Tomorrow's News. 06-29-2013 | ScienceTechnol

The so-called groundscraper at the King's Cross Central development is the latest overseas property deal by the cash-rich U.S. internet group, which will house all of its London staff under one roof when completed in 2016.

Google revealed designs for the low-rise one million square feet scheme on Friday after announcing its move to King's Cross in January.

At 330 meters long, it exceeds the height of the 310-metre tall Shard, western Europe's tallest skyscraper.

Swiss bank UBS is undertaking a similar large-scale low-rise scheme at the Broadgate complex in London's main financial district.

Several thousand people will work at the site - a large scale operation Google would have found difficult to house in space-constrained central London where land is also more expensive.

Google has spent about 650 million pounds to buy and develop the 2.4 acre site and the finished development will be worth up to one billion pounds, sources told Reuters.

Construction will start early next year subject to planning approval and it will be one of the internet giant's largest offices outside its so-called Googleplex corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The internet giant is a prized tenant for landlords and its presence is expected to draw other technology companies to King's Cross - especially small start-ups - and help bump up rents.

The new site is likely to include a 20,000 square feet area for bike parking, about the size of seven tennis courts, and features a climbing wall between floors, a source close to the project told Reuters.

The company's offices are famous for perks like gourmet food, bowling alleys, roof gardens, high-tech gyms and on-site medical staff and massages.

King's Cross Central, which sits on a former fish, coal and grain goods yard to the north of the city, spans 67 acres and will contain homes, offices and shops. It is being built by the King's Cross Central Limited Partnership which includes developer Argent Group.

Google has traditionally leased its overseas offices but in the past two years has purchased premises in Paris, Dublin, and now London, its filings show.

As of December 31, 2011, Google had $44.6 billion of cash, with $21.2 billion of that held offshore, according to its 2011 annual report. If the funds held offshore were repatriated, they would be subject to U.S. taxes, Google said.

Logging on to his computer, he greets his Facebook followers with a "good morning all" in English before posting links to 746 websites they have hacked in the last 48 hours along with his digital calling card: a half-skull, half-cyborg Guy Fawkes mask.

He calls himself Mauritania Attacker, after the remote Islamic republic in west Africa from which he leads a youthful group scattered across the Maghreb, southeast Asia and the West.

As jihadists battle regional governments from the deserts of southern Algeria to the scrubland of north Nigeria, Mauritania Attacker says the hacking collective which he founded, AnonGhost, is fighting for Islam using peaceful means.

"We're not extremists," he said, via a Facebook account which a cyber security expert identified as his. "AnonGhost is a team that hacks for a cause. We defend the dignity of Muslims."

During a series of conversations via Facebook, the 23-year-old spoke of his love of house music and hip hop, and the aims of his collective, whose targets have included U.S. and British small businesses and the oil industry.

He represents a new generation of Western-style Islamists who promote religious conservatism and traditional values, and oppose those they see as backing Zionism and Western hegemony.

In April, AnonGhost launched a cyber attack dubbed OpIsrael that disrupted access to several Israeli government websites, attracting the attention of security experts worldwide.

"AnonGhost is considered one of the most active groups of hacktivists of the first quarter of 2013," said Pierluigi Paganini, security analyst and editor of Cyber Defense magazine.

An online archive of hacked Web sites, Hack DB, lists more than 10,400 domains AnonGhost defaced in the past seven months.

Mauritania, a poor desert nation straddling the Arab Maghreb and black sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely hacker base. It has 3.5 million inhabitants spread across an area the size of France and Germany, and only 3 percent of them have Internet access.

But the company, the dominant cable TV operator in Western Canada, managed only a marginal rise in third-quarter profit as it lost subscribers to its video cable and satellite TV services.

Shaw said the number of subscribers to its video services fell by 26,578, or 1.3 percent, to 2.07 million in the quarter, while the number of those taking its "direct to home" satellite service slipped by 2,930 or 0.3 percent, to about 904,000.

"Subscriber losses in the core cable TV business were pretty much in line, maybe a little worse than anticipated," said David Heger, an analyst at brokerage Edward Jones.

"But they were better than they were in the (second) quarter. Perhaps they're starting an improving trend."

Shaw, which also operates the Global TV network, raised its 2013 cash-flow forecast to C$590 million-C$600 million from C$550 million and said it plans dividend increases of 5 to 10 percent in each of the next two years as a result of the higher cash flows and favorable market conditions.

The company also has 19 specialty networks including HGTV Canada, Food Network Canada, the History channel and Showcase.

Shaw's net income rose to C$250 million, or 52 Canadian cents per share, from C$248 million, or 53 Canadian cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 4 percent to C$1.33 billion.

Analysts on average had expected a profit of 45 Canadian cents per share, on revenue of C$1.30 billion ($1.24 billion), according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Shaw had more shares outstanding in the third quarter than it did in the year-earlier quarter.

Apart from the pressure on its TV businesses, Shaw is facing fierce competition from Telus Corp, which is pushing out an internet-based TV product to lure away its customers.

Shaw added a net 17,719 landline telephone subscribers in the quarter, bringing the total to 1.35 million, and a net 4,157 internet subscribers, bringing the total to 1.88 million.

The methods, currently only at the research stage in laboratories in Britain and the United States, would for the first time involve implanting genetically modified embryos into women.

Critics said the technique was ethically suspect and would eventually lead to a eugenic 'designer baby' market.

It involves intervening in the fertilization process to remove faulty mitochondrial DNA, which can cause inherited conditions such as fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy.

The methods are designed to help families with mitochondrial diseases - incurable conditions passed down the maternal line that affect around one in 6,500 children worldwide. Mitochondria act as tiny energy-generating batteries inside cells.

The potential treatment is known as three-parent in vitro fertilization (IVF) because the offspring would have genes from a mother, a father and from a female donor.

After a national public consultation showed Britons broadly favor the idea, the government's chief physician said on Friday it should be allowed to go ahead under strict regulation.

"Scientists have developed ground-breaking new procedures which could stop these diseases being passed on, bringing hope to many families seeking to prevent their children inheriting them," Sally Davies, chief medical officer, told reporters.

"It's only right that we look to introduce this life-saving treatment as soon as we can."

But David King, director of the Human Genetics Alert campaign group said "the techniques are unnecessary and their use is ethically unsound" and criticized the government for failing to conduct a more comprehensive public consultation.

"They cross the ethical line that has been agreed by government around the world that we should not genetically alter human beings," he said in an emailed statement.

DNA SWAP

Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, who worked as a senior accountant in the Vatican's financial administration, was arrested along with an Italian secret service agent and a financial intermediary in a tale that reads like a spy novel.

It involves police wiretaps, a private plane rented to collect the cash from Locarno, burned cell phones and an allegedly corrupt secret services agent who promised to get the money past customs.

Details of the case against Scarano will come as an acute embarrassment to Pope Francis, who, since his election in March, has pointedly eschewed many of the trappings of office and sought to stress the importance of a simple life of devotion.

Only two days ago, the Vatican announced he had set up a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which has been hit by a number of scandals in the past decades.

Scarano, who was arrested in a Rome parish and taken to Rome's Queen of Heaven jail, had hatched a plot to bring up to 40 million euros ($52 million) into Italy for a family of shipbuilders in his hometown of Salerno in southern Italy, magistrate Nello Rossi told reporters.

Rossi is already investigating the Vatican bank for money laundering, and the latest arrests stemmed from that.

Rossi and fellow magistrate Stefano Pesci said there was no indication so far that the bank was directly involved in the attempt to bring the money into Italy, but that the investigation was continuing and more searches were underway.

Scarano is under separate investigation in southern Italy in relation to his accounts in the Vatican bank.

CELL PHONES DESTROYED

According to Rossi, in July last year Scarano engaged Giovanni Zito, a paramilitary Carabiniere policeman on loan to the secret services, to help him get the money, which was in a Swiss bank, into Italy without tax and customs controls.

The third person arrested was Giovanni Carenzio, a financial broker with offices in Switzerland and the Canary Islands and who was acting as the fiduciary for the owners of the money.

It was not clear how or when the money got to Switzerland in the first place.

The testimony from a man who has admitted taking cash from gangsters and tipping them off on investigations comes as Bulger's lawyers seek to discredit FBI evidence against their client, who is accused of murder and racketeering as head of Boston's Winter Hill Gang.

Morris, who earned the nickname "Vino" for accepting crates of wine from Bulger and his associates while at the FBI, said he initialed several documents relating to the gang that he knew included lies and half-truths.

Asked by defense attorney Henry Brennan whether he had "deceived" FBI headquarters with the documents, Morris - who received excellent performance reviews during his tenure at the bureau - said, "Yes."

Once one of the most feared men in Boston, Bulger, 83, is on trial for killing or ordering the murders of 19 people as head of the Winter Hill Gang as it ran extortion and gambling rackets in Boston for decades.

The trial, which began June 12, has given the jury a glimpse of an era when machine-gun-toting mobsters shot associates who talked too much and buried bodies under bridges in a bloody struggle for control of the criminal underworld.

But it also has shown a dark side of the FBI during that period, when some former agents are alleged to have traded information with Bulger and his gang to help them elude arrest and murder "rats" who spoke to police.

Morris testified that he and fellow ex-FBI agent John Connolly - who cultivated Bulger as an informant - would sometimes invite Bulger and his associate Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi for home-cooked dinners, where they would trade information and gifts.

Connolly apparently got so rich on kickbacks that he began wearing jewelry and bought a boat and a second home on Cape Cod, Morris said. Morris said he had accepted wine and at least $5,000 in cash directly from Bulger and provided tips.

One tip Morris passed on to Connolly was about a Winter Hill associate who had begun cooperating with investigators against the crime group. The associate later turned up dead.

Morris, who now works as a part-time wine consultant, was offered immunity from prosecution in late 1997 in exchange for his testimony in hearings about FBI misconduct.

The faltering health of the first black president of South Africa, a revered symbol of racial reconciliation, has drawn world attention since the 94-year-old was rushed to hospital with a recurring lung infection nearly three weeks ago.

Earlier this week, the government reported Mandela's frail condition had turned critical, but since Thursday President Jacob Zuma has reported that his health is improving.

"I'm not a doctor, but I can say that from what he was a few days ago, there is great improvement," Mandela's ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, told reporters outside Mandela's former home in the Johannesburg township of Soweto.

But, she added, he remained "clinically unwell".

Heading for Johannesburg aboard Air Force One from Senegal, Obama paid tribute to Mandela for the way he led South Africa out of apartheid after years of struggle, but he said he did not need a "photo op" with the former president.

During his weekend trip to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town, his second stop of a three-nation Africa tour, Obama is scheduled to visit Robben Island, where Mandela passed 18 of the 27 years he spent in apartheid prisons.

White House officials have said they will defer to the Mandela family on whether a visit to the hospital to see Madiba, as he is affectionately known, would be appropriate.

While well-wishers and journalists crowded outside the hospital in the capital Pretoria where Mandela is being treated, a few blocks away, hundreds of demonstrators protested against Obama's visit, some burning U.S. flags.

Nearly 1,000 trade unionists, Muslim activists and South African Communist Party members marched to the U.S. Embassy shouting slogans denouncing Obama's foreign policy as "arrogant and oppressive".

Muslim activists held prayers in a car park outside the embassy. Leader Imam Sayeed Mohammed told the group: "We hope that Mandela feels better and that Obama can learn from him."

South African critics of Obama have focused in particular on his support for U.S. drone strikes overseas, which they say have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and his failure to fulfill a pledge to close the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba housing terrorism suspects.

Protesters said the first African-American president should not try to link himself to the anti-apartheid figure.