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Government leaders, who expressed frustration over the airline’s actions, were expected to argue at the hearing that Qantas should be forced to fly in Australia’s economic interests.

“It’s not our place to start allocating responsibility, but what I also know is there is a better way to resolve these matters … than locking your customers out,” Australian Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten told reporters ahead of the arbitration hearing in the southern city of Melbourne. “We want more common sense than that.”

Qantas, the world’s 10th-largest airline, announced Saturday that it would ground all flights. But CEO Alan Joyce said the airline could be flying again within hours if the three arbitration judges rule to permanently terminate the grounding and the unions’ strike action.

The unions want the judges to rule for a suspension so that the strikes can be resumed if their negotiations with the airline fail.

“Within six hours, we can get the fleet flying again” after the aviation regulator provides a routine clearance, Joyce told Australian Broadcasting Corp. television Sunday.

“We have to wait and see what that process generates today,” he said, referring to the court hearing.

Planes in the air when the grounding was announced continued to their destinations, and at least one taxiing flight stopped on the runway, a passenger said. Among the stranded passengers are 17 world leaders attending a Commonwealth summit in the western Australian city of Perth.

The appliances were “transmitting automatic status messages back to the company” Blue Coat executives told the newspaper.

“Blue Coat says it doesn’t monitor where such ‘heartbeat’ messages originate from,” according to the report. “Computer code reviewed by the Journal indicates that Syrians were also using other Blue Coat products, raising questions about how the tools came to be used this way and whether Blue Coat has violated the trade embargo.”

Reports began trickling out this summer that the devices were being used by Syria to monitor its citizens’ Internet activity in a crackdown on opposition that has left thousands of protesters dead and injured.

Last month, Blue Coat told ZDNet UK that company policy forbade the sale of equipment to the Syrian government.

Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we’d still get bad predictions from models.

The New York Police Department monitors everyone in the city who changes his or her name, according to interviews and internal police documents obtained by The Associated Press. For those whose names sound Arabic or might be from Muslim countries, police run comprehensive background checks that include reviewing travel records, criminal histories, business licenses and immigration documents.

All this is recorded in police databases for supervisors, who review the names and select a handful of people for police to visit.

The program was conceived as a tripwire for police in the difficult hunt for homegrown terrorists, where there are no widely agreed upon warning signs. Like other NYPD intelligence programs created in the past decade, this one involved monitoring behavior protected by the First Amendment.

The claims led to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary delaying a report into undercover police tactics at the last minute.

It had been due to be published today and was thought to be critical of the police.

Lawyers for a convicted protester claim a Metropolitan Police officer called Jim Boyling, posing as an activist, was prosecuted alongside their client and lied under oath to conceal his true identity.

Solicitors from the law firm Bindmans claim Boyling pretended to be Jim Sutton between 1995 and 2000 and joined the non-violent organisation Reclaim the Streets, the Guardian newspaper reported.

As part of his role, Bindmans claim, he was prosecuted at Horseferry Road magistrates court in London in 1997 for disorderly behaviour in a three-day trial.

The lifeless body of Claude Dray, 76, was found with three bullet holes in the neck in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Paris suburb where President Nicolas Sarkozy built his career and still owns property.

A butler found Dray’s corpse at 9am on Tuesday following a death that had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.

Dray, one of the most prominent Jews in France, had been the subject of threats in the past. His palatial villa – which was called Madrid – was considered one of the most secure in the French capital.

It was regularly surrounded by police and private security guards, and is equipped with anti-intruder measures including cameras and infra-red alarms.

“Somebody got in and fired three bullets into the victim’s neck,” said one detective at the scene who asked not to be named, adding that a silencer had likely been used as domestic staff heard nothing.

Dray’s wife, Simone, was in the US, where four years ago he bought the famous art deco National Hotel in South Beach, Miami.

Anyone curious about the cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can look it up on costofwar.com, up to the latest fraction of a second. Last weekend, the Iraq war had cost more than $800 billion since 2001; the Afghan war, $467 billion plus.

For the 8-1/2-year conflict in Iraq alone, that works out to nearly $3,000 a second.

So President Obama’s announcement that all US troops will be out of Iraq by year end should mean some drop in ongoing military spending. But the budget relief probably won’t be as much as you might expect.

Tragically, beside the financial cost, there is the human toll. The war in Iraq has resulted in some 4,480 US troops killed and more than 32,000 wounded. (The Iraqis have suffered far more fatalities, about 654,965, according to the British medical journal The Lancet.) Thus, ongoing medical and disability claims and treatment of US veterans will boost the costs of the Iraq war even more.

After marathon negotiations that continued well past midnight, European leaders said banks and other major investors in Greek bonds agreed to take losses of up to 50 percent. This concession was meant to help prevent the Greek government from defaulting on bills it cannot pay and avoid an even costlier shock to the European financial system.

The losses are much larger than private investors accepted under a deal this summer. Since then, Greece’s economy has steadily eroded, making it even harder for the government to repay its bonds.

The question of how to structure a new refinancing plan for Greece and divide the costs of rescuing it has been at the center of negotiations. Other elements of the plan were dependent on European officials reaching an agreement with negotiators for major banks, which had been balking at taking bigger losses.

Under the deal, the bailout fund, known as the new European Financial Stability Facility, would help cash-strapped countries such as Italy and Spain borrow at least a trillion dollars by providing a kind of insurance that would make their bonds more attractive to investors.