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The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.

Authorities claim that the alleged victims received £1-2 to be tested with what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine but, according to investigators, was actually an anti bird-flu drug.

The director of a Grudziadz homeless centre, Mieczyslaw Waclawski, told a Polish newspaper that last year, 21 people from his centre died, a figure well above the average of about eight.

Although authorities have yet to prove a direct link between the deaths and the activities of the medical staff, Poland’s health minister, Ewa Kopacz, has said that the doctors and nurses involved should not return to their profession.

“It is in the interests of all doctors that those who are responsible for this are punished,” the minister added.

Investigators are also probing the possibility that the medical staff may have also have deceived the pharmaceutical companies that commissioned the trials.

The suspects said that the all those involved knew that the trial involved an anti-H5N1 drug and willingly participated.

The decision, handed down by U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton on Wednesday, is part of an ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit that Viacom Inc., the entertainment group that owns Comedy Central, VH1, Nickelodeon, among others, filed last year against Google, which owns YouTube. The suit says YouTube hasn’t done enough to remove copyrighted material and is making money off that material.

Viacom demanded to review all the logging information to prove that copyrighted clips are more popular than amateur videos on the site. The logging data includes how often and how much time users spend watching videos, their login ID information and Internet Protocol addresses, the unique identification assigned to individual computers and devices.

The case, and this ruling, could have wide implications for Internet content and user behavior. The sharing of copyrighted materials online, both in music and video, has become commonplace in recent years, creating tension between copyright holders who believe they should control their material and Internet users who wish to share and manipulate such content in a variety of ways.

Today, Google requested that the judge reconsider the ruling.

“We see no reason why Viacom and the other plaintiffs seek or require such information,” Google said in a letter filed with the court. “Given plaintiffs’ stated reason for seeking information from the logging database … potentially personal identifiable information should be irrelevant.”

Google counsel Catherine Lacavera expanded on that point in an e-mailed statement: “We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history. We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

Viacom officials said that it has not asked for personally identifiable information of any user and that all the data will be handled by its advisers confidentially and used only to prove its case against Google.

“YouTube and Google have put us in this position by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and profiting from copyright infringement,” the company said in a statement.

YouTube is the leading destination for watching video online, accounting for more than 75 percent of all U.S. visits in May, according to a recent Hitwise report. To fulfill the judge’s orders, Google and YouTube will have to hand over 12 terabytes of information, a daunting task.

This week’s ruling could threaten the privacy rights of the hundreds of millions of people who use the site, experts said.

“It’s breaking the user’s trust,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrester Research. “When users were watching these streaming videos on YouTube, they did not expect that information to be passed along.”

Citing the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, Google argued that “the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns.”

“The court’s order grants Viacom’s request and erroneously ignores the protections of the (act), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users,” Kurt Opsahl, senior attorney the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog posting. “As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection.”

Art Neil, an attorney for New Media Rights, a non-profit consumer group, agreed.

“It’s disturbing because there is a chilling effect for the online content,” Neil said. “When big companies find ways to go after people, they use it beyond what the law allows them to do in terms of enforcing.”

The judge’s ruling could pose concerns for other sites, too.

“If Viacom wins this lawsuit, then there’s going to be others who will step up and ask for this data” from YouTube and other companies – perhaps even Apple and its iTunes store, Owyang said.

Google has maintained that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a law passed by Congress to encourage Internet development, protects YouTube in the Viacom lawsuit and has allowed people to share ideas by uploading videos.

The deaths of Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, both aged 23, came as a massive shock to their families and fellow students at the Polytech in Clermont-Ferrand, central France, where both studied bio-engineering and where Mr Bonomo had recently been student president.

The horrific nature of the attack against them shocked even experienced detectives. “I have never seen injuries inflicted to bodies like this before,” Detective Chief Inspector Mick Duthie told a press conference at Scotland Yard.

Mr Duthie told The Times that the two men had been playing a computer game before the attack in the flat at Sterling Gardens, New Cross, which had been rented by Mr Bonomo.

Bound up by their attacker or attackers, they received multiple stab wounds in the head, neck, back and torso.

Mr Bonomo was stabbed 196 times, Mr Duthie said. Almost 100 of those wounds were inflicted to his back after his death. Mr Ferez was stabbed 47 times.

The two were talented and committed students on a three-month research placement at Imperial College, London, who had impressed colleagues with their maturity. They were enrolled on the university’s research opportunities programme, which allows students who have not yet graduated from their Masters degrees to take part in research.

Led by Marcelo Ebrard, the city’s leftwing mayor, the local governmenthas decided to expand a “backyard agriculture programme” launched last year to encourage the capital’s residents to use all available space to grow crops.

“We want to make people realise that they can use their gardens, yards and roof terraces to grow food,” says Adolfo López Villanueva, the programme’s director. “With the climate we have in Mexico City you can get between two and three harvests a year and that would help families keep costs down.”

The programme was launched last year. But the spiralling cost of food has given new impetus to plans for its expansion and this year officials have decided to increase its scope by at least 50 per cent.

Together with agronomists from a local university, the city’s government gives families technical support and agricultural supplies to get their vegetable gardens going. Among the crops available are carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and chillies.

“We get them to provide the land and the labour and we provide everything else,” said Mr López Villanueva.

A parallel project, the urban agriculture programme, focuses on communities, encouraging them to make communal land available for more ambitious crops such as corn, a Mexican staple, and fruit. Mr López Villanueva said the target was to involve about 200,000 city residents in the medium term.

Both programmes were launched last year in the hope that adding a dose of agriculture could improve the city’s notoriously poor air quality.

But this year’s global surge in commodity and grain prices has added to the interest in the programmes. In the past 12 months alone, food costs have increased by about 8 per cent in Mexico compared with less than 5 per cent for the overall consumer price index.

The jump has hit the poorest hardest because they spend a larger proportion of their total income on food. That is particularly worrying in a country such as Mexico, where the minimum daily wage is $5 a day and almost half the 106m population lives below the poverty line, according to government figures.

Mr Ebrard and his team have begun to see their urban agriculture programmes increasingly as a way of combating soaring food prices rather than just pollution. Mr López Villanueva is so optimistic about their prospects that he even believes that participating families could end up generating a surfeit of agricultural produce, which could give rise to farmer-style markets in the city.

“Backyard agriculture could in time become small commercial enterprises,” he said. “The ultimate goal is to lower prices for the whole city.”

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.

The consensus view on Iran’s nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA’s rationale for censoring the former officer’s lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.

“On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all,” Krieger said in an interview.

In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, Krieger said.

The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were “thwarted by CIA employees,” according to court papers. Later he was told to “remove himself from any further handling” of the informant, the documents say.

In the months after the conflict, the operative became the target of two internal investigations, one of them alleging an improper sexual relationship with a female informant, and the other alleging financial improprieties. Krieger said his client cooperated with investigators in both cases and the allegations of wrongdoing were never substantiated. Krieger contends in court documents that the investigations were a “pretext to discredit.”

Krieger maintains that his client is being further punished by the agency’s decision prohibiting him from fully regaining his identity. “He is not even allowed to attend court hearings about his own case,” Krieger said.

The number of homes scheduled for auction in Los Angeles rose 14,505 compared with 3,797 in the same period a year earlier, PropertyShark said in a report distributed by e-mail. In Miami-Dade County, the number climbed to 2,677 from 1,282.

“The foreclosure chart for Los Angeles is unfortunately starting to look like a ski jump,” Adina Dumitru, a member of PropertyShark’s foreclosure products team, said in the statement.

From this, his foes inferred that since it was Hitchens’ belief that America did not stoop to the latter, the practice of waterboarding – known to be perpetrated by US forces against certain “high-value clients” in Iraq and elsewhere – must fall under the former heading.

Enraged by what they saw as an exercise in elegant but offensive sophistry, some of the writer’s critics suggested that Hitchens give waterboarding (which may sound like some kind of fun aquatic pastime, but is probably best summarised as enforced partial drowning) a whirl, just to see what it was like. Did the experience feel like torture?

And amazingly, he has done just that. In August’s edition of Vanity Fair, you can read all about it, and see more photographs of the “wheezing, paunchy, 59-year-old scribbler”, his head hooded, being subjected to this most terrifying of ordeals by veterans of the US Special Forces. A video is due to be posted soon at vf.com, though that may be a bit too much to bear.

So what did it feel like? Hitchens recounts how he was lashed tightly to a sloping board, then, “on top of the hood, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose … I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and – as you might expect – inhale in turn.”

That, he says, “brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, flooded more with sheer panic than with water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal” and felt the “unbelievable relief” of being pulled upright.

The “official lie” about waterboarding, Hitchens says, is that it “simulates the feeling of drowning”. In fact, “you are drowning – or rather, being drowned”.