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San Onofre owner Southern California Edison (SCE), confirms the picture was taken inside Unit Three, but did not say when. The anonymous source said the picture was taken in December 2012.

Unit Three is the same unit that leaked radiation in January 2012. SONGS has been shutdown since then as a precaution.

“[Staff] identified a small leak in the water box and will perform maintenance per our scheduling process,” SCE spokeswoman Maureen Brown wrote in a statement. “In the meantime, plastic is in place to direct the water from the small leak to a drain.”

(Team 10 took the picture to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to see what federal regulators had to say about the quick fix. See the commission’s response today on 10News at 5 p.m.)

“If that’s nuclear technology at work and that’s how we’re going to control leaks I think the public should know,” the inside source said.

More than one anonymous source talked about the picture with Team 10. They said the public has a right to know about the plant’s condition, as the NRC decides whether the plant will be allowed to restart.

Unit Two is the generator under consideration for restart – not Unit Three – where the picture was taken. Currently there are no plans to restart Unit Three.

Sources also pointed to what appears to be corrosion on the pipe as a sign of the power plant’s age.

They claim rust is rampant throughout SONGS — including what sources call a fire suppression pipe, which protects both units.

“There’s a pipe that runs along the security fence, from one side of the plant to the other side of the plant — it’s totally blistered,” one inside source told Team 10.

“To take an isolated picture and leap to some kind of conclusion about maintenance is a pretty big leap,” SCE’s Brown said in a phone conversation.

“We are dealing with unknown territory here which has never been explored before,” another inside source said. Two inside sources called restarting SONGS “risky.”

There is great concern across Europe about the collapse of bee populations.

Neonicotinoid chemicals in pesticides are believed to harm bees and the European Commission says they should be restricted to crops not attractive to bees and other pollinators.

But many farmers and crop experts argue that there is insufficient data.

Fifteen countries voted in favour of a ban – not enough to form a qualified majority. According to EU rules the Commission will now have the option to impose a two-year restriction on neonicotinoids – and the UK cannot opt out.

The Commission says it wants the moratorium to begin no later than 1 December this year.

The UK did not support a ban – it argues that the science behind the proposal is inconclusive. It was among eight countries that voted against, while four abstained.

The research in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that certain environmental exposures could trigger allergies later in life, overcoming the protective effects of microbial exposure in childhood.

The study examined records from 2007-2008 phone surveys of nearly 92,000 people in the United States, where food and skin allergies have been on the rise in recent years.

Allergies reported in the survey included asthma, eczema, hay fever, and food allergies.

“Children born outside the United States had significantly lower prevalence of any allergic diseases (20.3 percent) than those born in the United States (34.5 percent),” said the study led by Jonathan Silverberg of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York.

“However, foreign-born Americans develop increased risk for allergic disease with prolonged residence in the United States,” it said.

Children who were born outside the United States but came to live in the United States for longer than 10 years showed “significantly” higher odds of developing eczema or hay fever but not asthma or food allergies, said the research.

“These data indicate that duration of residence in the United States is a previously unrecognized factor in the epidemiology of atopic disease,” it said.

European politicians will take the “easy option” of taking money from the rich rather than raising taxes and cutting spending to deal with the continent’s debt problem, Lars Christensen, the head of Saxo Bank, said.

Asked if the raid on uninsured savings in Cyprus would be repeated, he told City AM: “There will be future bail-ins [loss of deposits] and other types of confiscation of wealth in the eurozone, without a doubt.

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors’ Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

“The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained over 1,000 pages of internal government documents and provided them to CNET this week. “Alarm bells should be going off.”

Those documents show the National Security Agency and the Defense Department were deeply involved in pressing for the secret legal authorization, with NSA director Keith Alexander participating in some of the discussions personally. Despite initial reservations, including from industry participants, Justice Department attorneys eventually signed off on the project.

The Justice Department agreed to grant legal immunity to the participating network providers in the form of what participants in the confidential discussions refer to as “2511 letters,” a reference to the Wiretap Act codified at 18 USC 2511 in the federal statute books.

The factories in which microchips are made, called fabs, can cost billions of dollars. They’re like rocket launch sites or nuclear power plants: Everyone knows where they are and how many are in the works. And they make the microchips on which all advanced smartphones, PCs, servers, and other critical pieces of IT infrastructure depend.

The smallest elements on the most advanced microchips, currently in testing, are down to 14 nanometers, on the scale of atoms and molecules. Fifty water molecules in a row would just reach 14 nanometers.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”