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But people will not be pouring the genetically modified milk on their Weetbix just yet – the milk will be discarded.

AgResearch won Environmental Risk Management Authority approval to allow a handful of scientists to breed and keep genetically-modified animals at the Ruakura research facility, near Hamilton.

The work will begin with genetically modified cows, and could be expanded to genetically modified goats within the next year.

There are no immediate plans to genetically modify sheep at Ruakura.

Simon Terry, of environmental consultancy the Sustainability Council, welcomed conditions making it clear the milk could not be made for commercial sale but he was concerned the 20-year time limit was three times as long as the last GM experiment at the facility.

And he feared Ruakura would become a “GM animal warehouse” because there were no limits on the number of animals.

Jon Carapiet, of GE-free NZ, said the decision was the beginning of a “mega-transformation” of New Zealand agriculture.

But AgResearch’s applied biotechnology head Jimmy Suttie said there were no plans to release any genetic material into the food chain.

He said human genetic material in the animals would be “switched on” only in the mammary glands of lactating animals, leaving the beasts otherwise unchanged.

AgResearch hopes human proteins made by the animals could eventually be used to make “biopharmaceuticals” to treat rare human diseases and boost New Zealand’s income in the pharmaceuticals market.

Keeping GM goats will be a first for the facility, and people who spoke at the public hearing on the application were eager to warn the company about goats’ incredible abilities to escape.

Dr Suttie said any human DNA used would almost certainly not be from a traceable person. It was now possible to build wholly synthetic human genes in a test tube using information bought from overseas databanks, he said. Agresearch has said it will not use Maori DNA because of cultural concerns.

Fiore irked Apple’s censorious staffers with his cartoons making fun of the Balloon Boy hoax and the pair that famously crashed a White House party, according to Laura McGann at the Neiman Journalism Lab.

Fiore won a Pulitzer Monday for animations he made for the SFGate, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle. But Fiore, who is a freelancer who runs a syndication business, was rejected by Apple in December for an app called NewToons that features his work.

According to a Dec. 21 e-mail reprinted by Neiman, Apple rejected his app because it “contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states: Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

Neither Fiore nor Apple responded to requests for comment.

The news of the rejection comes not long after Apple decided to purge its App store of content that included nudity, a retroactive ban that included apps from respected German publications such as Bild and Der Spiegel.

Fiore’s rejection may be especially disconcerting to news and media organizations, many of which are betting heavily on iPad apps as a way to get users to pay to read magazines and newspapers, and to get advertisers to pay print-ad prices for online content. (Online ads cost a small percentage of what ads in glossy magazines cost, in no small part because the net has almost infinite advertising space.)

Federal prosecutors said Thomas Drake, 52, served as a source for many articles about the NSA in an unidentified newspaper, including articles that contained classified information.

A federal indictment filed in Maryland charges that Drake used a nongovernment e-mail account to transmit classified and unclassified information. Authorities also charge that Drake lied to federal agents about what he’d done.

The indictment does not identify the reporter, the newspaper or the subject matter of the stories. It says the stories were published between February 2006 and November 2007.

The place, time, and type of stories described in the indictment generally match articles published in The Baltimore Sun, though federal officials would not confirm that paper was the one cited in the case. Judy Berman, a spokeswoman for the newspaper, declined to comment.

The Washington Post said that the reporter was Siobhan Gorman, an intelligence correspondent for The Baltimore Sun at the time and subsequently at the Wall Street Journal. Calls to the Sun seeking comment were not returned and the Journal declined to comment.

The Justice Department defended the charges against Drake.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” said the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer.

Drake faces five counts of willfully retaining documents related to national defense. He is also charged with obstruction of justice and four counts of making false statements to the FBI.

The most serious charge in the 10-count indictment carries a maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors say Drake exchanged hundreds of e-mails with the reporter, researched stories for the reporter by asking other NSA employees questions and accessing classified documents, and sent the reporter copies of classified and unclassified documents.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the case is likely to have “a chilling effect on government employees who have information they wish to share with the public.”

Dalglish said prosecutors do not appear to have subpoenaed any reporters in the case, which she called an encouraging sign.

Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, will propose a “no-bailout provision” as part of an overhaul of derivatives regulation she plans to unveil today, according to the aide, who declined to be identified because the plan isn’t public. The measure aims to ensure banks don’t endanger depositors’ money with risky trading of over-the-counter derivatives, the aide said.

The proposal is already drawing opposition from banks that dominate the $605 trillion over-the-counter market. Derivatives regulation being weighed by Congress could cost JPMorgan from “$700 million to a couple billion dollars,” Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive officer, said yesterday during a conference call with analysts.

“I imagine their lobbyists have already contacted their best contacts in the government,” said Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (By the way, out of sheer coincidence, the announcement comes on the same day our own number of feed-followers has surpassed 50,000. I love serendipity!)

The Labor Department reported Thursday that first-time requests for jobless benefits rose by 24,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 484,000, the highest level since late February. Economists had predicted claims would fall.

Ten children and teenagers died when troops stormed a remote mountain compound near the border with Pakistan in December.

At the time, Nato claimed that the assault force was targeting a “known insurgent group responsible for a series of violent attacks”. Officials said that the victims were involved in making and smuggling improvised explosive devices. But Western sources close to the case now agree that the victims were all aged 12 to 18 and were not involved in insurgent activity.

Nato sources say that the raid should never have been authorised. “Knowing what we know now, it would probably not have been a justifiable attack,” an official in Kabul told The Times. “We don’t now believe that we busted a major ring.”

When reports of the raid first surfaced eight weeks ago, The Times contacted the police chief in Kunar province and then the boys’ head-master and uncle, Rahman Jan Ehsas.

Two men whose children and other relatives were killed agreed to come to Kabul to describe the incident. They provided pictures of their dead sons, a sketched map of the compound and copies of the compensation claim forms signed by local officials detailing their sons’ names, relatives and positions at school. Their story was supported by Western military sources.

Farooq Abdul Ajan, who lost two sons, two brothers, three nephews and a cousin in the raid, said that the soldiers had had no idea whom they were killing. Afghan investigators, local officials and MPs from the province all maintain that the boys were innocent.

Nato’s statement, issued four days after the event, said that troops were attacked “from several buildings” as they entered the village. Yesterday it said that “ultimately, we did determine this to be a civilian casualty incident”.

Anger is growing over civilian casualties. General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander, has warned that Nato risks “strategic defeat” by causing civilian deaths. The Independent Human Rights Commission said that more than 63 civilians had died in the past two weeks, including 27 killed when US special forces ordered an airstrike on a convoy of minibuses in the central Daikundi province. Nato recently introduced a new tactical directive to limit the use of night raids, the coalition’s chief legal adviser, Colonel Richard Gross, said. “General McChrystal realised that this was one of the areas where we had to change the way we do business, or else we would not win this war,” he said.

Exactly who carried out the Narang raid is unclear. Colonel Gross said that US forces were present but did not lead the operation. Nato insists that the troops were not part of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf). US forces based in Kunar denied any knowledge of the raid.

Take Hong Kong as an example. City Telecom made waves a few months ago with its US$13, symmetric 100Mbps connections. Today, the company slashed prices on its much faster 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home offering; a fully symmetric, 1Gbps connection costs HK$199… or US$26 a month.