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The lawsuit was filed last Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware and accuses Carrier IQ, three wireless carriers, and four handset makers of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, the Stored Electronic Communications Act, and the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The complaint was filed on behalf of four individuals, who are described in court papers as owners of mobile handsets with Carrier IQ software on them. Those named in the lawsuit besides Apple and Carrier IQ, are AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, HTC, Samsung and Motorola. All of these companies have admitted that their handsets include Carrier IQ software.

The carriers have insisted that the software is being used only for network diagnostics purposes while the handset makers have claimed that they integrated Carrier IQ in their devices only because the carriers specifically asked them to.

On Monday, President Dmitry Medvedev hailed the vote as “fair, honest and democratic” as official results revealed that the ruling United Russia party had lost a total of 77 seats in the State Duma, barely hanging on to its majority.

Although the results were largely interpreted as a sign of Putin and his party’s waning popularity, the prime minister – who hopes to resume his role at the helm of the country in Russia’s 2012 presidential elections – dismissed the poll’s significance, noting that United Russia still had enough of a majority to pass most legislation without seeking outside support.

Yet many who participated in Sunday’s elections claim support for Putin was grossly inflated by election fraud at all levels of the vote. These allegations were later backed up by European election monitors, who said the vote count was “characterized by frequent procedural violations and instances of apparent manipulation, including several serious indications of ballot box stuffing”.

John McMillan, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, told the Montgomery Advertiser on Thursday that inmate labor through the state’s work-release program offers a short-term solution to the sudden labor shortage that has hit Alabama since enforcement of its illegal immigration law kicked in.

Some farmers have said the state’s new law has driven away Hispanic migrant farm workers — and without another potential labor source, they say produce may have to be left to rot in the fields.

“We are optimistic that by Monday, we will have some help for farmers,” McMillan said.

“We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,” said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library’s national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. “The archives don’t contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there.”

Lefurgy joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Amy Morris Tuesday morning to talk about the library’s digital mission.

Using new technical processes it has developed, Twitter is moving a large quantity of electronic data from one electronic source to another. “They’ve had to do some pretty nifty experimentation and invention to develop the tools and a process to be able to move all of that data over to us,” Lefurgy said.

The Library of Congress has long been the repository of important, historical documents and the Twitter library, as a whole, is something historic in itself.

“We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it’s a unique record of our time,” Lefurgy said. “It’s also a unique way of communication. It’s not so much that people are going to be interested in what you or I had for lunch, which some people like to say on Twitter.”

Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.

Thousands of police and interior troops are on alert in Moscow, after one of the biggest opposition rallies in the city centre for years.

Police made 300 arrests as protesters chanted “Russia without Putin”.

Among those held was Alexei Navalny, a top anti-corruption campaigner and fierce critic of Mr Putin.

A counter-demonstration by Putin supporters was held beside Red Square on Tuesday amid reports that opposition supporters were planning a new protest.

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Interior ministry spokesman Oleg Yelnikov told AFP news agency that “as many [troops] as required” would police Moscow.

He said security forces would remain on a “heightened regime” of alert until all the votes in the election were counted, adding that some 11,500 interior ministry troops would ensure order across the country.

At a hearing in a New Orleans’ court, BP said Halliburton had “intentionally” destroyed test results on its cement product used at the Macondo well.

The case arose from an episode in 2006 at a mall in Beaver Creek, Colo. A Secret Service agent said he heard Steven Howards say into a cellphone that he planned to ask Mr. Cheney “how many kids he’s killed today.” Mr. Howards later approached Mr. Cheney and said the administration’s “policies in Iraq are disgusting.” Mr. Howards then touched Mr. Cheney on the shoulder in a gesture variously described as an open-handed pat, a slap and a strike that caused the vice president’s shoulder to dip.

Confronted by the Secret Service, Mr. Howards denied touching Mr. Cheney and said, “If you don’t want other people sharing their opinions, you should have him avoid public places.” Agents arrested Mr. Howards for assault and turned him over to local authorities. He was charged with harassment under state law, but those charges were later dropped.

We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.

Benjamin Carlson at The Daily reports on a little known endeavor called the “1033 Program” that gave more than $500 million of military gear to US police in 2011 alone.

The euro area’s six AAA rated countries are among the nations to be placed on a negative outlook, and their credit ratings may be cut depending on the result of a summit of European Union leaders on Dec. 9, S&P said today in a statement. The euro reversed its gains and U.S. Treasuries rose earlier today after the Financial Times reported that the credit-ranking firm planned to reduce six AAA outlooks.