH370 vanished from civilian radar screens early on March 8, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight to Beijing.

An international force resumed its search efforts on Sunday, zeroing in on two areas around where the sightings were made in an effort to find the object identified by China and other small debris, including a wooden pallet, spotted by a search plane on Saturday.

The Australian rescue co-ordination center sent out eight aircraft - four military and four civilian - to the southern corridor.

"The weather in the southern Indian Ocean is much clearer today than the past couple of days, allowing for the full spectrum of electronic and visual of search capability," Commander William J. Marks, spokesman for the U.S. 7th Fleet, said in an email.

Obama and senior aides met with six tech executives to discuss issues surrounding intelligence, technology and privacy, the White House said in a statement following the meeting. Executives were seen entering the White House around 4 p.m. EDT and leaving more than two hours later.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, the world's largest Internet search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, the world's biggest social network; and Reed Hastings, chief executive officer of Netflix Inc, an online video streaming service, were among those attending the meeting, the White House said.

Other attendees are Aaron Levie and Drew Houston, chief executive officers of two online storage and file-sharing companies Box and Dropbox; and Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company which is partly backed by the CIA and whose clients include the National Security Agency.

The president sought to provide reassurances that the administration is putting in place reforms to intelligence collection after revelations of widespread collection of data stirred outrage.

"The president reiterated his administration's commitment to taking steps that can give people greater confidence that their rights are being protected while preserving important tools that keep us safe," the White House said.

But Facebook's Zuckerberg, a public critic of government data gathering practices, said that more needed to be done.

"While the U.S. government has taken helpful steps to reform its surveillance practices, these are simply not enough," he said through a spokesperson.

"People around the globe deserve to know that their information is secure and Facebook will keep urging the U.S. government to be more transparent about its practices and more protective of civil liberties," he said.

Obama in January outlined a series of limited reforms to NSA data gathering, banning eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly or allied nations and proposing some changes to how NSA treats Americans' phone data.

The most sweeping program, collection of telephone "metadata," comes up for reauthorization next week, on March 28.

The warning comes a day after Russian troops, using armored vehicles, automatic weapons and stun grenades, seized the last military facilities under Ukrainian control in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsular that Russian President Vladimir Putin formally annexed on Friday.

"The (Russian) force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizeable and very, very ready," NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, told an event held by the German Marshall Fund think-tank.

Russia's seizure of Crimea, which has a majority Russian population, after the ousting of Ukraine's pro-Russian president by mass protests has triggered the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.

The United States and the European Union have targeted some of Putin's closest political and business allies with personal sanctions and have threatened broader economic sanctions if Putin's forces encroach on other eastern or southern parts of Ukraine with big Russian-speaking populations.

Breedlove said NATO was very concerned about the threat to Transdniestria, which declared independence from Moldova in 1990 but has not been recognized by any United Nations member state. About 30 percent of its half million population is ethnic Russian, which is the mother tongue of an overall majority.

Russia launched a new military exercise, involving 8,500 artillery men, near Ukraine's border 10 days ago.

"There is absolutely sufficient (Russian) force postured on the eastern border of Ukraine to run to Transdniestria if the decision was made to do that, and that is very worrisome," Breedlove said.

The president of ex-Soviet Moldova warned Russia last Tuesday against considering any move to annex Transdniestria, which lies on Ukraine's western border, in the same way that it has taken control of Crimea.

The speaker of Transdniestria's parliament had urged Russia earlier to incorporate the region.

NO EXPANSIONIST VIEWS"

Russia's Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov was quoted by the state's Itar-Tass news agency on Sunday as saying that Russia was complying with international agreements limiting the number of troops near its border with Ukraine.

Moscow's ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, also told Britain's BBC television on Sunday that Russia did not have any "expansionist views".

In a mystery fit for the tumultuous history of Russia's ostentatious elite, the 8-cm (3-inch) golden egg was spirited out of St Petersburg after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and then disappeared for decades in the United States.

An unidentified man in the United States spotted the egg while searching for scrap gold and purchased it for $14,000, hoping to make a fast buck by selling it to the melting pot.

But there were no takers because he had overestimated the value of the watch and gems tucked inside the egg.

In desperation, the man searched the Internet and then realized he might have the egg that Russian Tsar Alexander III had given to his wife, Maria Feodorovna, for Easter in 1887.

When the scrap metal man approached London's Wartski antiques dealer, he was in shock.

"His mouth was dry with fear - he just couldn't talk. A man in jeans, trainers and a plaid shirt handed me pictures of the lost Imperial egg. I knew it was genuine," Kieran McCarthy, director of the Wartski antique dealer, told Reuters.

"He was completely beside himself - he just couldn't believe the treasure that he had," said McCarthy, who then travelled to a small town in the U.S. Midwest to inspect the reeded yellow golden egg in the man's kitchen.

Wartski acquired the egg for an unidentified private collector. McCarthy said he could not reveal the identity of the man who found the egg, its sale price or the collector, though he did say that the collector was not Russian.

Reuters was unable to verify the story without the identities of those involved and when questioned whether the story was perhaps too fantastic to be true, McCarthy said:

"We are antique dealers so we doubt everything but this story is so wonderful you couldn't really make it up - it is beyond fiction and in the legends of antique dealing, there is nothing quite like this."

'BEYOND FICTION'

Rich Russians, who before the revolution once dazzled European aristocracy with their extravagance, have since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union returned to stun the West by snapping up treasures, real estate and even football clubs.

Alan Krueger, a respected labor market economist who led President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said those unemployed long term tended to put less effort into their job hunts than others and were often viewed by employers as undesirable.

The sobering analysis published on Thursday by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, projected that people out of work for more than six months will increasingly give up their job search in the coming years.

Their plight could be one of the deepest scars left by the 2007-09 U.S. recession.

While the unemployment rate has fallen quickly over the past year, most of the workers getting jobs have experienced only brief stretches of unemployment.

It has yet to be seen whether the long-term unemployed will eventually get jobs as the economy strengthens or drop out of the labor force altogether. Krueger's analysis suggests America is headed towards the latter of those two paths.

"A concerted effort will be needed to raise the employment prospects of the long-term unemployed, especially as they are likely to withdraw from the job market at an increasing rate," Krueger wrote in the paper, which was coauthored by his Princeton University colleagues Judd Cramer and David Cho.

In February, there were 3.8 million people without jobs who had been actively looking for work for at least 27 weeks, nearly three times more than on the eve of the recession.

Krueger and his coauthors found the long-term unemployed were especially prone to dropping out of the workforce. While that pattern is suppressed in the aftermath of recession, the researchers concluded it would reassert itself in coming years.

It also appears unlikely a strengthening economy will benefit the long-term unemployed much. The researchers found that even in states with low jobless rates such as North Dakota, where the economy is booming thanks to surging oil output, the long-term unemployed don't seem to be doing any better.

The paper also suggested the U.S. Federal Reserve would do better to monitor the dwindling ranks of short-term unemployed than the overall jobless rate when trying to gauge when a tightening labor market might fuel inflationary wage pressures.

Dayton, a No. 11 seed in the South region, defeated No. 3 seed Syracuse 55-53. Dayton won a surprise victory over No. 6 seed Ohio State in the first round.

"Devin Oliver, I may need to take you up on that pick-up game one of these days," the president said in a Twitter post signed "bo," which means he wrote it himself. Oliver, a 6-foot, 7-inch (2-meter) senior forward for Dayton, was ESPN's player of the game with 10 rebounds and 7 points.

Obama played high school basketball and continues to play recreationally. He had forecast Dayton would lose in the first round.

The president is known to unwind by watching sports on television and reporters could see basketball games on the screen in the front cabin of the president's plane during a flight to Florida on Thursday, the first day of the tournament.

The president leaves for Europe and the Middle East on Sunday with the crisis in Ukraine a pressing global problem. Not everyone on Twitter shared Obama's enthusiasm for basketball.

"You have bigger issues to be worrying about," one person tweeted in response.

A court blocked access to Twitter after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's defiant vow, on the campaign trail on Thursday ahead of March 30 local elections, to "wipe out" the social media service, whatever the international community had to say about it.

Industry Minister Fikri Isik said talks with Twitter were taking place and the ban would be lifted if the San Francisco-based firm appointed a representative in Turkey and agreed to block specific content when requested by Turkish courts.

"We stand with our users in Turkey who rely on Twitter as a vital communications platform. We hope to have full access returned soon," the company said in a tweet.

A company spokesman declined to say whether it would appoint someone in Turkey but said it was moving forward in talks with the government.

Tech-savvy Turks - President Abdullah Gul apparently among them - quickly found ways to circumvent the ban, with the hashtag #TwitterisblockedinTurkey among the top trending globally on Friday.

"One cannot approve of the complete closure of social media platforms," Gul tweeted, voicing his hope that the ban would be short-lived and setting himself publicly at odds with the prime minister.

Erdogan, who has dominated Turkish politics for 11 years, is battling a corruption scandal that has been fed by social media awash with alleged evidence of government wrongdoing. He did not mention the Twitter ban at two campaign rallies on Friday.

Turkey's main opposition party said it would challenge the ban and file a criminal complaint against Erdogan on the grounds of violating personal freedoms. The country's bar association filed a separate court challenge.

Twitter users called the move a "digital coup", some comparing Turkey to Iran and North Korea, where social media platforms are tightly controlled. There were also calls for protests.

"Waking up to no Twitter in Turkey feels like waking up to a coup. The modern equivalent of occupying the radio stations," U.S. author and journalist Andrew Finkel, who has reported from Turkey for more than 20 years, said on his Twitter account.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama will meet with six tech executives to "continue his dialogue with them on the issues of privacy, technology and intelligence following his January 17 speech." The meeting is scheduled to start in the Oval Office at 4:05 p.m. EDT (2005 GMT).

Carney said Obama will speak with Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, the world's largest Internet search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, the world's biggest social network; and Reed Hastings, chief executive officer of Netflix Inc, an online video streaming service.

Other attendees are Aaron Levie and Drew Houston, chief executive officers of two online storage and file-sharing companies Box and Dropbox; and Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company which is partly backed by the CIA and whose clients include the National Security Agency.

Obama in January outlined a series of limited reforms to NSA data gathering, banning eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly or allied nations and proposing some changes to how NSA treats Americans' phone data.

The White House did not elaborate further on the focus of the discussions. Experts, however, point out that the most sweeping program, collection of telephone "metadata," comes up for reauthorization next week, on March 28.

The firm said it found the bitcoins - worth around $116m (£70m) - in an old digital wallet from 2011.

That brings the total number of bitcoins the firm lost down to 650,000 from 850,000.

MtGox, formerly the world's largest bitcoin exchange, filed for bankruptcy in February, after it said it lost thousands of bitcoins to hackers.

"MtGox had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins," said Mt Gox chief executive Mark Karpeles in the filing.

However, "on March 7, 2014, MtGox confirmed that an old-format wallet which was used prior to June 2011 held a balance of approximately 200,000 bitcoins," he said.

Mr Karpeles said the firm moved the found bitcoins to offline wallets on 14 and 15 March so that they could not be targeted.

At the time of the MtGox theft, about 750,000 customer bitcoins were stolen as well as close to 100,000 of MtGox's own bitcoins.

That amounts to about 7% of all the bitcoins in existence.

Speaking at the Ted conference, where leaker Edward Snowden spoke earlier in the week, NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett said Mr Snowden had put people's lives at risk.

He said letting "the bad guys" know NSA's methods made them harder to find.

But he said the agency should do more to reassure people about its work.

He defended the Prism surveillance system, saying it was "hugely relevant" in disrupting terrorist plots.

Mr Ledgett was beamed in to the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference taking place in Vancouver via video link, in a similar manner to how Mr Snowden had appeared.

More transparency

He told the audience that he wanted to "inform the discussion with facts" rather than the "half-truths and distortions" he accused Mr Snowden of using.

But, he added, the ex-NSA agent's exposure of its programs and practices had opened up a global debate about the "balance between secrecy and transparency", that the agency wanted to fully engage with.

"There is a proposal to release transparency reports in the same way as the internet companies are doing," said Mr Ledgett.

He admitted that the NSA needed to be more transparent about its processes, authorities and oversight.

"We haven't done a good job on that," he said.

But he emphasised that all the work the agency does has been rubberstamped by the president, federal judges and Congress.

Of Mr Snowden he said: "It shows amazing arrogance that he knows better than the framework of the constitution."

His release of vast amounts of top secret documents outlining the work at the NSA had been hugely damaging, said Mr Ledgett.

"He put people's lives at risk.

"If our adversaries see our methods they will move away from using them. We have evidence that terrorists, smugglers and nation states have moved away. We are losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing," he said.

He said that the agency needed access to the global telecommunications system to monitor the activities of terrorists, traffickers and enemy states.

"It would be great if the bad guys used a corner of the internet. If they had a domain badguys.com, that would be awesome," he said.

"But we are all on the same network. I use the same email service as the terrorists. We need to be able to pick that apart to find what we need."

Along the way it is inevitable that agents will "encounter people going about their business" but the NSA uses what he called "minimisation procedures" to ensure little information is read.