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Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.

Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington.

With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.

That is significant because the N.I.H., a federal agency in Bethesda, Md., underwrites much of the country’s medical research. Many of the nation’s top doctors depend on federal grants to support their work, and attaching fresh conditions to those grants could be a powerful lever for enforcing new ethical guidelines on the universities.

Like many of the universities, N.I.H. appears reluctant to tackle the issue. A spokesman said the agency was committed to maintaining objectivity in science. But he added that in the case of ghostwriting allegations, universities and other institutions that employ researchers are responsible for setting and enforcing their own ethics policies.

“How long does it have to go on before it actually is stopped? One way to stop it would be if the actual authors were punished in some way,” said Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor at the Center for Bioethics of the University of Minnesota. “But the academics who are complicit in it all never seem to be punished at all.”

Coroners and funeral directors in several cities say the number of people seeking government-paid funerals, cremations and burials is spiking. Most counties and states will use public money to cremate or bury people who are too poor to pay for private services.

“People just aren’t in a position to pay $7,000 for a private funeral and burial,” says Lt. David Smith of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, where the number of people seeking county burial has nearly doubled since last year.

The percentage of people in poverty in the USA is climbing, says Gregory Acs, a senior fellow at The Urban Institute. When the recession started at the end of 2007, about 12.5% of the U.S. population was considered impoverished, up from 11.7% in 2001, he says.

Among the counties noting a surge in requests for indigent burials:

* The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office handled 205 indigent deaths in the last six months of 2007. This year, from Jan. 1 to June 30, the office handled 404 indigent deaths — a 97% increase. “It has put a major financial strain on this department,” Smith says. “I need to come up with $12,000 a month in a budget that’s locked up tight as a drum.”

Then in February, the county crematory notified the coroner it was overflowing with natural death cases and couldn’t handle cases from the coroner, who handles accidental deaths, homicides and unidentified people, Smith says. “My body count in my crypt swelled to near capacity,” Smith says, as he sought a crematory to handle the excess corpses.

* Las Vegas has seen a 22% increase in indigent cremations and burials since last year, says Dan Kulin, a spokesman for Clark County, Nev. In the budget year that ended June 30, 2008, the county handled 741 indigent deaths. In the same period ending June this year, the county handled 904 deaths, he says.

“It’s a sign of the times,” Kulin says.

* Kenton County, Ky., is expecting a record year of indigent burials. The 29 indigent burials as of Aug. 13 are more than double last year’s total of 12, says Don Catchen, whose funeral home has the county contract for indigent burials.

Catchen offers a minimal private funeral and cremation for $1,400.

“With the economy being what it is, some of the lesser-income families … are barely surviving and they don’t have any money to pay for even a minimum funeral service,” he says.

The United States incarcerates people at nearly five times the world average. Of those sentenced to state prisons, 82 percent were convicted of nonviolent crimes, according to one study.

California spends $216,000 annually on each inmate in the juvenile justice system. In contrast, it spends only $8,000 on each child attending the troubled Oakland public school system, according to the Urban Strategies Council.

For most of American history, we had incarceration rates similar to those in other countries. Then with the “war on drugs” and the focus on law and order in the 1970s, incarceration rates soared.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Officials said the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune.

Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

Blackwater, which has changed its name, most recently to Xe Services, and is based in North Carolina, in recent years has received millions of dollars in government contracts, growing so large that the Bush administration said it was a necessary part of its war operation in Iraq.

It has also drawn controversy. Blackwater employees hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq were accused of using excessive force on several occasions, including shootings in Baghdad in 2007 in which 17 civilians were killed. Iraqi officials have since refused to give the company an operating license.

Several current and former government officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing details of a still classified program.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined to provide details about the canceled program, but he said that Mr. Panetta’s decision on the assassination program was “clear and straightforward.”

“Director Panetta thought this effort should be briefed to Congress, and he did so,” Mr. Gimigliano said. “He also knew it hadn’t been successful, so he ended it.”

A Xe spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, also declined to give details of the program. But she praised Mr. Panetta for notifying Congress. “It is too easy to contract out work that you don’t want to accept responsibility for,” she said.

The C.I.A. this summer conducted an internal review of the assassination program that recently was presented to the White House and the Congressional intelligence committees. The officials said that the review stated that Mr. Panetta’s predecessors did not believe that they needed to tell Congress because the program was not far enough developed.

The House Intelligence Committee is investigating why lawmakers were never told about the program. According to current and former government officials, former Vice President Dick Cheney told C.I.A. officers in 2002 that the spy agency did not need to inform Congress because the agency already had legal authority to kill Qaeda leaders.

One official familiar with the matter said that Mr. Panetta did not tell lawmakers that he believed that the C.I.A. had broken the law by withholding details about the program from Congress. Rather, the official said, Mr. Panetta said he believed that the program had moved beyond a planning stage and deserved Congressional scrutiny.

“It’s wrong to think this counterterrorism program was confined to briefing slides or doodles on a cafeteria napkin,” the official said. “It went well beyond that.”

Current and former government officials said that the C.I.A.’s efforts to use paramilitary hit teams to kill Qaeda operatives ran into logistical, legal and diplomatic hurdles almost from the outset. These efforts had been run by the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center, which runs operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

In 2002, Blackwater won a classified contract to provide security for the C.I.A. station in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the company maintains other classified contracts with the C.I.A., current and former officials said.

Over the years, Blackwater has hired several former top C.I.A. officials, including Cofer Black, who ran the C.I.A. counterterrorism center immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.

C.I.A. operatives also regularly use the company’s training complex in North Carolina. The complex includes a shooting range used for sniper training.

An executive order signed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 barred the C.I.A. from carrying out assassinations, a direct response to revelations that the C.I.A. had initiated assassination plots against Fidel Castro of Cuba and other foreign politicians.

The Bush administration took the position that killing members of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group that attacked the United States and has pledged to attack it again, was no different from killing enemy soldiers in battle, and that therefore the agency was not constrained by the assassination ban.

But former intelligence officials said that employing private contractors to help hunt Qaeda operatives would pose significant legal and diplomatic risks, and they might not be protected in the same way government employees are.

Some Congressional Democrats have hinted that the program was just one of many that the Bush administration hid from Congressional scrutiny and have used the episode as a justification to delve deeper into other Bush-era counterterrorism programs.

But Republicans have criticized Mr. Panetta’s decision to cancel the program, saying he created a tempest in a teapot.

“I think there was a little more drama and intrigue than was warranted,” said Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Officials said that the C.I.A. program was devised partly as an alternative to missile strikes using drone aircraft, which have accidentally killed civilians and cannot be used in urban areas where some terrorists hide.

Georgia has stepped up efforts to isolate Abkhazia and another breakaway region, South Ossetia, since a five-day war with Russia last August. It has banned economic and commercial activities there without its permission.

A tanker delivering fuel to Abkhazia was detained this week by Georgian authorities, and its Turkish captain remanded in custody. He faces up to 24 years in prison if found guilty of smuggling and violating the ban on unauthorised economic activity.

On Thursday, the Georgian coastguard said it had detained another vessel carrying scrap metal from Abkhazia. It was operating under a Cambodian flag with a Syrian crew.

Coastguard head Besik Shengelia said it was the fourth such seizure this year.

Abkhazia compared Georgian authorities to Somali pirates.

“Under the law in force in Georgia, we don’t even have the right to breathe without permission from Tbilisi,” Abkhazia’s foreign minister, Sergei Shamba, told Russian Interfax.

“We warned Georgia that we can make a proportionate response, take the same kind of actions that the Georgian side allows itself,” he said.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon yesterday announced that the Government would start deploying its first batch of swine-flu vaccine in coming weeks, with an aim to vaccinate as many people as possible to prevent further spread of the virus.

But in a letter sent to Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer Jim Bishop, the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases expresses deep concern about CSL’s use of multi-dose vials for the vaccine and urged the Government to abandon its plan until it had single-dose vials.

The letter, written by the Society’s president, Associate Professor Tom Gottlieb, says multi-dose vials – bottles containing many doses of the vaccine – had been shown on many occasions to transmit infectious diseases, ”resulting in considerable morbidity and mortality”.

To prevent contamination, clinicians must follow stringent infection-control guidelines and use new syringes and needles for every vaccination.

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A potential problem was observed in studies of LAIV as it encounters restrictive temperature in the lung. The viral polymerase function is reduced and virus replication, assembly, and release become impaired [12]. The morphology of the temperature restricted virus was affected and the virus particles contained high levels of heat shock protein. Impairment of the viral replicase is a matter of concern because replicase may create new pandemic strains. Restrictive replication of LAIV at the restrictive temperature occurs in multiple steps in the virus replication cycle [13]. Shedding of LAIV is observed in individuals between 5 to 49 years of age up to 11 days after vaccination, and vaccinated individuals were advised to avoid contact with severely inmunosuppressed individuals for a week after vaccination [14].

Russia has arrested eight people on suspicion of hijacking the Arctic Sea off the Swedish coast and sailing it to the Atlantic Ocean, ending weeks of silence about the fate of a ship which has intrigued European maritime authorities.

Limited information from Russian officials has failed to satisfy sceptics who voiced doubts about whether the piracy actually took place or was a convenient cover story to conceal a possible secret cargo of arms or nuclear material.

“The crew members have already confirmed that the captors demanded a ransom and threatened to blow up the vessel if their orders were not obeyed,” Interfax quoted a Russian defence ministry spokesman as saying.

“The crew members also claim that the people who seized the Arctic Sea were armed and got rid of their weapons when the [Russian navy ship] Ladny ordered the dry cargo carrier’s crew to stop the vessel,” he said.

Climbing gear, flares and a high-speed inflatable boat supposedly used in the hijack were found aboard the Arctic Sea, the spokesman said.

The agencies did not say what ransom was demanded.

The Maltese-registered, Russian-crewed vessel and its $1.3 million cargo of timber disappeared from radar screens three weeks ago, prompting speculation ranging from an attack by an organised crime gang to a top-secret spy mission.

The Malta Maritime Authority said on Tuesday, without elaborating, that the Arctic Sea had “never really disappeared”, a comment which increased speculation that security services might have been involved in the affair.

Russia has said the eight detainees were citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Russia who on July 24 boarded the ship, forced the crew to change route and turned off its navigation equipment.

After heading through the English Channel in late July, radio contact was lost and the 4,000-tonne ship did not deliver its cargo to the Algerian port of Bejaia on August 4.

The Russian navy found the missing ship on Monday in the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Verde.

The official version of events was questioned by Yulia Latynina, a leading Russian opposition journalist and commentator.

But instead of students handing over cash, some placed their index fingers on small scanners and walked away with their lunches.

“I’m just really glad I don’t have to remember a number every day or have a card or something,” said 14-year-old Korey Gallaher. “All you have to do is put your finger down and go.”

With the start of the new school year well under way at the high school, a new lunch system is being piloted that will use student fingerprints instead of cards or personal identification numbers to access lunch accounts.

“As long as there is money in my account, I won’t have to worry about anything,” said 14-year-old Stephanie Nieves. “It’s going to make lunch that much easier.”

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“When it’s really up and running it will make things go a lot smoother and faster,” said Bill Jett, general manager of Sodexo, the district’s food service provider.

At a cost of roughly $91,000, Sodexo will pick up the tab to implement the program districtwide with the hope of recouping expenses over the next five years as more parents sign their children up for free or reduced lunches. The added advantage of the biometrics system is no one knows who receives free or reduced lunch or who has to pay for their meals.

There are still a few kinks to work out with the system as the small scanners located near all cash registers failed to recognize some fingerprints, prompting students to revert back to the old system of keying in personal identification codes.

Still, for those who used the new system, it was pretty cool.

“The technology is already out there for us to use biometrics in a number of ways,” said Principal Darren Conley. “In the future, we are looking at adding it to the media center for signing materials out or in the classrooms for attendance.”

The marketing experiment – which is being conducted by CBS, the US broadcaster, and Pepsi, the soft drinks maker – recalls the fantasy newspapers of the Harry Potter films and works much like a singing greetings card, with the video starting once a reader turns the appropriate page.

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