Newspapers online. 08-06-2013 | Health Healt

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

The Obama administration vetoed a U.S. trade panel's ban on the import and sale of some older iPhones and iPads, reversing a ruling that had favored South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) over Apple in their long-running patent battle. The move was vehemently criticized by the South Korean media as "protectionism."

"We express concerns about the negative impact that such a decision would have on the protection of patent rights," the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, said in a statement.

The ministry called on the U.S. trade body and the Obama administration to make "fair and reasonable decisions" as Samsung faces a decision on Friday as to whether some of its phones and tablets infringed on Apple's patents and should be banned from imports into the United States.

Apple and Samsung, the world's top two smartphones makers, have been waging a global patent war since 2011, filing multiple lawsuits against each other over the design, interface and technology of their devices.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in June banned the import and sale of the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G distributed by AT&T Inc (T.N), saying the devices infringed on one patent owned by the South Korean electronics giant.

Alphasat, which was launched 10 days ago on an Ariane rocket, is now at its operational altitude and, critically, has deployed its huge 11m antenna.

Engineers intend shortly to switch on the 6.6-tonne spacecraft's new sophisticated communications payload.

Alphasat will relay traffic for mobile satellite services company Inmarsat.

The London-based operator's customers include the big broadcasters like the BBC, shipping concerns, the oil and gas industry, airlines, the armed forces, and other groups that need on-the-go connections in remote areas.

Alphasat was confirmed in a stable, Earth-pointing configuration late on Sunday.

"We'll start the in-orbit testing over the next few days," said Franco Carnevale, Inmarsat's vice president for satellite and launch vehicles.

"I expect us to start testing the payload on the 13th, 14th, or 15th of August at the latest," he told BBC News. The satellite is the product of a major public-private partnership involving the British operator and the European Space Agency.

Alphasat incorporates a host of new technologies and represents the first flight of a new heavyweight class of chassis, or bus, that will allow European manufacturers to make telecoms spacecraft weighing up to 8.8 tonnes with a power output of 22kW.

This has led some to refer to the Alphasat design as the "A380 of space".

Following its 25 July launch, the satellite had to be raised to a geosynchronous orbit 36,000km over the equator. This involved four lengthy burns on its apogee engine, consuming nearly three tonnes of propellant. This is equivalent to the full tanks of approximately 50 medium-sized cars.

At the end of last week, controllers then began the delicate process of deploying Alphasat's antenna/reflector.

This enormous structure was folded for launch and its parts had to be "barbequed" to achieve an even, not-too-hot, not-to-cold temperature before unfurling in space. This meant slowly rotating the spacecraft in the sun. The moment of full blooming was achieved on Saturday.

"It was a tense two days," conceded Mr Carnevale. "The last time the antenna was tested on the ground was March."

Alphasat is now drifting along the equator arc. Its eventual destination is an orbital slot at 25 degrees East. Once there, Alphasat will assume the duties of an Inmarsat-4 spacecraft, but with considerable extra capability thanks to its novel digital signal processor.

The in-vitro burger, cultured from cattle stem cells, the first example of what its creator says could provide an answer to global food shortages and help combat climate change, will be fried in a pan and tasted by two volunteers.

The burger is the result of years of research by Dutch scientist Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht, who is working to show how meat grown in petri dishes might one day be a true alternative to meat from livestock.

The meat in the burger has been made by knitting together around 20,000 strands of protein that has been cultured from cattle stem cells in Post's lab.

The tissue is grown by placing the cells in a ring, like a donut, around a hub of nutrient gel, Post explained.

To prepare the burger, scientists combined the cultured beef with other ingredients normally used in burgers, such as salt, breadcrumbs and egg powder. Red beet juice and saffron have been added to bring out its natural colors.

"Our burger is made from muscle cells taken from a cow. We haven't altered them in any way," Post said in a statement on Friday. "For it to succeed it has to look, feel and hopefully taste like the real thing."

VIABLE ALTERNATIVE?

Success, in Post's view, would mean not just a tasty burger, but also the prospect of finding a sustainable, ethical and environmentally friendly alternative to meat production.

According to a 2006 report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), industrialized agriculture contributes on a "massive scale" to climate change, air pollution, land degradation, energy use, deforestation and biodiversity decline.

The report, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, said the meat industry contributes about 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions and this proportion is expected to grow as consumers in fast-developing countries such as China and India eat more meat.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), annual meat production is projected to rise to 376 million metric tons by 2030 from 218 million metric tons in 1997-1999, and demand from a growing world population is expected to rise beyond that.

Post cites FAO figures suggesting demand for meat is expected to increase by more than two-thirds by 2050.

The charity said legal pornographic sites had also been attacked to redirect users to the illegal material.

The offending material was sometimes accompanied by malware, it said.

The IWF told BBC Radio 5 live it had received 227 reports about the trend over the past six weeks. Some complaints involved the same examples.

Hijacked links

Cambridge-based IWF described the images as showing "the worst of the worst" sexual abuse.

They included images of newborn babies and the rape and violent sexual abuse of very young children, it said.

The charity gave the example of one case in which a furniture business had had the servers it used breached.

It said the attackers had created an "orphan folder" on the computers and then uploaded hundreds of offending images to it - effectively creating a new section on the retailer's website which was not linked to any of its other pages.

The charity said the hackers then hijacked links on "adult" sites so that if a visitor clicked on one of the affected pornographic images or videos they would be directed to the offending material.

It said more than two dozen businesses across the world had had the servers they used compromised, in addition to the furniture seller.

Administrators of the sites involved might be unaware of the problem until someone complained, the IWF added.

"We hadn't seen significant numbers of hacked websites for around two years, and then suddenly in June we started seeing this happening more and more," said the IWF's technical researcher, Sarah Smith.

"We speculate that the motivation behind the hacking is to distribute malware, specifically a Trojan.

"The IWF specialises in removing online child sexual abuse images rather than tracking malware distributors.

"However, you can imagine that an internet user would be worried about taking their malware-infected computer to be fixed knowing it was a folder of child sexual abuse images which caused the problems.

"We know that those people whose computers have been infected were not looking for the criminal content though."

She added that the charity had passed on the information to the police and sister hotlines in other countries.

Children's charity the NSPCC urged anyone coming across abuse images to report them immediately, saying "something like 16% of men in particular" were failing to do so.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co are only a temporary solution, he said.

Tepco's "sense of crisis is weak," Kinjo said. "This is why you can't just leave it up to Tepco alone" to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

"Right now, we have an emergency," he said.

Tepco has been widely castigated for its failure to prepare for the massive 2011 tsunami and earthquake that devastated its Fukushima plant and lambasted for its inept response to the reactor meltdowns. It has also been accused of covering up shortcomings.

It was not immediately clear how much of a threat the contaminated groundwater could pose. In the early weeks of the disaster, the Japanese government allowed Tepco to dump tens of thousands of metric tons of contaminated water into the Pacific in an emergency move.

The toxic water release was however heavily criticized by neighboring countries as well as local fishermen and the utility has since promised it would not dump irradiated water without the consent of local townships.

"Until we know the exact density and volume of the water that's flowing out, I honestly can't speculate on the impact on the sea," said Mitsuo Uematsu from the Center for International Collaboration, Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute at the University of Tokyo.

"We also should check what the levels are like in the sea water. If it's only inside the port and it's not flowing out into the sea, it may not spread as widely as some fear."

NO OTHER OUTLET FOR WATER

Tepco said it is taking various measures to prevent contaminated water from leaking into the bay near the plant. In an e-mailed statement to Reuters, a company spokesman said Tepco deeply apologized to residents in Fukushima prefecture, the surrounding region and the larger public for causing inconveniences, worries and trouble.

Twenty-one US embassies and consulates closed on Sunday.

The state department in Washington said the extended closures were "out of an abundance of caution", and not a reaction to a new threat.

The UK said its embassy in Yemen would stay closed until the Muslim festival of Eid on Thursday.

The decision to close the embassies comes as the US government battles to defend recently disclosed surveillance programmes that have stirred deep privacy concerns. Security at US diplomatic facilities also remains a concern following last year's attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where the US ambassador and three other Americans were killed.

While details of the threats are unspecified, the BBC's David Willis, in Washington, says members of Congress who have been briefed about the intelligence seem to agree it amounts to one of the most serious in recent years - all pointing to the possibility of a major attack, possibly to coincide with the end this week of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Al-Qaeda

A state department global travel alert, issued on Friday, is in force until the end of August.

The department said the potential for an al-Qaeda-inspired attack was particularly strong in the Middle East and North Africa.

Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has tried to carry out several high-profile attacks in recent years, including one on Christmas Day in 2009 when a man attempted to blow up a trans-Atlantic jet over Detroit, using explosives sewn into his underwear.

Months earlier, the group tried to kill the Saudi intelligence chief with a bomb on the attacker's body.

The UK Foreign Office had earlier announced it would shut its mission in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, until Tuesday.

Meanwhile, US diplomatic missions in Algiers, Kabul and Baghdad are among those which will reopen on Monday, Washington said. But its diplomatic posts in Abu Dhabi, Amman, Cairo, Riyadh, Dhahran, Jeddah, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait, Manama, Muscat, Sanaa and Tripoli will remain closed until Saturday.

The US state department also added African missions in Antananarivo, Bujumbura, Djibouti, Khartoum, Kigali and Port Louis to the list, meaning a total of 19 US embassies will remain closed this week.

Embassies closed on Sunday, a working day in the Muslim world, included Amman, Cairo, Riyadh and Dhaka.

Boeing (BA.N) and Airbus (EAD.PA) have spent billions of dollars building advanced jets capable of flying a third of the way round the world non-stop, but economic change has forced a new adjustment in strategy.

Boeing launched a new version of its Dreamliner at the Paris Airshow in June by chopping 1,800 km from the range of its newest jet and giving it a longer fuselage and more seats.

It says the 787-10 Dreamliner will be its most cost-efficient aircraft yet, optimized for regional operations including Asia.

Within days, Airbus (EAD.PA) pulled from its drawer plans for a new "Regional" version of its A350, as first reported by Reuters.

And after years of enhancing its older A330 to give it more range, it announced it would also offer a Regional version of that plane for short trips. Sources say it will be aimed at the Chinese and Indian domestic markets.

The decisions reflect both a battle between traditional rivals and a broader economic shift. Asia's newly affluent nations are increasingly trading among themselves.

Half the world's traffic growth in the next 20 years will involve Asia and traffic within the region is growing fastest.

Although confidence is wobbling as China's economy slows, Boeing predicts travel within Asia will grow 6.5 percent a year over the next two decades, versus a 5-percent global average.

GROWTH ROUTES

The top three growth routes are in South and Southeast Asia, all with shorter distances than premier jets were designed for.

Regional powerhouse Singapore saw what may have been the first major deal involving the shorter-stride models.

Singapore Airlines bought 30 each of the 787-10 and A350-900 jets in deals worth $17 billion in June and industry sources say these probably included the scaled-down A350 Regional version.

The response to such demand has been radically different.

Boeing has pledged to build a new member of its 787 family by stretching the upcoming 787-9 to add more seats.

The resulting extra load means the 323-seat 787-10's range is automatically shortened but airlines can earn more revenue.

Airbus is adapting its A350 in a different way, by adjusting a purely paper parameter without a physical redesign.