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Holiday snapshots and family details about the newly appointed head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency have been removed from a Facebook page after a newspaper told the government about them.

Pictures from the social networking Web site published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper show John Sawers posing with his children, wearing a Santa hat and playing Frisbee on a beach.

The paper said the information was posted by Sawers’ wife on her Facebook page. It included vacation photos, details about the couple’s three children and the location of their London home.

Shelley Sawers’ page has been removed from the site, although a cached page can still be viewed that shows a picture of the spy chief’s wife.

Some politicians called the details a security lapse — but others said they revealed nothing but a few mildly embarrassing domestic details.

“It’s not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks,” said Foreign Secretary David Miliband. “For goodness’ sake, let’s grow up.”

The Foreign Office would not comment further on the case.

But Conservative lawmaker Patrick Mercer, who heads Parliament’s counterterrorism subcommittee, said the revelations left Sawers open “to criticism and blackmail.”

John Sawers, 53, was named last month as the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency. A former spy, diplomat and foreign policy adviser to ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, he is currently Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations.

NSA budgeting documents also indicate that the design of the 1-million-square-foot center should be completed by February, with building to begin in June on a project that could mean thousands of construction jobs for a state that, like many others, has been stuck in a building lull.

President Barack Obama last week signed a spending bill that included $181 million for preparatory construction of the Camp Williams facility and tentatively agreed to two future phases of construction that could cost $800 million each.

The secretive agency released a statement Thursday acknowledging the selection of Camp Williams as a site for the new center and describing it as “a specialized facility that houses computer systems and supporting equipment.”

Budget documents provide a more detailed picture of the facility and its mission. The supercomputers in the center will be part of the NSA’s signal intelligence program, which seeks to “gain a decisive information advantage for the nation and our allies under all circumstances” according to the documents.

The agency is set up to collect intelligence on foreign threats, but it has been accused of also participating in the unwarranted monitoring of the communications of U.S. citizens.

A similar center is being constructed in San Antonio, Texas, and NSA documents indicate that the agency is also expanding its existing intelligence collection facilities in North Yorkshire, England, and Fort Meade, Md. The agency has been seeking to decentralize its operations in an effort to protect assets and find areas with the capacity to satiate the energy appetites of its enormous computer caches.

To that end, the initial phase of the project is expected to include more than $52 million in preparatory electrical work — much of that is likely to be spent connecting two large power corridors that run through Camp Williams to the construction site near the base airstrip. The next phases of the project will include $340 million in electrical work, according to the documents.

About $70 million has been budgeted for security, including vehicle inspection facilities, fencing, surveillance and separate visitor control centers for construction and technical personnel.

All NSA security measures will be in addition to security that the Utah National Guard already provides for the 28,000-acre Camp Williams facility.

“Physical and technical security of the construction site will be assured,” the budget documents promise.

While the project — and the ongoing operation of the center — will bring millions of dollars into the state, the Utah Guard doesn’t stand to make a penny.

Guard spokesman Hank McIntire said the state, which manages Camp Williams, would act as “a benevolent landlord.”

Citizens Education Project director Steve Erickson, who advocates for greater military oversight, was wary.

“If we’re going to be landlords,” he said, “we should act like a good landlord and have some rules that apply to the tenants to make sure they’re behaving.”

Regrettably, he said, that’s not likely to happen when dealing with one of the most secretive government agencies in the world.

“The major part of Indian reserves is in dollars — that is something that’s a problem for us,” Tendulkar, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, said in an interview yesterday in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he was attending an economic conference.

Singh is preparing to join leaders from the Group of Eight industrialized nations — the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — at a summit in Italy next week which is due to tackle the global economy. China and Brazil will also send representative to the summit.

As the talks have neared, China and Russia have stepped up calls for a rethink of how global currency reserves are composed and managed, underlining a power shift to emerging markets from the developed nations that spawned the financial crisis.

“There should be a system to maintain the stability of the major reserve currencies,” Former Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan said in a speech in Beijing yesterday, highlighting China’s concerns about a global financial system dominated by the dollar.

In 2008, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate awarded a $6.2 million contract to Thales Communications to demonstrate the first-ever portable radio prototype that lets emergency responders-police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel and others-communicate with partner agencies, regardless of the radio band they operate on. This is the final pilot in a three-part test, DHS said.

Currently radios only operate within a specific frequency band; subsequently, responders are often unable to communicate with other agencies and support units that operate in different radio frequencies. Comparable in size and weight to existing portable radios with similar features, multi-band radio would provide users with much-improved incident communications capabilities, the DHS stated.

Thales Liberty multiband mobile radio received US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) certification in April. The Liberty radio is made in the U.S. and is the first multiband, software-defined LMR designed specifically for government agencies and first responders, the company said.

In the most recent attempt by activists to break a two-year blockade of Gaza, a group called the Free Gaza Movement sent the ship loaded with humanitarian supplies and 21 activists and crew members from Cyprus.

The Israeli navy intercepted the ship Tuesday after it ignored repeated messages saying it would not be allowed to enter Gaza waters and ordering it to turn back.

Among those being held Friday were former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, said Sandra Law, mother of detained British activist Alex Harrison.

Law, speaking from her London home, said her daughter was being held with other women from the group at Ramle jail, near Ben-Gurion Airport. She said she spoke briefly with her daughter Friday.

“The conditions (in the jail) aren’t great, but they’re certainly not as bad as they could be,” Law said. “They’re in good spirits.”

She said the planned deportation of the activists may have been delayed by their refusal to sign legal documents in Hebrew, which they do not understand.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said those who signed an undertaking to return home voluntarily could be released immediately and repatriated on the first available flight.

The announcement by a top Kremlin aide came ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow next week, when the deal is expected to be signed during a summit aimed at improving the nations’ strained relations.

Russia’s concession on arms shipments also came as the Obama administration is shifting the U.S. military’s focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, where a massive American offensive is currently under way in Taliban-controlled areas of Helmand province.

Russia has been allowing the United States to ship non-lethal supplies across its territory for operations in Afghanistan, and Kremlin officials had suggested further cooperation was likely.

Kremlin foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko told reporters Friday that the expected deal would enable the U.S. to ship lethal cargo and would include shipments by air and land.

He said it was unclear if U.S. soldiers or other personnel would be permitted to travel through Russian territory or airspace.

“They haven’t asked us for it,” he said.

PVM Oil Associates, the world’s largest over-the-counter oil brokerage, said on Thursday it had been the “victim of unauthorised trading”. The privately owned company said that as a result of the unauthorised trades it had been forced to close substantial volumes of futures contracts at a loss.

London-based PVM said it had informed the Financial Services Authority, the UK regulator. But officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the US regulator, claimed they had been kept in the dark for several hours in spite of an agreement between the watchdogs last year to exchange such market-sensitive information spontaneously.

Oil traders in London and New York said the “unauthorised trading” explained the exceptional spike in business activity and prices in the early hours of Tuesday that some initially thought must have been caused by a geopolitical event. “Trading volumes rose overnight and prices jumped more than $2 a barrel without apparent justification,” a senior oil trader in New York said.

Prices rose in one hour from $71 to $73.5, the highest level for the year, according to Reuters data. In total, futures contracts for more than 16m barrels of oil changed hands in that hour – equivalent to double the daily production of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, and far more than the traditional 500,000 barrels for that time of the day.

Traders said the broker implicated had allegedly accounted for at least half of the unusual activity, with the rest the result of others chasing the rally. Oil prices on Thursday fell to $66.5 a barrel, down almost 10 per cent from Tuesday’s peak.

The Financial Times has identified the PVM broker as Steve Perkins. PVM declined to comment and Mr Perkins could not be reached. Fellow traders said Mr Perkins was considered an experienced broker, well-regarded in the market.

The payroll decline was more than forecast and followed a 322,000 drop in May, according to Labor Department figures released today in Washington. The jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent, the highest since August 1983, from 9.4 percent.

Unemployment is projected to keep rising for the rest of the year just as the income boost from the stimulus package fades, undermining prospects for a sustained rebound in household purchases, analysts said. As companies from General Motors Corp. to Kimberly-Clark Corp. cut costs, the lack of jobs will restrain growth.

Seven banks were shut down by authorities Thursday, pushing the tally of failed banks for 2009 to 52, more than doubling the failures in 2008.

Six regional banks in Illinois and one in Texas closed their doors, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Twelve banks in Illinois have failed this year. Thursday’s failure in Texas was the first for the state in 2009.

Last year, 25 banks failed in the United States.

Local banks have been hard hit as plummeting home values devalued mortgage-backed assets and rising unemployment rates caused an increasing number of consumers to default on their loans.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events — a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth.