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Yet several federal entities and independent companies have found the results of experiments convincing enough to provide some small-scale funding to a select few labs.

Department of Defense agencies that have provided funding, confirmed results, or positively-reviewed cold fusion research include:

Naval Research Laboratory
Defense Threat Reduction Agency DTRA
Defense Intelligence Agency DIA
Defense Advanced Research Agency DARPA
Army Research Lab ARL

Fake posters can “poison” debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.

Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate.

The researchers say there are reliable ways to spot fakes and urge websites to do more to police users.

The researchers from Canada and China say paying people to post comments is an “interesting strategy in business marketing” but it is not a benign activity.

The attack on a military checkpoint in northwest Pakistan also wounded at least a dozen soldiers.

A spokesman for the NATO-led alliance in Afghanistan confirmed on Saturday that it was “highly likely” the alliance’s aircraft killed Pakistani soldiers.

The incident before dawn Saturday was a major blow to already strained relations between Islamabad and U.S.-led forces fighting in Afghanistan. It will add to perceptions in Pakistan that the American presence in the region is malevolent, and further fuel resentment toward the weak government in Islamabad for its cooperation with Washington.

It comes a little more than a year after a similar but less deadly strike near the Afghan border in which U.S. helicopters accidentally killed two Pakistani whom the pilots mistook for insurgents. Pakistan responded by closing the Torkham border crossing to NATO supplies for 10 days until the U.S. apologized.

On Saturday, Pakistan went further, closing both of the country’s border crossings into landlocked Afghanistan. NATO trucks about 30 percent of the non-lethal supplies used by its Afghan-based forces through Pakistan. A short stoppage will have no effect on the war effort, but serves as a reminder of the leverage Pakistan has over the United States from the supply routes running through its territory.

The Government says 11 per cent of five-year-olds are not immunised and has announced a shake-up of the system which will take effect from July 1 next year.

Under the changes, families who refuse vaccinations face losing up to $2,100 per child in benefits.

The Guardian has collected video footage as well as witness accounts from doctors and victims who have offered strong evidence that at least two other crowd control gases have been used on demonstrators in addition to CS gas.

Suspicion has fallen on two other agents: CN gas, which was the crowd control gas used by the US before CS was brought into use; and CR gas.

Some protesters report having seen canisters marked with the letters “CR” – although the Guardian has not been able to confirm this independently.

Both gases can be more dangerous than CS and can cause unconsciousness and seizures in certain circumstances.

Concern began to emerge over the use of more powerful incapacitating agents after reports of gassed protesters falling unconscious and having attacks of jerking spasms.

Those who have experienced the more powerful gas have described it as smelling different and causing an unusual burning sensation on the skin. Others have complained of rashes.

On Tuesday afternoon al-Jazeera reported that some of the recent deaths in Cairo were believed to have been caused by gas asphyxiation.

In one field clinic, set up in a mosque near Tahrir Square, a Guardian videographer recorded footage of a young man brought in insensible and convulsing, whose symptoms were typical of those seen in recent days in Cairo.

A doctor treating him described both the symptoms and the gases used.

“We have been attacked with four different kinds of gas bombs,” said Dr Ahmad Sa’ad. “I have never seen these ones before because the patients come in with convulsions. I’ve never seen patients like that before. You can see it yourself. You can be 100 metres away from the gas bombs [and it will still affect you].”

Similar reactions were reported earlier this year in Yemen where demonstrators also suffered convulsions after being hit with old stocks of CN gas held by the regime.

Talking Points Memo acquired the letter and published it earlier today. “Pimentel’s Internet activity — both his spreading of bomb-making instructions links and his hate-filled writings — were hosted by Google” writes Lieberman, going on to add that, unlike YouTube, “Blogger’s Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content nor does it provide a ‘flag’ feature for such content.”

The world’s highest-rated private lender will seek 20 billion euros ($27 billion) to 25 billion euros from senior bond offerings in 2012, according to Michael Gower, the head of long- term funding at Utrecht-based Rabobank. Investors will be denied AAA rated securities that returned 3.3 percent this year, more than double the average for securities in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s EMU Corporates, Banking index.

“We’ve been extremely conservative by raising a significant amount of capital over a number of years, just to be prepared for what was a highly unlikely scenario that we’re now living in,” Gower said in an interview. “The bank doesn’t need to borrow until 2013 so there’s no pressure.”

In September, one scientist made a stunning announcement. At a flu conference held in Malta, he said he’d done a lab experiment that resulted in bird flu virus becoming highly contagious between ferrets — the animal model used to study human flu infection. It seemed that just five mutations did the trick.

News of the results raised red flags for Dr. Thomas Inglesby, a bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“It’s just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it’s a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it,” says Inglesby.

No science journal has published the information yet. And Inglesby hopes none of them do.

Biology research usually has a culture of openness. Scientists report their methods and results so others can repeat their work and learn from it.

Inglesby agrees that’s the way to go the vast majority of the time. But not this time. “There are some cases that I think are worth an exception to that otherwise very important scientific principle,” he says. “I can only imagine that the process of deliberating about the publication of these findings is quite serious.”

A British company called Gamma International marketed hacking software to governments that exploited the vulnerability via a bogus update to iTunes, Apple’s media player, which is installed on more than 250 million machines worldwide.

The hacking software, FinFisher, is used to spy on intelligence targets’ computers. It is known to be used by British agencies and earlier this year records were discovered in abandoned offices of that showed it had been offered to Egypt’s feared secret police.

Apple was informed about the relevant flaw in iTunes in 2008, according to Brian Krebs, a security writer, but did not patch the software until earlier this month, a delay of more than three years.

“A prominent security researcher warned Apple about this dangerous vulnerability in mid-2008, yet the company waited more than 1,200 days to fix the flaw,” he said in a blog post.