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The Tailored Access Operations department used it to steal sensitive information, according to a censored slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

NRC said 20,000 networks had been hit in 2008, with the program recently expanded to include others in Rome, Berlin, Pristina, Kinshasa, Rangoon.

The NSA declined to comment.

The malware could be pit in a "sleeper" mode and activated with a click of a button, the paper said.

"Clearly, conventional criminal gangs aren't the only people interested in breaking into computer networks anymore," wrote computer security expert Graham Cluley in a blogpost.

"All organisations need to ask themselves the question of whether they could be at risk."

The reports come as Twitter introduces technology it says will help protect people's messages from unwanted scrutiny.

Some users say the drive is making very loud noises when they try to insert a disc and in some cases is not reading discs at all.

Microsoft says only a very small number of users are affected.

The Xbox One was launched on Friday and sold more than one million units in the first 24 hours.

More than 150 people contacted Kotaku, a gaming news website, claiming their new consoles were faulty. Other users uploaded videos apparently showing the problem to the gaming forum NeoGAF.

"The issue is affecting a very small number of Xbox One customers," said Microsoft in a statement.

"We're working directly with those affected to get a replacement console to them as soon as possible through our advance exchange programme."

The Xbox One is the first new console from Microsoft in eight years and it broke all previous Xbox first-day sales records when it went on sale in the UK and 12 other countries last week.

The company said it had now sold out at most retailers and it was working to replenish stock as fast as possible.

Shipping damage

This is not the first time Microsoft has experienced problems with the launch of an Xbox console. When the Xbox 360 was launched in 2005 some users reported faults with the hardware which led to three red lights flashing on the front of the device and the console becoming unusable. The problem became known as the "red ring of death".

"Microsoft suffered very significant quality control problems with the early Xbox 360 consoles and has put significant effort into its hardware design and manufacturing process to minimise faults," Spencer Izard, an analyst with IDC told the BBC.

"For launches over multiple countries the volume of manufacturing required by both Microsoft and Sony will always unfortunately yield a minor amount of hardware failures, in one form or another, and we are seeing this with this launch cycle," he added. The launch of the Xbox One came a week after the US launch of Sony's PlayStation 4. The two consoles are set to go head-to-head in the crucial Christmas season.

The PlayStation 4 will go on sale in the UK and Europe on 29 November.

The PS4 also experienced technical issues after its launch with users complaining that a blue light continually flashed on the console affecting its operation and others reporting that sometimes the unit suddenly turned itself off.

In its latest statement Sony said several issues had been reported.

"[This] leads us to believe there isn't a singular problem that could impact a broader percentage of PS4 units," Satoshi Nakajima, a spokesman for Sony, told Bloomberg.

Qualcomm said it was not aware of any violation but would cooperate with the investigation by China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

Qualcomm, the world's biggest maker of cellphone chips, gets half of its revenue from China and has sought more growth there as telecom operators such as China Mobile upgrade their high-speed network services.

The NDRC did not say why Qualcomm was being investigated. However, Evercore Partners analyst Mark McKechnie said the investigation seemed to be part of a wider probe into the industry and not specific to the company.

Qualcomm also sells chips and licenses technology to Chinese companies looking to export their devices into overseas markets.

Its revenue from China rose 54 percent to $12.3 billion this year, 49 percent of total revenue.

Qualcomm did not immediately return calls seeking further comment.

"It is a little bit inauspicious because it corresponds with seemingly some confirmation that the Chinese government will be granting new spectrum licenses to allow for the launching of LTE (high-speed 4G networks) in China in the middle of December," Pacific Crest Securities analyst James Faucette told Reuters.

China's state media quoted on Sunday an NDRC official saying the country will focus antitrust investigations on six industries, ranging from technology to medicine.

The Chinese government is probably trying to push for local technology suppliers, McKechnie said.

In the last few months, organizations affiliated to the Chinese government spent nearly $3 billion to buy Chinese mobile chipmakers Spreadtrum Communications Inc and RDA Microelectronics Inc.

With growth in the smartphone industry shifting away from wealthy markets toward China and other emerging economies, Qualcomm has focused on supplying chips for cheaper phones, in competition with Chinese rivals such as Spreadtrum.

China Mobile Ltd, the world's biggest mobile company with 800 million subscribers, is investing billions of dollars to upgrade its infrastructure so clients can enjoy speedier Internet and data access once the government awards 4G telecom licenses.

An Apple spokesman confirmed the purchase but declined to say how much it spent. Israeli media said it was about $350 million.

"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," an Apple spokesman said in an e-mail.

A spokeswoman for PrimeSense said: "We can confirm the deal with Apple. Further than that, we cannot comment at this stage."

It was the second acquisition of an Israeli company by Apple in less than two years. Apple bought flash storage chip maker Anobit in January 2012.

PrimeSense's sensing technology, which gives digital devices the ability to observe a scene in three dimensions, was used to help power Microsoft's Xbox Kinect.

Negotiated by six world powers and Iran over the weekend, the deal halts Iran's most sensitive nuclear activities and gives it some relief from crippling sanctions, but does not allow the OPEC member to increase oil sales for six months.

Despite tough work ahead to transform the agreement into a permanent solution, it was enough to ease oil supply fears and send Brent crude down $2.15 at $108.90 in European trade after it had earlier slid $3 to hit a low of $108.05.

"What prices are mostly reflecting is a lack of geopolitical risk premium," said Barclays oil analyst Miswin Mahesh.

"We would have expected a $3 to $4 a barrel move. We did not get that because... you're not seeing additional barrels coming into the market," he said.

The easing of Middle East tensions after the agreement did look set to lift Wall St shares when trading opens, where the S&P 500 and Dow indexes .SPX.DJI are sitting at record highs after posting a seventh straight week of gains on Friday. .N

"It's positive news, its clearly boosting equity markets today and in a broader sense its reflationary for the global economy," said Mike Ingram, market commentator at BGC Partners.

European shares rose by 0.5 percent .FTEU3 in the wake of the agreement, extending last week's solid gains and edging closer to their five-year high highs. Germany's DAX .GDAXI rose 0.9 percent to a record high. .EU

However, uncertainty over the region's economic outlook was keeping liquidity levels low, with volumes likely to suffer further this week due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday and as the end of the month approaches.

MSCI's world equity index .MIWD00000PUS, tracking shares in 45 countries, gained 0.2 percent reflecting the firmer tone in Europe and earlier gains across Asian share markets .MIAPJ0000PUS after the Iran deal emerged.

In emerging markets, the deal gave a big boost to Turkish stocks, which jumped 1.6 percent, though political tensions weighed on Thai and Ukrainian assets, and the dip in oil prices pushed the Russian rouble lower.

In Japan, a major oil importer, shares got an extra boost from a weaker yen to surge by 1.5 percent and have now gained almost 11 percent in little more than two weeks. .N225

Lior Amihai, a spokesman for Israeli settler watch group Peace Now, said authorities first advanced the plans for 831 homes in five West Bank settlements earlier this month.

These plans were in addition to thousands of other settler homes Israel has announced since U.S.-brokered peace negotiations with the Palestinians resumed in July after a three-year stalemate.

The Israeli civil administration in the West Bank which approves settlement plans had no immediate comment.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's top aide, Nabil Abu Rdeineh, condemned the announcement and said Palestinians "consider it the continuation of a policy of escalation aimed at putting obstacles in front of the peace process."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "shouldn't settle his scores with the United States at the expense of our people," Abu Rdeineh told Reuters, connecting the latest settlement plan with Israel's objections to world powers' deal with Iran on Saturday to curb its nuclear program.

Israel feels the deal with Iran fails to strip the Islamic republic of a future ability to build a nuclear bomb. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat denounced what he called an Israeli plan to destroy chances of negotiating the terms of Palestinian statehood alongside Israel.

More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem alongside 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel cites historical and Biblical links to those areas.

The cases focus on the broad-ranging power wielded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the landmark Clean Air Act, first enacted in 1970.

The law was envisioned as a cooperative effort between the federal government and states in which the EPA sets standards but states have to set plans to comply.

That flexibility has allowed states which favor looser regulations, like Texas and Kansas, to resist - with the support of industry groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers - when the agency wants to impose more stringent standards.

In both cases before the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, mainly Republican-led states and industry groups have challenged different EPA regulations, in the hope of weakening the agency's authority. The EPA has support from Democratic-leaning states, like Massachusetts and New York, and from environmental groups.

"It would be both a big deal and somewhat unsurprising if EPA loses both Clean Air Act cases," said Richard Frank, an environmental law professor at the University of California at Davis School of Law. Such rulings would reflect a dilution of the deference that courts generally show government agencies in interpreting statutes, he added.

The cases do not challenge whether the EPA can regulate pollutants, such as greenhouse gases, but instead how it uses the Clean Air Act to regulate a wide range of them.

The EPA's authority to interpret the statute broadly is vital to its mission in the face of resistance from Republicans and a handful of Democrats in Congress and some state governments. In the climate change context in particular, the Clean Air Act is the EPA's main tool for tackling greenhouse gas emissions after the U.S. Senate rejected a cap-and-trade bill in 2010.

The Supreme Court rulings are unlikely to have a direct impact on President Barack Obama's sweeping Climate Action Plan, which was unveiled in June, legal experts say, in part because the EPA will be using its authority under parts of the law not at issue in the cases. But decisions against the EPA could pose obstacles to the way it rolls out its rules.

Children are more vulnerable to radiation, which can increase the odds of them developing cancer later in life.

The team at King's College Hospital are trialling a scan that turns organs into a "field of gold" to find tumours.

The findings were presented in the European Journal of Ultrasound.

Nodules or lesions on the liver can be detected when children with liver disease or fatty livers have an ultrasound scan.

However, these could be malignant tumours that need treating or benign growths that can be ignored.

A CT scan can tell the difference, but this exposes the patient to X-ray radiation.

"We are trying to stop children having unnecessary radiation as the long-term effects show a substantial increase in cancer," Prof Paul Sidhu, a consultant radiologist at King's College Hospital, told the BBC. Accurate diagnosis The team at the hospital is testing an upgraded version of ultrasound, which has been used in adults for a decade but not yet in children.

A harmless chemical, injected into the arm, forms temporary microscopic bubbles in the bloodstream. It acts as a "contrast agent" in the ultrasound scan.

Prof Sidhu said: "It makes the arteries light up and then the veins and the whole liver. It looks like a field of gold."

If the liver lesion is benign, it lights up like the rest of the liver. But a cancerous growth will rapidly get rid of the contrast agent.

"It looks like a black hole. It's so clear it is like day and night," Prof Sidhu said.

In a trial on 44 children with chronic liver problems, the test was able to accurately diagnose patients.

GN Store Nord, headquartered in Ballerup, near Copenhagen, has a product it hopes will reach that demographic - famously averse to accepting the depredations of age - by taking the stigma out of wearing an aid.

The world's fourth-largest maker has collaborated with Apple Inc to develop a device packed with bluetooth-like technology that installed in the ear allows users to stream voice and music from their iPhones without the need for an intermediary device.

Denmark's expertise in sound technology can be traced back to 1904, when William Demant Holding Group was founded by Hans Demant, whose wife had a hearing disability. Nearly 110 years later, William Demant is the world's second-largest maker of hearing aids, behind Switzerland's Sonova, and its Oticon Foundation continues to fund research and support engineering students.

Strong public and private cooperation has driven development in audio products from microphones to amplifiers in Denmark, which is also home to luxury stereo maker Bang & Olufsen and sound measurement firm Brüel and Kjaer.

Denmark's technical university offers an engineering acoustics masters program that attracts students from around the world and hosts a sound technology innovation network funded by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation.

There is huge potential in an industry worth $15 billion.

The World Health Organization estimates there are 360 million people - over 5 percent of the world's population - with a disabling loss of hearing, yet current hearing aid production meets less than 10 percent of global need.

Berenberg Bank estimates only one in four who suffer from hearing loss in the United States use them. That might in part be down to stigma, part to cost.

Premium products in the United States sell for about $3,000, including GN's Verso range, and GN has said it will probably launch LiNX at a 5 to 10 percent premium to that.

But there are hopes that the new technology can overcome some of the stigma by making the devices more attractive, accelerating single-digit volume growth in a market that will benefit from an ageing population and rising wealth in emerging markets.

United Nations figures project that one in five people in a world population of between 8.3 and 10.9 billion will be over 60 by 2050, up from just under one in 10 of the current 7 billion.

Aimed at easing a long festering standoff, the interim pact between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia won the critical endorsement of Iranian clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

U.S. President Barack Obama said the deal struck after marathon, tortuous and politically charged negotiations cut off Tehran's possible routes to a nuclear bomb. But Israel, Iran's arch-enemy, denounced the agreement as an "historic mistake".

Halting Iran's most sensitive nuclear activity, its higher-grade enrichment of uranium, it was tailored as a package of confidence-building steps towards reducing decades of tension and ultimately creating a more stable, secure Middle East.

Indeed, the United States held previously undisclosed, separate direct talks with Iran in recent months to encourage diplomacy towards a nuclear deal, a senior U.S. official said.

Washington and Tehran have lacked diplomatic relations and been locked in hostility since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Any new detente between the two will be opposed by Washington's Israeli and conservative Gulf Arab allies as it could tilt the regional balance of power towards Tehran.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who has been coordinating diplomatic contacts with Iran on behalf of the major powers, said the accord created time and space for follow-up talks on a comprehensive solution to the dispute.

"This is only a first step," said Iranian Foreign Minister and chief negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif. "We need to start moving in the direction of restoring confidence, a direction which we have managed to move against in the past."

Downtrodden by sanctions, many Iranians expressed joy at the breakthrough and prospect of economic improvement. Iran's rial currency, decimated earlier this year due to sanctions, jumped more than 3 percent on news of the deal on Sunday.

Obama said that if Iran did not meet its commitments during the six-month period covered by the interim deal, Washington would turn off the tap of sanctions relief and "ratchet up the pressure".

HP's year-long stock rally sputtered last week amid fears a faster-than-anticipated slowdown in emerging markets, above all China, may dash the computing giant's hopes for a return to growth in 2014 or beyond.

Cisco has warned about crumbling Chinese demand. IBM last month reported a sales drop of over 20 percent in the world's No. 2 economy.

Both also reported weakness in other emerging markets as well, but it was China and concerns about sales declines in that market that has grabbed headlines.

HP is already grappling with expectations of slowing U.S. federal spending, a fundamental erosion of PC demand and unrelenting competition from Lenovo and Dell. So it can ill afford a steeper-than-expected dropoff in China, which is estimated to account for a fifth of HP's revenue and is one of its most crucial growth markets.

Investors are looking to the computing giant, which reports quarterly results on Tuesday, to shed more light on goings-on in the world's largest PC market.

"All the giant tech companies are somewhat at risk now. You have to worry if the other companies are going to report the same kind of thing in their fourth quarter," said Peter Tuz, President of Chase Investment Counsel Corp in Virgina.

Shares in HP, up 77 percent so far this year, have lost almost 5 percent in the week since Cisco blamed a dismal business outlook on deepening fallout from the Snowden revelations. Some analysts also blame competition from networking giant Huawei and the government's increasing tendency to buy local.

Mizuho Securities analyst Abhey Lamba cited another culprit: a slowdown in spending by Chinese state enterprises awaiting policy signals from a new government.

Microsoft said China was the company's weakest performing market during the September quarter. The picture is far from clear, however. Juniper Networks said last week its business continues to grow in Asia, including China.

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