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Two of the five institutions had assets of more than $1 billion. The Florida bank, in Miami, was sold to an investment group that includes former North Fork Bancorp Chief Financial Officer Dan Healy. The deposits and assets of the New Mexico bank went to Texas billionaire Andrew Beal.

The offices remained open, but with computers unable to connect to the state’s network, DMV workers were forced to do everything by hand, such as processing driver’s licenses and registrations, DMV spokeswoman Jan Mendoza said.

“They’re collecting paperwork and processing it later,” Mendoza said while the computers were down.

DMV offices began experiencing problems connecting to the state’s network around 11 a.m. Offices started to connect back around 2 p.m.

The failure comes a day before DMV offices will close for a mandatory furlough day, meaning customers could have to wait even longer for service.

The office of the state Chief Information Officer, which is in charge of state information technology, blamed the outage on equipment failure at the state’s data center in Sacramento.

“It was a router switch that malfunctioned,” said spokesman Bill Maile. “Network traffic was rerouted and the system is back up and running.”

It wasn’t clear how long customers were being delayed because of the failure.

Youngsters with rickets, caused primarily by a chronic lack of vitamin D, develop painful and deformed bow-legs that do not grow properly.

The condition is linked mainly with extreme poverty and the 19th-century Victorian England of Charles Dickens, and can be easily avoided through a balanced diet and exposure to sunlight.

But doctors reported this month that cases of the debilitating disease have once again become “disconcertingly common” in Britain.

“Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computers instead of enjoying the fresh air,” said Simon Pearce, a professor at Newcastle University in northeast England and lead author of a new study on Vitamin D deficiency.

“This means their vitamin D levels are worse than in previous years,” he said in a press release.

Half of all adults in Britain — especially in the north — have Vitamin D deficiency in winter and spring, with one-in-six having severe deficiency.

The condition has been linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, several kinds of cancer and a soft-bone condition in adults called osteomalacia.

While the study focused on Britain, the same trend is likely elsewhere in the industrialised world, the researchers suggested.

The solution? Soaking up sunrays helps boost Vitamin D levels, but can also increase the risk of skin cancer.

The other option is adjusting diet. The rickets-preventing vitamin is present in oily fish such as salmon, mackerel, sardines and herring.

“Fifty years ago, many children would have been given regular doses of cod liver oil, but this practice has all but died out,” noted co-author Tim Cheetham, also a professor at Newcastle.

But if foul-tasting oils and expensive fish are not options, there is another ready mode of transmission: milk.

The study, published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, called for new regulations recommending the addition of vitamin D to milk and similar food products, as has been done in several other countries.

Leading explosives expert Sidney Alford told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 was “absolutely immoral”.

“This type of equipment does not work,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind betting that lives have been lost as a consequence.”

Questions have been raised over the ADE-651, following three recent co-ordinated waves of bombings in Baghdad.

…

Anti-theft tag inside

Claims of such almost magical technical abilities would almost be comic, if the potential consequences were not so serious.

Newsnight obtained a set of cards for the ADE-651 and took them to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory where Dr Markus Kuhn dissected a card supposed to detect TNT.

It contained nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.

Dr Kuhn said it was “impossible” that it could detect anything at all and that the card had “absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT”.

The story was quickly picked up by websites around the globe – most quoting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as saying the U.S. used a new tectonic weapon to induce the Haitian earthquake. This was, according to Chavez – “only a drill, and the final target is destroying and taking over Iran”.

Within the actual story, ABC noted that the information came from an obscure opinion post on the website of a Venezuelan state television channel, VIVE Television. The post referenced a supposed Russian military report on American seismic weapons.

The last thing we expect is a joke from a Transportation Security Administration screener – particularly one this stupid.

Rebecca Solomon is 22 and a student at the University of Michigan, and on Jan. 5 she was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.

She would be flying into Detroit on Northwest Airlines, the same city and carrier involved in the attempted bombing on Christmas, just 10 days before. She was tense.

What happened to her lasted only 20 seconds, but she says they were the longest 20 seconds of her life.

After pulling her laptop out of her carry-on bag, sliding the items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she went to collect her things.

A TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him.

Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on – the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.

She remembers his words: “Where did you get it?”

Two thoughts came to her in a jumble: A terrorist was using her to sneak bomb-detonating materials on the plane. Or a drug dealer had made her an unwitting mule, planting coke or some other trouble in her bag while she wasn’t looking.

She’d left her carry-on by her feet as she handed her license and boarding pass to a security agent at the beginning of the line.

Answer truthfully, the TSA worker informed her, and everything will be OK.

Solomon, 5-foot-3 and traveling alone, looked up at the man in the black shirt and fought back tears.

Put yourself in her place and count out 20 seconds. Her heart pounded. She started to sweat. She panicked at having to explain something she couldn’t.

Now picture her expression as the TSA employee started to smile.