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It also emerged that to shed its sullied reputation and win contracting business in Afghanistan, Blackwater created what one senator called a shell company. Senators said that company, Paravant, deceived US officials into thinking Blackwater was not involved even as it laid claim to Blackwater’s past performance to establish a track record. “They made representations here that are wildly false,” said Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat. “Everyone knew in the field it was Blackwater trying to get rid of a negative name.”

Steven Ograyensek, a US army contracting officer who testified, said: “There is no indication that they were part of Blackwater.”

Blackwater has come under intense scrutiny in recent years for its employees’ involvement in a 2007 Baghdad shooting in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed, and other allegations. The company has since sought to rebrand itself as Xe, and in order to win the training contract in Afghanistan, created a firm called Paravant.

The experiment is the first to show such complete effects of atrazine, which had been known to disrupt hormones and which is one of the chief suspects in the decline of amphibians such as frogs around the world.

“Atrazine-exposed males were both demasculinized (chemically castrated) and completely feminized as adults,” Tyrone Hayes of the University of California Berkeley and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The chemical had been shown to disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features — termed hermaphroditism. This study of 40 male frogs shows the process can go even further, Hayes said.

“Before, we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites. Now, we have clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males,” Hayes said in a statement.

“Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution.”

Syngenta AG (SYNN.VX), one of several companies that makes atrazine, questioned the design of the study and said Hayes has a history of offering flawed studies for publication.

“For 50 years, atrazine has been used safely in agriculture with no effect to amphibians, fish, birds and other wildlife at concentrations found in the environment — a fact that is supported by numerous scientific studies,” the company said in a statement.

The Proceedings is a peer-reviewed journal, meaning that papers it publishes have been screened for obvious flaws.

EFFECTS ON HUMANS?

Whether the effects translate to humans is far from clear. Frogs have thin skin that can absorb chemicals easily and they literally bathe in the polluted water.

The European Union banned atrazine in 2004. The finding may add pressure to the United States to more closely regulate the chemical, used widely in agriculture.

“Approximately 80 million pounds (36,000 tonnes) are applied annually in the United States alone, and atrazine is the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water,” the researchers wrote.

“In fact, more than a half million pounds (220 tonnes) of atrazine are precipitated in rainfall each year in the United States.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in October it was reviewing the health impacts of atrazine.

Hayes and colleagues studied 40 African clawed frogs, keeping them in water contaminated with 2.5 ppb (parts per billion) of atrazine. The EPA’s current drinking water standard is 3 ppb.

“Ten percent of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs,” the researchers wrote.

“Regardless of the mechanism, the impacts of atrazine on amphibians and on wildlife in general are potentially devastating,” they wrote.

The U.K. currency weakened against all 16 of its most- active counterparts after polls showed Britain may have its first minority government since 1974 and ahead of a report forecast to show that a recovery in consumer confidence stalled in February. The Australian dollar traded near the strongest in a week versus the greenback after the Reserve Bank of Australia raised its benchmark interest rate to 4 percent.

“Concerns over politics and the debt situation in the U.K. are growing,” said Toshiya Yamauchi, manager of foreign- exchange margin trading at Ueda Harlow Ltd. in Tokyo. “If forthcoming data confirms the deterioration in sentiment, the pound may extend its decline.”

The pound declined to $1.4928 as of 12:32 p.m. in Tokyo from $1.4991 in New York yesterday when it dropped to $1.4784, the lowest level since May 1. It was at 90.64 pence per euro from 90.47 yesterday after reaching 91.50, the weakest since Dec. 1. Sterling traded at 60.26 pence against the Australian dollar from 60.12 yesterday, when it reached 60.46, the weakest since March 1985.

The U.K. currency yesterday had its biggest drop against the dollar since Feb. 2, 2009, as a poll showed the opposition Conservative Party has the smallest lead over the Labour Party in more than two years. Elections must be held by June. The pound has tumbled by 7.6 percent against the dollar and 2.3 percent versus the euro this year.

U.K. Sentiment

U.S. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is selling a record amount of debt to finance stimulus measures introduced to help the economy recover from its longest recession on record. In December, the government increased gilt sales planned for the fiscal year ending this month to 225.1 billion pounds ($337 billion), up from 220 billion pounds announced in April.

“A hung parliament in the U.K. is clearly bearish because the market would not expect them to press ahead with fiscal measures,” said Thomas Harr, a senior currency strategist at Standard Chartered Plc in Singapore, in a Bloomberg News interview. “If this continues and we end up in a hung parliament, the sterling could fall more.”

The Nationwide Building Society’s index of U.K. consumer sentiment stood at 73 in February, unchanged from the previous month, according to a Bloomberg News survey before the release of the survey from tomorrow.

Australia’s currency traded at 90.06 U.S. cents from 90.09 cents after reaching 90.16 cents, the most since Feb. 23.

It’s illegal to keep bees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or any of the five boroughs, but Paska is one of a growing number of New Yorkers doing it anyway. The New York City Beekeepers Association, a hobbyist group started a few years ago to provide new beekeepers with training and supplies, already has 180 members. New York City honey is showing up at area farmers’ markets and mainstream specialty food retailers. Paska, who does marketing and project management for a children’s clothing company, gives the honey to friends and sells it at a local market. Over the past few months, she has been contacted by scores of fellow Brooklynites wanting to see her hives and learn how to get started.

Congress created the 20-member panel in 2006 to analyze the Defense Department’s four-year plan, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. Lawmakers called for the committee to provide an independent “alternate view” of the Pentagon’s plan, which shapes future military policy and spending on weapons and other needs.

A dozen of the unpaid panelists were appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and eight by the top Republican and Democrat members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Eleven work for defense contractors as employees, consultants or board directors, records show.

In this back-breaking way, a 31-member crew harvested 30,000 heads of Yuma, Arizona, iceberg lettuce one day in early 2008. It’s one of the stints Gabriel Thompson undertakes for “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.” He also clocks in at a poultry plant, a wholesale florist operation and as a restaurant delivery man.

In “Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers,” Dick J. Reavis looks at the labor hall, where workers go each morning in the hope of “catching out” a job ticket for a few hours of low-level, low-paying toil.

The two journalists bring back from the margins reports of exploitation, injury, injustice and numbed resignation. It can be eye-opening to see what the body and mind will endure, yet it isn’t pleasant reading, not least because neither writer holds out much hope of better prospects.

Thompson, who speaks Spanish and spent three years reporting on Latino immigrants before researching his book, targets industries that depend on their labor. The lettuce fields are staffed by Dole Food Co., which pays him $8.37 an hour and, he says, runs “a pretty fair program.”

Dying at 49

Almost all the workers he meets are legal, living locally or commuting across the Mexican border each day. He finds no “glaring abuses” of workers. Yet few can escape the fields, or reach retirement age in them. Life expectancy is 49.

Workers at the poultry plant, in Russellville, Alabama, are black, white and Latino and make between $8 and $10 an hour depending on attendance and punctuality. The work is stupefyingly dull, smelly, painful and dangerous. Jobs range from “neck breaker and oil sack cutter to giblet harvester and lung vacuumer.” One man puts lids on boxes for an entire shift.

Mr Dimon told investors at the Wall Street bank’s annual meeting that “there could be contagion” if a state the size of California, the biggest of the United States, had problems making debt repayments. “Greece itself would not be an issue for this company, nor would any other country,” said Mr Dimon. “We don’t really foresee the European Union coming apart.” The senior banker said that JP Morgan Chase and other US rivals are largely immune from the European debt crisis, as the risks have largely been hedged.

California however poses more of a risk, given the state’s $20bn (£13.1bn) budget deficit, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is desperately trying to reduce.

Earlier this week, the state’s legislature passed bills that will cut the deficit by $2.8bn through budget cuts and other measures. However the former Hollywood film star turned politician is looking for $8.9bn of cuts over the next 16 months, and is also hoping for as much as $7bn of handouts from the federal government.

Earlier this week, John Chiang, the state’s controller, said that if a workable plan to reduce the deficit and increase cash levels is not reached soon, he will have to return to issuing IOU’s, forcing state workers to take additional unpaid leave and potentially freezing spending.

Last summer, California issued $3bn of IOU’s to creditors including residents owed tax refunds as a way of staving off a cash crisis.

Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama’s signature Saturday.

The act, which was adopted in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, expands the government’s ability to monitor Americans in the name of national security.

Three sections of the Patriot Act that stay in force will:

-Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

-Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

-Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

Obama’s signature comes after the House voted 315 to 97 Thursday to extend the measure.

The decision, which comes at a time of growing concern over cyber-security, applies only to the military’s non-classified network.

But it could mean big changes for large portions of the armed forces, including the Marines, which had selectively banned social media on work computers.

The Department of Defense also had bans in place since 2007 on accessing certain bandwidth-gobbling Web sites like YouTube on its network.

“The purpose of the policy is to recognize that we need to take advantage of these Internet-based capabilities. These Web 2.0 tools need to be part of what we use,” David Wennergren, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, told Reuters.

“And what we had were inconsistent approaches. Some websites were blocked and some commands were blocking things.”

Social media are increasingly important for the U.S. military. Admiral Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the top U.S. military officer, has a Twitter feed with more than 16,000 followers.

U.S. Southern Command offered operational updates via Twitter on relief activities in Haiti.

REACHING OUT TO YOUNG SOLDIERS

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, 66, has said that he wants to use social networking to help the Pentagon interact with U.S. military members, many of whom are in their early 20s.

But opponents have cited the risks of information leaks, of opening gateways to hackers, along with a potential overload of precious bandwidth on the Defense Department’s network.

The new policy says commanders will still need to defend against cyber-attacks and block access to online pornography, gambling and sites promoting “hate-crime related activities.”

It also allows commanders to temporarily limit Internet access if the bandwidth is overwhelmed, a key caveat for U.S. forces fighting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or stationed in remote, rugged places around the globe.

Wennergren said commanders still had authority to limit access to safeguard missions, perhaps banning use of social media ahead of a major offensive. The Defense Department will also be monitoring use of its network.

“There are two imperatives. One is the ability to share information. The other is about security — we need to be good at both,” he said.

Training people so they know what can and cannot be disclosed on the Internet is a more effective policy than simply banning use of social media on work computers, he said.

“You can’t just have the policy be that you’re going to block access to MySpace. Because there are 10,000 ways people could still compromise a mission — by making a phone call, or sending an email,” Wennergren said.