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David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.

He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.

“India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent,” an Indian Home Ministry official said yesterday.

Mr Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicised name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.

Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.

“The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

According to Mr Raman, it is probable that Mr Headley, who was arrested when the US authorities learned that he was about to fly to Pakistan, was listed on the main database of the US National Counterterrorism Centre, a facility used by the CIA and several other American agencies to track terror suspects.

Indian officials suspect that US agencies declined to share intelligence to avoid compromising other secret operations and to to be able to deny any link with Mr Headley.

Analysts believe that the US may also have been anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbours who have fought three wars.

According to documents put before a court in Chicago, Mr Headley had links with the Pakistan Army and, through it, with al-Qaeda.

As well as helping to co-ordinate the Mumbai atrocity, Mr Headley is accused of planning attacks on Mumbai’s Bollywood film industry, the Shiv Sena, a Hindu extremist group also based in Mumbai, a major Hindu temple, and a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The US authorities allege that he was close to Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a former Pakistani schoolmate and businessman who is also being charged with planning to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Mr Rana is accused of having known about the attack on Mumbai in advance.

The CIA denied that Headley had worked for the organisation.

“Any suggestion that Headley was working for the CIA is complete and utter nonsense. It’s flat-out false,” Paul Gimigliano, from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, said.

A senior U.S. intelligence official told ABCNews.com the approximate estimate of 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan reflects the conclusion of American intelligence agencies and the Defense Department. The relatively small number was part of the intelligence passed on to the White House as President Obama conducted his deliberations.

President Obama made only a vague reference to the size of the al Qaeda presence in his speech at West Point, when he said, “al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same number as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.”

Ford, the healthiest of Detroit’s three automakers and the only one to avoid government aid and bankruptcy protection, still has more workers than it needs to produce cars and trucks at current sales levels, said company spokesman Mark Truby.

He would not say how many workers Ford expects to take the packages, which include cash payments and other incentives such as vouchers to buy cars and short-term health insurance coverage.

“We’re just going to try to right-size our manned capacity and align it with demand,” Truby said.

Ford currently has 634 blue-collar workers on layoff in the U.S.

Under the terms of a new contract with the United Auto Workers union, the employees get most of their pay for a year depending on seniority, and a portion of their wages for another year before they are removed from the company payroll.

In the past, laid-off workers went into the “jobs bank” and were paid indefinitely even if their factory had been shut down. But the union agreed to scrap the jobs bank earlier this year when all three Detroit automakers ran into financial troubles.

The buyout package, offered to workers with at least a year of service, includes $50,000 cash and the choice of a $25,000 voucher to buy a vehicle or $20,000 more in cash. The deal also includes basic health care coverage for six months, Ford said. Retirement-eligible workers can take the buyout but must wait up to 18 months before retiring.

The retirement package includes $40,000 for skilled trades workers and $20,000 for nonskilled employees. To be eligible, workers have to have either 30 or more years of service, be age 55 or older with 10 or more years of work, or they can be 65 with at least one year of service, the company said.

In other words, the federal budget deficit will be $1.4 trillion. Just to make the size more visible, that’s $1,400 billion.

Our colleague Rob Arnott, who always does terrific research, wrote in his recent report that “at all levels, federal, state, local and GSEs, the total public debt is now at 141% of GDP. That puts the United States in some elite company–only Japan, Lebanon and Zimbabwe are higher. That’s only the start. Add household debt (highest in the world at 99% of GDP) and corporate debt (highest in the world at 317% of GDP, not even counting off-balance-sheet swaps and derivatives) and our total debt is 557% of GDP. Less than three years ago our total indebtedness crossed 500% of GDP for the first time.”

The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.

The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.

Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.

The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.

Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”

Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”

However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The interview with Hiss was released by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who had conducted a study of Abu Kabir.

She was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that while Palestinians were “by a long shot” not the only ones affected, she felt the interview must be made public, because “the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, [is] something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.”

Israel demanded that Sweden condemn the Aftonbladet article, calling it an antisemitic “blood libel”. Stockholm refused, saying that to so would violate freedom of speech in the country. The foreign minister then cancelled a visit to Israel, just as Sweden was taking over the EU’s rotating presidency.

Hiss was removed from his post in 2004, when some details about organ harvesting were first reported, but he still works at the forensic institute.

The policy, outlined last month by Major-General Anthony Cucolo, would apply to female soldiers who become pregnant while deployed in combat zones and the male soldiers who impregnate them.

Civilians reporting to General Cucolo also could face criminal prosecution under the guidelines.

General Cucolo told the BBC: ”I’ve got a mission to do; I’m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them.”

An army spokesman, George Wright, said the service typically sends home from the battlefield soldiers who become pregnant. It is not an army-wide policy to punish them under the military’s legal code, he said. However, division commanders, such as General Cucolo, have the authority to impose restrictions on personnel under their command, Mr Wright said.

General Cucolo oversees forces in northern Iraq, an area that includes the cities of Kirkuk, Tikrit and Mosul.

General Cucolo’s order outlines about 20 barred activities. Most are aimed at keeping order and preventing criminal activity, such as selling a weapon or taking drugs. But others seem aimed at preventing soldiers from leaving their unit short-handed, including becoming pregnant or undergoing elective surgery that would prevent deployment.

In a presentation to about 30 colleagues, Thomsen, one of Europe’s leading radiologists, revealed how patients treated at his hospital had subsequently contracted a rare and potentially fatal disease.

Thomsen and other doctors at his Copenhagen University hospital were baffled as to why 20 kidney patients who had been given routine scans were afflicted by a disorder — nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (NSF) — in which the skin gradually swells, thickens and tightens. Some sufferers were confined to wheelchairs. At least one died. There was no known cure.

Then, in March 2006, there was a breakthrough. It was confirmed that all those who had fallen ill with NSF had been given the same drug in advance of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

Omniscan was used to enhance the images produced by the scan. The product was sold around the world and was manufactured by GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of General Electric, one of the world’s largest corporations.

Thomsen’s presentation lasted no more than 15 minutes, with the final slide reading: “I hope none of you meets a similar medical hurricane.”

The quietly spoken 56-year-old, director of the department of diagnostic sciences at the University of Copenhagen, is part of a small group of clinicians credited with alerting patients and regulators to the potential risks of Omniscan for renal patients.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency this weekend said there had been 20 reports in the UK of NSF after patients were given Omniscan. Five of the patients died.

Last month, European medical regulators recommended that anybody who needed an MRI scan should be given a check to ensure their kidneys were healthy if they were to be given Omniscan or two similar products. In America, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is reviewing its advice.

Environmentalists have long advocated a ban on the retardant decabromodiphenyl ether, or DecaBDE, which is used widely in consumer electronics, furniture and textiles, among other items. It has been found to be a potential carcinogen and to be toxic to the nervous system.

The agreement, with the manufacturers Chemtura, Albemarle and ICL Industrial Products, would end the production, importation and use of the chemical in all consumer products by December 2012. A full ban would take effect one year later.

No accord has been reached with a Japanese manufacturer that exports products with the substance to the United States.

Exiled southern leader Ali Salem al-Baid had accused the Yemeni authorities of killing at least 62 civilians in Thursday’s air strikes Sanaa said targeted an Al-Qaeda training camp in the southern province of Abyan.

The local official from the Al-Mahfed region, which includes the village of Al-Maajala where the strike took place, on Sunday confirmed civilian deaths.

“The raid was carried out indiscriminately and killed 49 civilians, including 23 children and 17 women,” said the official, who did not wish to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

A tribal leader from the Al-Kazam tribe too confirmed civilian deaths.

“In total, 49 civilians were killed,” he told AFP. “Al-Qaeda has chosen to build its training centre on land where bedouin nomads pitch their tents, and the government forces believe the nomads harbour Al-Qaeda forces,” said the leader, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

Yemeni government officials said the Thursday air strikes against Al-Maajala killed 30 suspected Al-Qaeda members, and that four Al-Qaeda members were also killed Thursday in a ground raid in Abhar, 35 kilometres north of Sanaa.

Yemen’s defence ministry said on its website that “several” local Al-Qaeda leaders were killed in the air strikes. It identified five of them, including Mohammad Saleh Al-Kazimi, whom it said was the commander of the training camp.

The ministry also said that a Saudi, identified as Ibrahim al-Najdi, was among those killed in Abyan.

The province of Abyan has in recent years become a base area for Islamist fighters, including veterans of fighting in Afghanistan. It is outside the control of Yemeni security forces.

Since the air strikes, more than 30 members of Al-Qaeda have been arrested by government forces, the defence ministry said on Saturday.

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants–nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. “This points to an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of ICE,” said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957 immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his official bio stating that he “spearheaded the use of the 287(g) program,” legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration law enforcement functions.

A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on background, saw the list and exclaimed, “You cannot have secret detention! The public has the right to know where detention is happening.”

Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, “Locked Up Far Away.” Even she had never heard of the subfield offices and was concerned that the failure to disclose their locations violates the UN’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. She explained that the government must provide “an impartial authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known to a court.”

The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers, documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at in the Schriro report, as well as cover-ups.