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Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

Congress is expected to decide by year’s end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further.

The ranks of the poor would also rise. The Census Bureau says unemployment benefits kept 3.2 million people from slipping into poverty last year. It defines poverty as annual income below $22,314 for a family of four.

“What we are doing is something different,” said Fontoura, explaining her research. “We are actually stimulating our own response which is already there – boost it – to fight an infection.”

The compound targets a specific protein called REDD-1, which is responsible for helping cells fight infection. The scientists discovered that when there is less REDD-1 protein in a cell, viruses like the flu can invade and corrupt the cell in a matter of hours. But when this compound is added, boosting the presence of the REDD-1 protein, the flu (no matter what strain) is held at bay. “We tested different strains — from less pathogenic strains to highly pathogenic strains,” Fontoura said, “and it worked.”

The current vaccine can often be ineffective, Fontoura said, if the flu virus mutates. This is why so many people who get a flu shot still get sick. However, this new compound would bypass that mutation, using your body – instead of the virus – to fight back.

“It’s very exciting. We’re all excited about it,” Fontoura said. “More is yet to come.”

With a horde of 102 bogus Facebook friends, the University of British Columbia researchers showed that they could harvest personal information on members not publically available on the social network and that its defenses were inadequate to cope with a large scale infiltration.

The revelations made in the publishing-industry newsletter Buchreport concern Weltbild, a company with an annual NZ$3bn turnover and 6,400 employees. It is Germany’s largest bookseller after Amazon and wholly owned by the Catholic Church.

Buchreport revealed that Weltbild’s massive assortment of titles available to customers online includes some 2,500 “erotic” books with unmistakably lewd titles including Call Me Slut!, Take Me Here, Take Me Now! and Lawyer’s Whore, to name a few. The publisher’s website also pictures the titles’ lascivious dust jackets that feature colour photographs of scantily clad women in high heels and erotic underwear.

Yesterday, Carel Haff, Weltbild’s managing director, was quoted as saying that the revelations had provoked “a very intense and critical dialogue” within the company. He said discussions were under way about possibly limiting the assortment of titles that would be available in future.

Catholic bishops responded with a statement claiming that “a filtering system failure” at the publishing house had allowed the books to stray on to the market. “We will put a stop to the distribution of possibly pornographic content in future,” they said.

But Bernhard Mller, editor of the Catholic magazine PUR, dismissed the clerics’ reaction as grossly hypocritical. He alleged that the pornography scandal at Weltbild had been going on for at least a decade with the Church’s full knowledge.

Mr Mller said that in 2008, a group of concerned Catholics had sent bishops a 70-page document containing irrefutable evidence that Weltbild published books that promoted pornography, Satanism and magic. They demanded that the publisher withdraw the titles.

But their protests appear to have been completely ignored. Writing in the Die Welt newspaper, Mr Mller said most of the bishops refused to respond to the charges. “The sudden proclaimed astonishment of many church leaders that pornographic material is being distributed by their publishing house, is play acting – bad play acting,” Mr Mller said. “Believers have been complaining to their bishops about this for years.”

According to the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida, the main suspects are the former heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, respectively Israel’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.

Netanyahu is said to believe that the two, Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin, wanted to torpedo plans being drawn up by him and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, to hit Iranian nuclear sites. Tzipi Livni, leader of the opposition Kadima party, is also said to have been persuaded to attack Netanyahu for “adventurism” and “gambling with Israel’s national interest”.

The paper suggested that the purpose of the leaks was to prevent an attack, which had moved from the stage of discussion to implementation. “Those who oppose the plan within the security establishment decided to leak it to the media and thwart the plan,” it said.

The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.

Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.

“Tavarez was … was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.

“I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy,” Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

He made clear he wasn’t about to pass off the two legit arrests he had made in the bar to Tavarez.

“As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division,” he said.

Both are about 30 to 40 km from the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, which has been releasing radioactive material into the environment since the week of March 11, when the quake and tsunami caused core meltdowns.

“This won’t be a problem if they don’t eat vegetables or other products that are contaminated,” said Nanao Kamada, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Hiroshima University. “But it will be difficult for people to continue living in these areas.”

Kamada teamed up with doctors including Osamu Saito of Watari Hospital in the city of Fukushima to conduct two rounds of tests on each resident in early and late May, taking urine samples from 15 people between 4 and 77.

Vanessa Guerena says police refused to allow paramedics to help her husband, 26-year-old Jose Guerena, after the SWAT team shot him repeatedly while serving a search warrant on May 5.

“No shots were ever fired at members of the Pima Regional SWAT Team from inside the Guerena home,” the widow says in her Pima County Court complaint. She says her husband was “peacefully sleeping in his bed” after returning home from the night shift at a mine when the police killed him.

“After the shooting, the Pima Regional SWAT Team denied entry to anyone, including paramedics, into the Guerena home for over an hour.”

The raid apparently was aimed at her husband’s brother, who did not live with them.

Guerena says that the affidavit in support of the search warrant “misrepresented and failed to include complete and material information about Joseph Guerena.”

The complaint states: “The Pima Regional SWAT Team was serving a warrant based on an alleged investigation into the activities of Jose Guerena’s brother, Alejandro Guerena, who was not a resident of Jose Guerena’s home. No evidence was found that Jose Guerena was engaging in criminal activity, that any criminal activity was occurring at Jose Guerena’s home, or that any evidence of criminal activity would be found in the Guerena home.”

Tucson media reported that the SWAT team shot Guerena more than 20 times.

Guerena says that when she pleaded with officers to allow paramedics to care for her wounded husband, “Rather than provide help, the Pima Regional SWAT team forcefully and violently drug [sic] Vanessa Guerena from her home. A frightened, crying, and traumatized Joel Guerena, age four, exited a short time later of his own volition wearing his Spider-Man pajamas.