World Newspapers Overnight Online 12-26-2013 |

In a two-minute video recorded in Moscow, where Snowden has been granted temporary asylum, he spoke of concerns over surveillance in an age of huge technological advancement. "We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person." "A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all," said Snowden. "They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."

The "Alternative Christmas Message", broadcast annually on Britain's Channel 4 television since 1993, mimics the format of the yearly address to the nation by Queen Elizabeth.

Previous participants have included then President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2008 and popular cartoon characters Marge and Lisa Simpson in 2004. On Tuesday, Snowden - who disclosed thousands of confidential documents - said in an interview published in the Washington Post that he had achieved what he set out to do. "For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished," he said.

Snowden left his NSA post in Hawaii in May and went public with his first revelations from Hong Kong a few weeks later. In June, he left for Russia and stayed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport for nearly six weeks until the Kremlin granted him temporary one-year asylum. The United States has revoked his passport and demanded he be sent home to face charges for stealing secrets. Earlier this month there were signs of thawing attitudes when Richard Ledgett - a top NSA official who leads a taskforce at the agency responding to the leaks - left open the option for Snowden to return to the United States in an amnesty.

"It's worth having a conversation about," he told CBS. "I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured and my bar for those assurances would be very high," Ledgett said. Senior officials in the Obama administration remain opposed to such a move.

Last week a White House-appointed panel proposed curbs on some key NSA surveillance operations, recommending limits on a program to collect records of billions of telephone calls, and new tests before Washington spies on foreign leaders.

"The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it," Snowden said in the Christmas address.

Co-founders Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in October disclosed in a regulatory filing they were considering a bid to buy the company.

Cryptolocker scrambles users' data and then demands a fee to unencrypt it alongside a countdown clock.

Dell Secureworks said that the US and UK had been worst affected.

It added that the cyber-criminals responsible were now targeting home internet users after initially focusing on professionals.

The firm has provided a list of net domains that it suspects have been used to spread the code, but warned that more are being generated every day.

Ransomware has existed since at least 1989, but this latest example is particularly problematic because of the way it makes files inaccessible.

"Instead of using a custom cryptographic implementation like many other malware families, Cryptolocker uses strong third-party certified cryptography offered by Microsoft's CryptoAPI," said the report.

"By using a sound implementation and following best practices, the malware authors have created a robust program that is difficult to circumvent."

Ransom dilemma The first versions of Crytpolocker appear to have been posted to the net on 5 September.

Early examples were spread via spam emails that asked the user to click on a Zip-archived extension identified as being a customer complaint about the recipient's organisation.

Later it was distributed via malware attached to emails claiming there had been a problem clearing a cheque. Clicking the associated link downloaded a Trojan horse called Gameover Zeus, which in turn installed Cryptolocker onto the victim's PC.

By mid-December, Dell Secureworks said between 200,000 to 250,000 computers had been infected.

It said of those affected, "a minimum of 0.4%, and very likely many times that" had agreed to the ransom demand, which can currently only be paid in the virtual currencies Bitcoin and MoneyPak.

"Anecdotal reports from victims who elected to pay the ransom indicate that the Cryptolocker threat actors honour payments by instructing infected computers to decrypt files and uninstall the malware," added the security firm.

"According to reports from victims, payments may be accepted within minutes or may take several weeks to process."

The move gives the authorities the power to charge any member of deposed President Mohamed Mursi's movement with membership of a terrorist organization, marking an escalation in the army-backed government's crackdown on the group.

Following Tuesday's attack, Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi described the Brotherhood as a terrorist group, though Wednesday's move formalizes the step.

"All of Egypt ... was terrified by the ugly crime that the Muslim Brotherhood group committed by blowing up the building of the Dakahlyia security directorate," an emailed statement from the cabinet office said.

"The cabinet decided to declare the Muslim Brotherhood group a terrorist organization."

The environmental group said 29 of the 30, who are still in Russia after being freed on bail, have now been amnestied and will be free to leave for their home countries as soon as they secure exit visas. One more activist's case will be reviewed on Thursday, it said.

Russia's treatment of the activists - who spent two months in detention and had faced hooliganism charges punishable by seven years in jail - had drawn heavy criticism from Western nations and celebrities.

Their amnesty will remove an irritant in relations in what Kremlin critics say is a move timed to improve Russia's image ahead of the Sochi Olympics.

"This is the day we've been waiting for since our ship was boarded by armed commandos almost three months ago," Peter Willcox, who captained the Greenpeace vessel used in the protest, the Arctic Sunrise, said in a statement.

"I'm pleased and relieved the charges have been dropped, but we should not have been charged at all."

President Vladimir Putin has said Russia's response to a Greenpeace protest should serve as a lesson and Moscow would take tougher steps to guard against interference in its development of the region.

Russia says activists endangered lives and property in the protest at the state-controlled energy giant Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya platform in the Pechora Sea, a key element of Russia's plans to develop the Arctic.

Speaking to about 70,000 people from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, the same spot where he emerged to the world as pope when he was elected on March 13, Francis also made another appeal for the environment to be saved from "human greed and rapacity".

The leader of the 1.2 billion-member Church wove his first "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and world) message around the theme of peace.

"Peace is a daily commitment. It is a homemade peace," he said.

He said that people of other religions were also praying for peace, and - departing from his prepared text - he urged atheists to join forces with believers.

"I invite even non-believers to desire peace. (Join us) with your desire, a desire that widens the heart. Let us all unite, either with prayer or with desire, but everyone, for peace," he said, drawing sustained applause from the crowd.

Francis's reaching out to atheists and people of other religions is a marked contrast to the attitude of former Pope Benedict, who sometimes left non-Catholics feeling that he saw them as second-class believers.

He called for "social harmony in South Sudan, where current tensions have already caused numerous victims and are threatening peaceful coexistence in that young state".

Thousands are believed to have died in violence divided along ethnic lines between the Nuer and Dinka tribes in the country, which seceded from Sudan in 2011 after decades of war.

The pontiff also called for dialogue to end the conflicts in Syria, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, and prayed for a "favorable outcome" to the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

"Wars shatter and hurt so many lives!" he said, saying their most vulnerable victims were children, elderly, battered women and the sick.

PERSONAL PEACEMAKERS

The thread running through the message was that individuals had a role in promoting peace, either with their neighbor or between nations.

The message of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem was directed at "every man or woman who keeps watch through the night, who hopes for a better world, who cares for others while humbly seeking to do his or her duty," he said.

Citing nearly 2 million visits to the HealthCare.gov website and over 250,000 inquiries at call centers before Monday's sign-up deadline, the government gave consumers an extra day to enroll by midnight on Tuesday for January coverage.

It added flexibility by encouraging consumers to contact government call centers if they had started but not been able to finish their applications, without specifying a deadline for completing those enrollments.

"Sometimes despite your best efforts, you might have run into delays caused by heavy traffic to HealthCare.gov, maintenance periods, or other issues with our systems that prevented you from finishing the process on time," read a blog post on HealthCare.gov on Tuesday. "If this happened to you, don't worry -- we still may be able to help you get covered as soon as January 1."

The last-minute changes were aimed at getting as many people as possible insured under the Affordable Care Act, Obama's major domestic policy initiative. The administration has been moving the sign-up goal posts as it tries to recover from technical failures and political missteps that dogged the enrollment drive for weeks after it opened on October 1.

Ahead of Monday, more than 1 million people had signed up for private coverage through HealthCare.gov -- which serves 36 states -- and 14 state-run marketplaces, according to state and federal estimates.

Enrollment data from the final dash was not available on Tuesday, but administration officials cited "amazing interest in signing up for January 1."

"We are taking thousands of calls at our call centers, which remain open until midnight, and we are seeing thousands of visitors complete enrollment online," said Julie Bataille, spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs the HealthCare.gov site.

Americans who wait until after Tuesday to begin the process of selecting a health plan will have missed the deadline for health insurance coverage starting January 1 and will be covered as of February 1, CMS said on Tuesday afternoon.

The work is the largest genetic study ever carried out, involving nearly 30,000 patients.

The investigators believe new drugs could be developed to target these areas that could one day provide a cure for the disease.

The findings are published in the Journal Nature. The research team compared the DNA of arthritis patients with those without the disease and found 42 'faulty' areas that were linked with the disease. The hope is that drugs can be developed to compensate for these faults.

The lead researcher Professor Robert Plenge of Harvard Medical School found that one of these areas produced a weakness that was treated by an existing drug that was developed by trial and error, rather than specifically made to correct the genetic problem.

This finding, he says, shows such discoveries could be used to design new drugs.

"What this offers in the future is an opportunity to use genetics to discover new medicines for complex diseases like rheumatoid arthritis to treat or even cure the disease," he said.

Complex diseases Some have argued identifying genetic weak areas for complex diseases - known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - is not useful. There is little or no evidence, they argue, that "silencing the SNPs" with drugs will relieve any symptoms.

But Dr Plenge says the fact that he has found an established drug that treats the symptoms that arise from a particular SNP for rheumatoid arthritis validates this genetic approach. "It offers tremendous potential. This approach could be used to identify drug targets for complex diseases, nut just rheumatoid arthritis, but diabetes, Alzheimer's and coronary heart disease"

Fast track The study also found SNPs in the rheumatoid arthritis patients that also occur in patients with types of blood cancer.

According to Prof Jane Worthington, director of the centre for genetics in Manchester, this observation suggests that drugs that are being used to treat the cancer could be effective against rheumatoid arthritis and so should be fast tracked into clinical trials.

"There are already therapies that have been designed in the cancer field that might open up new opportunities for retargeting drugs," she told BBC News.

Dorsey, widely credited with creating Twitter alongside fellow co-founders like Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass, will stand for election at Disney's March 18 annual meeting, Disney said in a statement on Monday.

At 36, Dorsey, who is also CEO of fast-growing payments startup Square, will be by far the media conglomerate's youngest board member.

Dorsey, who sent the company's first tweet in 2006 - "just setting up my twttr" - spent the past few years molding San Francisco-based Square into a billion-dollar payments company whose matchbox-sized card readers are a common sight in coffee shops, corner stores and food trucks across the country.

In November, Twitter's initial public offering valued Dorsey's roughly 4.9 percent stake in the messaging service at about $1 billion.

"Jack Dorsey is a talented entrepreneur who has helped create groundbreaking new businesses in the social media and commerce spaces," said Iger, who is also Disney's chairman. "The perspective he brings to Disney and its Board is extremely valuable."

SMALLER BONUS

Iger's bonus was reduced by $3 million because Disney's "strong" results did not outperform his targets "by the same extraordinary amount as in fiscal 2012," the board said in a proxy filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

The reduced 2013 salary also included what Disney said was an increase in the discount rate that caused "a change in the value of his pension benefit of $3.1 million."

The Disney board did not change Iger's $2.5 million salary from 2012 when he earned $40.2 million.

In awarding Iger a $13.6 million cash performance bonus, the board's compensation committee said Disney did beat Iger's four financial performance measures taken together. But the weighted average of 112 percent of the targets fell below the 132 percent in 2012.

Those measures include segment operating income, diluted earnings per share on an adjusted basis, after-tax free cash flow, and return on invested capital.

It addresses his 1952 conviction for homosexuality for which he was punished by being chemically castrated.

The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that had proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.

The pardon was granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a request by Justice Minister Chris Grayling.

'Appalling' treatment "Dr Alan Turing was an exceptional man with a brilliant mind," said Mr Grayling.

He said the research Turing carried out during the war at Bletchley Park undoubtedly shortened the conflict and saved thousands of lives. Turing's work helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German Naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine. He also contributed some more fundamental work on codebreaking that was only released to public scrutiny in April 2012.

"His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed," said Mr Grayling.

"Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."

The pardon comes into effect on 24 December.

Turing died in June 1954 from cyanide poisoning and an inquest decided that he had committed suicide. However, biographers, friends and other students of his life dispute the finding and suggest his death was an accident.

Many people have campaigned for years to win a pardon for Turing. Dr Sue Black, a computer scientist, was one of the key figures in the campaign.

She told the BBC that she hoped all the men convicted under the anti-homosexuality law would now be pardoned.

"This is one small step on the way to making some real positive change happen to all the people that were convicted," she said.

"It's a disgrace that so many people were treated so disrespectfully."

Some have criticised the action for not going far enough and, 59 years after Turing's death, little more than a token gesture.

"I just think it's ridiculous, frankly," British home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair told the BBC.

"He's been dead these many years so what's the point? It's a silly nonsense.

With both cable and mobile phone operators grappling with slowing growth, speculation has intensified recently about potential takeovers of No. 4 wireless service provider T-Mobile US Inc and No. 2 cable service provider Time Warner Cable Inc.

Some possible buyers, including Sprint Corp and Comcast Corp, may face headwinds in convincing U.S. regulators that their deals would improve competition.

"The Obama administration definitely is more skeptical of large corporate combinations... They are concerned about the effects of market concentration on consumers," said Robert McDowell, who stepped down as the senior Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year.

"It's not an impossible wall to climb over but it is a high wall nonetheless," said McDowell, now a visiting fellow at the nonprofit Hudson Institute in Washington.

The Obama administration's pro-consumer tack could threaten deals that eliminate big competitors within an industry, such as a Sprint bid for T-Mobile or a Comcast bid for Time Warner Cable. Regulators could, on the other hand, welcome transactions that bolster new entrants, such as one combining satellite TV service provider Dish Network Corp with T-Mobile, experts say.

"Dish/T-Mobile, from a regulatory standpoint, it would be a slam-dunk," said Stifel analyst David Kaut.

All the companies mentioned in this story declined comment.

Sources earlier told Reuters that Dish is considering making a bid for T-Mobile next year, potentially setting the stage for a new bidding war with Japan's SoftBank Corp, which owns 80 percent of Sprint.

Comcast Corp and smaller rival Charter Communications Inc and Cox Communications Inc are all circling No. 2 U.S. cable provider Time Warner Cable.

WIRELESS MARKET CONCENTRATION

Sprint and T-Mobile executives have argued that the wireless market would be much healthier with a stronger third competitor that could better challenge the leading players, Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless have roughly a third of the U.S. wireless customers each, while Sprint and T-Mobile have a third between them, according to Roger Entner of Recon Analytics.

Both FCC and Justice Department chiefs have signaled they will take a hard line in scrutinizing consolidation bids.

It’s part of the lore of modern China. When paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was handing over power a generation ago, a widely recounted tale goes, he had some advice for his successor. For every five working days, spend four with the top brass of the People’s Liberation Army.

The latest leader of China, Xi Jinping, shows every sign of applying that lesson. A month after assuming power in November last year, Xi visited the province of Guangdong on his first major political tour. Of the five days he spent there, three were at a military base, according to official coverage of his trip.

The son of a Communist revolutionary commander, Xi built his career as a friend of the army, and at times an official in it. But he still feels compelled to ask his generals for something in return: loyalty. “First, we must keep in mind that the military must unswervingly adhere to the party’s absolute leadership and obey the party’s orders,” he said on one of his many military inspection tours.

Xi’s injunction that the party comes first is a sign of the insecurity modern Chinese leaders feel at the top of their nation’s huge and increasingly powerful armed forces, military experts say. As it grows mightier, the People’s Liberation Army is growing trickier to govern. The PLA’s rising global profile is integral to Xi’s stated vision for the nation: the “China Dream,” a rejuvenated country that’s both peace-loving and militarily powerful.

But Xi is less a true military man than Deng and the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong. He is fundamentally a career bureaucrat, like his immediate predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin.

Like them, Xi has to win over the force that keeps the Communist Party in power. But he must do so at a time when the PLA is more self-confident than ever, mounting the first serious challenge to the naval dominance of the United States since the end of the Cold War.

“It will take time for Xi to take control of the military,” says Huang Jing, an authority on the PLA at the National University of Singapore. “Most of the senior generals were not appointed by Xi. Instead they were all appointed by his predecessors.”

The rise of a nationalistic leader with military leanings comes as the People’s Liberation Army, with 2.3 million men and women under arms, is the hard edge of a rising China.