World news online. 07-05-2013 | Health

As Egypt's military ousted President Mohammed Morsi on Wednesday, non-Egyptians were able to read his tweets in their local languages.

Other figures being translated included opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei and Arab Spring activist Wael Ghonim.

Twitter is using Microsoft Bing translator as an "experiment".

President Morsi's last tweet, posted at 21:39 BST on 2 July, was translated as: "Mohammed Morsi confirms its attachment to the constitutional legitimacy and rejected any attempt to break them and call the forces armed pull its ultimatum and rejects any dictates dakhlihaokhargih."

The translation tool is clearly not yet 100% accurate and Twitter has not officially launched the service, but in a statement to digital news site AllThingsD it said: "As part of our experiment with tweet text translation, we've enabled translation for some of the most-followed accounts in Egypt, so people around the world can better understand and keep up with what's happening there."

Twitter has provided a list of all the Egyptian accounts it is translating, called egypt2013, which has 63 members.

The list includes Wael Ghonim, who has more than 1.1 million followers, and Tahrir News, which has more than 900,000 followers. 'Independent storytellers' Twitter began its experimental translation service this month, covering European languages such as Italian, French and Spanish, before extending it to Arabic on Wednesday.

Social media site Facebook also offers a translate feature for its foreign-language posts.

"I think it opens a lot of chances for independent storytellers and bloggers to make their voice reach a wider audience," Federico Guerrini, a journalist fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, told the BBC.

"In the future, activists and bloggers from foreign countries could bypass the filter of Western 'curators' and tell the world live what is happening.

"Journalists will also have easier access to a number of sources previously unavailable," he added.

While Twitter is undoubtedly growing in popularity as an unfiltered news source, research by the University of Edinburgh suggests news wires are still faster than Twitter for breaking news.

Dr Miles Osborne, from the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, said: "Twitter and traditional news outlets each have their strengths in terms of delivering news.

Partly spurred by the death of his uncle, 16-year-old scientist and researcher Jack Andraka vowed to find a quick and cheap way to test for signs of the disease.

Andraka's research – incuding writing to 200 science professors – led to him developing a dipstick diagnostic test which searches for a biomarker for pancreatic cancer. It can also be used to test for lung and ovarian cancer.

He tells BBC Future about his quest.

Yahoo said it will integrate Xobni's technology into its communications products, including the mobile and PC versions of its email and instant messaging services.

Yahoo did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, which the technology blog AllThingsD pegged at $30 million to $40 million. Yahoo said that 31 Xobni employees will be joining Yahoo, including Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bonforte, who previously worked at Yahoo.

The deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions by Yahoo since Marissa Mayer became chief executive a year ago, vowing to boost traffic to Yahoo's online services and to revive the company's stagnant revenue growth.

Yahoo, which has roughly 11,000 employees, has acquired more than a dozen small, Web startups during the past year, focusing particularly on adding technology and services designed for smartphones and tablets.

On Tuesday Yahoo acquired Qwiki, a mobile app that creates mini-movies using a consumer's collection of photos and videos. And on Monday, Yahoo acquired Bignoggins Productions, a mobile app to help players of fantasy sports teams.

Last month, Yahoo closed its $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging service Tumblr, the largest deal by Mayer.

It said the DGSE intercepted signals from computers and telephones in France, and between France and other countries, although not the content of phone calls, to create a map of "who is talking to whom". It said the activity was illegal.

"All of our communications are spied on," wrote Le Monde, which based its report on unnamed intelligence sources as well as remarks made publicly by intelligence officials.

"Emails, text messages, telephone records, access to Facebook and Twitter are then stored for years," it said.

The activities described are similar to those carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency, as described in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The documents revealed that the NSA has access to vast amounts of Internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies such as Facebook and Google, under a program known as Prism.

They also showed that the U.S. government had gathered so-called metadata - such as the time, duration and numbers called - on all telephone calls carried by service providers such as Verizon.

France's DGSE was not immediately available for comment.

Le Monde said the French national security commission whose job it is to authorize targeted spying, and the parliamentary intelligence committee, had challenged the paper's report and said it worked in accordance with the law. It said the only body that collected communications information was a government agency controlled by the prime minister's office that monitors for security breaches.

Le Monde's report comes amid a storm over media allegations that Washington regularly spies on European citizens and embassies. The allegations, made in the German magazine Der Spiegel, sparked concern from data protection watchdogs and irked European governments just as major transatlantic trade talks are about to start.

Le Monde said France's DGSE was more interested in finding out who was speaking to whom than in combing through the content of private communications. It said the DGSE stored a mass of such metadata in the basement of its Paris headquarters.

France's seven other intelligence services, including domestic secret services and customs and money-laundering watchdogs, have access to the data and can tap into it freely as a means to spot people whose communications seem suspicious, whom they can then track with more intrusive techniques such as phone-tapping, Le Monde wrote.

But even following this advice isn't always going to be enough, particularly if you have nothing solid to shelter beneath. This was the concern guiding Arthur Brutter and Ido Bruno when they dreamed up the earthquake-proof table -- an invention that aims to provide affordable protection to people in earthquake-prone areas of the world.

"The earthquake-proof table started when I was a student in industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem," says co-inventor Arthur Brutter. "At the beginning I wanted a solution to help in natural disasters ... I looked at pictures of a school that was crushed in the earthquake in Haiti and they really shocked me."

The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic event that devastated the small Caribbean island and its surrounds. Official estimates suggest that up to 200,000 people died in the destruction. After seeing photographs of the aftermath, Brutter resolved to build a product to help save lives of people trapped in structurally unsound buildings during earthquakes.

Brutter, alongside his former lecturer Ido Bruno, devised a cheap reinforced table that would be light enough for two school children to be able to lift, yet still strong enough to withstand up to one ton of pressure from above.

Brutter says that the geometries of the earthquake-proof table are designed to spread weight evenly across the table's surface, ensuring that the structure holds its shape, even when subjected to significant down-force.

The earthquake-proof table "transforms energy and absorbs it," says Brutter. "When something falls on the table it absorbs the object's energy, and debris is forced to the side." In the event of a building's collapse, the tables are also designed to form passageways through the debris to help assist in rescue efforts.

The table was initially tested by the Israeli military and is currently awaiting official approval of the world-leading Structural Engineering department of Padua University, Italy, where more tests have been carried out.

The dramatic exit of President Mohamed Mursi was greeted with delight among millions of people on the streets of Cairo and other cities overnight, but there was simmering resentment among Egyptians who opposed military intervention.

Perhaps aware of the risk of a polarized society, the new interim leader, Adli Mansour, used his inauguration to hold out an olive branch to the Brotherhood.

"The Muslim Brotherhood are part of this people and are invited to participate in building the nation as nobody will be excluded, and if they respond to the invitation, they will be welcomed," he said.

Mursi's removal after a year in office marked another twist in the turmoil that has gripped the Arab world's most populous country in the two years since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

The United Nations, the United States and some other world powers did not condemn Mursi's removal as a military coup. To do so might trigger sanctions.

Army intervention was backed by millions of Egyptians, including liberal leaders and religious figures who expect new elections under a revised set of rules.

The protest movement that sealed Mursi's fate was rooted in a liberal opposition that lost elections to Islamists, but its ranks were swelled by anger over broken promises on the economy, shrinking real incomes and lengthening lines for fuel.

POLITICAL ISLAM

The downfall of Egypt's first elected leader to emerge from the Arab Spring revolutions raised questions about the future of political Islam, which only lately seemed triumphant.

Deeply divided, Egypt's 84 million people find themselves again a focus of concern in a region traumatized by the civil war in Syria.

At least 16 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in street clashes across Egypt since Mursi's overthrow, and television stations sympathetic to Mursi were taken off air.

Mursi himself was in military custody, army and Brotherhood sources said, and judicial authorities have opened an investigation into accusations that he and 15 other Islamists insulted the judiciary.

The prosecutor's office also ordered the arrest of the Brotherhood's top leader, Mohamed Badie, and his deputy Khairat el-Shater, according to judicial and army sources.

The two men have been charged with inciting violence against protesters outside the Brotherhood's headquarters in Cairo that was attacked on Sunday night.

The European Union has demanded the United States explain a report in a German magazine that Washington was spying on its European allies, calling such surveillance shocking if true.

The reports came to light amid the imbroglio over former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details of surveillance activities by Washington. He is currently in limbo in a transit area of Moscow's airport as the United States pressures Moscow to expel him home.

A White House statement said Obama and Merkel spoke by phone, a conversation that took place two weeks after they held face-to-face talks in Berlin.

"The president assured the chancellor that the United States takes seriously the concerns of our European allies and partners," the White House said, noting U.S. and EU officials would discuss intelligence and privacy issues as early as July 8.

The leaders agreed to hold a meeting of U.S. and German security officials in the coming days to discuss the issue in greater detail.

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said Germany would send the sub-heads of German ministries to Washington - those below the level of deputy minister - and said they would assess the communication streams coming into Germany in a bid to protect German citizens.

Thomas Oppermann, parliamentary floor leader of Germany's opposition Social Democrats, criticized Merkel's choice of delegation, however.

"The Chancellor needs to hold proper government consultations," he told German television on Thursday.

"In the next week a government delegation of sub-heads of ministries will go to Washington so basically technocrats will be talking about this topic. It's a highly political issue."

WITNESS PROTECTION?

Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the SPD, said German authorities should quickly contact Snowden and consider giving him witness protection, German news magazine Spiegel said on Thursday.

"The first step must be that the federal prosecutors office travels to Moscow to examine him as a witness," Gabriel was quoted as saying.

"And if they get the impression that he is a reliable witness, we have to consider whether he should be put into a witness protection program."