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Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.

“It’s true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page,” said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.

It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead.

Google’s trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called “hotness” gauge the topic was rated “volcanic”.

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at 0400 BST was 48% higher than average.

Fail

Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information.

Jamil Rahman, who is suing the Home office, says he believes MI5 were responsible for his arrest in 2005.

He claims Bangladeshi officers beat him and threatened to rape his wife if he did not confess to being a terrorist.

The BBC cannot verify the claims; the Home Office says it will respond with vigour to any action Mr Rahman brings.

The British government says it does not condone torture or its use abroad.

In his first interview since launching a legal action against the government, Mr Rahman told the BBC that he was arrested in Bangladesh in December 2005 by the DGFI intelligence agency.

The former civil servant from south Wales had emigrated earlier that year to marry.

Mr Rahman said he believed that two MI5 officers directed his arrest and were aware that he was subsequently subjected to physical and mental abuse.

He was initially held for three weeks before being released. His alleged mistreatment continued at sporadic interviews for another two years.

Speaking for the first time about the alleged abuse, Mr Rahman said that Bangladeshi officers assaulted him after he was taken to an interrogation centre.

“They stripped me naked and said that if I didn’t say what they wanted me to say, they would rape me and my wife and burn her and other family members.

“They told me to say I was al-Qaeda and the organiser of the 7/7 [London suicide] bombings.”

The 31-year-old told the BBC that two British men would question him separately. He later concluded they were the same balaclava-wearing men to whom Bangladeshi officers turned to for orders during his arrest.

“The first time [they interviewed me] they tried to be friendly, they came in trying to show they were my friends, calm and relaxed, nothing wrong. I tried to demonstrate my innocence – I thought this is wrong, because they were British I might get some justice.

“But they just said ‘they had not done a good job on you’ we need a ten minute break. The DGFI guys would take me to a room and beat me.”

Surveillance pictures

Mr Rahman says that he was questioned about bomb plots and shown scores of surveillance pictures taken in the UK.

“They were questioning me on the July 7 bombings, showing me pictures of the bombers. I didn’t even know who they were. They showed me hundreds of pictures. Black, white, Chinese, bearded non-bearded, woman, man, young and old. Every time, they came for a new session, same pictures with new ones.

“They showed me maps, terrains of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, UK, they asked me to draw things out and write names next to pictures.

“The main thing they wanted me to be is a witness against another British man in Bangladesh. They pressured me so much to be a witness against this guy in court.

“They threatened my family. [The MI5 officers] they go to me: ‘In the UK, gas leaks happen, if your family house had a gas leak and everyone got burnt, there’s no problems, we can do that easily.

“It was all to do with the British,” he said. “Even the Bengali intelligence officer told me that they didn’t know anything about me, that they were only doing this for the British.”

Mr Rahman admits that he attended meetings in the UK of the radical Islamist group, al-Muhajiroun, but that he rejected their ideology before his emigration for marriage.

In a statement, the Home Office said it would respond vigorously to any action that Mr Rahman brings.

“We firmly reject any suggestion that we torture people or ask others to do so on our behalf. Mr Rahman has made a lot of unsubstantiated allegations. They have not been evidenced in any court of law.”

The Bangladeshi government has not answered BBC requests for a response to Mr Rahman’s allegations.

At least seven former detainees are now alleging British collusion in their mistreatment abroad. Their cases list 19 alleged officers – although it’s not clear whether they are all separate people because of the use of pseudonyms.

BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford said the allegations went against what security service personnel would be taught.

“Those who are familiar with MI5’s techniques say the whole point about the way MI5 works is they try to build a rapport with people,” he said.

The Financial Services Agency told Citibank Japan Ltd. to halt retail banking sales from July 15 to Aug. 14, except in cases where the company is approached by customers, the regulator said in a statement in Tokyo today. It also ordered the bank to improve governance and control systems.

The regulator found Citigroup had “fundamental problems” with its compliance, including systems to detect and monitor suspicious transactions. The New York-based bank failed to implement an improvement plan it submitted after it was forced to close its private banking business in Japan in 2004 for a similar failure, the watchdog said.

Citibank Japan didn’t update a database used to screen suspicious transactions since 2004, and management officials “lack an understanding of the rules applied in Japan, such as laws and regulations, and an awareness of improvement,” the regulator said in its statement.

Citigroup will comply with the regulator’s order and will submit an improvement plan by July 31, the company said in a statement. The order won’t have any impact on business with institutional clients, the bank said.

Euro-zone banks borrowed the one-year funds, the largest amount the central bank has ever dispersed in a single shot, at the ECB’s current key rate of 1%. Much of the total likely substituted for amounts banks had been borrowing from the ECB for shorter periods, so the net stimulus to the economy is less than it appears at first sight.

The novelty lies more in the length of time over which the ECB is prepared to offer unlimited funding, reflecting a desire to bring longer-term money-market interest rates down. Although the risk premium that banks charge each other for funds has fallen since the dramatic days of September, it still appears big enough to strain the economy.

The ECB’s move signals the central bank remains committed to bolstering the euro-zone economy even as policy makers world-wide discuss how best to unwind the welter of monetary and fiscal stimulus pumped into the global economy over the course of the crisis. The ECB believes the 16-nation euro-zone economy will start growing again by the middle of 2010.

The ECB said in May that it would begin offering banks funds for one year. Before Wednesday, the longest period banks could borrow from the central bank was six months.

And the rest is history, literally and figuratively. For almost 30 years, Lombardo has tried to uncover the full story of the wrongs he read about that day.

The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being “feeble-minded.” The younger sister hadn’t even known she’d had a tubal ligation. She didn’t learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn’t been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister — Carrie Buck — was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

He read that although Carrie Buck was the first victim of a 1924 sterilization law, 8,300 Virginians had involuntary sterilization until the practice was stopped in the 1970s. The law itself was repealed in 1974. “It was startling,” says Lombardo, 59, now a legal historian at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

He had not known of eugenics — the “science” of human improvement through controlled breeding — as more than a vague concept. Learning that there had been many eugenics programs in the United States in the 20th century and that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Buck’s sterilization amazed him.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the 1927 ruling. Lombardo says: “This woman got railroaded. And one of the giants of the Supreme Court was driving the train.”

In the years that followed, Lombardo’s Ph.D. dissertation focused on the attorney who fought to have Buck sterilized. In 1985, he published more research in the New York University Law Review, saying that key “facts” of the Buck case were simply not true and that Buck never received any real legal representation.

He has written journal articles and made many speeches on the subject, finding himself returning to the details of the story again and again. The case was “part of my intellectual life for so long that in some senses it was my … ‘hobby’ is not the right word,” Lombardo says. ” ‘Obsession’ would probably be closer.”

Filner’s bill would amend the United States code with the following: “Sec. 1585b. Law enforcement officers of the Department of Defense: authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms… for any offense against the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

The Posse Comitatus Act, passed on June 18, 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, limits the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement. The Act prohibits members of the federal uniformed services from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property within the United States.

The associate, who asked not to be identified, is a Buenos Aires television executive involved in hiring the woman, whom he identified as María Belén Chapur, a producer at the television network America from 2001 to 2002.

Last December, the executive said, Ms. Chapur was dating a young Argentine a few months after her affair with Mr. Sanford began. The man happened to see the e-mail messages being exchanged between the governor and Ms. Chapur, said the executive — who said he had direct knowledge of the situation — and hacked into her e-mail account to see the rest.

Infuriated, the man sent the messages to The State, the newspaper in South Carolina’s capital, Columbia.

When she found out, the executive said, Ms. Chapur immediately ended the relationship with the man, whose identity has not been disclosed.

In one of the published messages, dated July 9, 2008, Ms. Chapur wrote Mr. Sanford that she had seen another man.

At the time, efforts to authenticate the e-mails were unsuccessful. However, Sanford’s office Wednesday did not dispute their authenticity.

Other means as well, including propaganda, NGOs and Color Revolutions for regime change, expanding NATO eastward, and “a vast array of psychological and economic warfare techniques” as part of a “Revolution in Military Affairs” discussed below.

September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor – at the expense of democratic freedoms and social justice. Engdahl’s book presents a frightening view of the future, arriving much sooner than most think.

Introduction

After the Soviet Union’s dissolution in late 1989, America had a choice. As the sole remaining superpower, it could have worked for a new era of peace and prosperity, ended decades of Cold War tensions, halted the insane arms race, turned swords into plowshares, and diverted hundreds of billions annually from “defense” to “rebuild(ing) civilian infrastructure and repair(ing) impoverished cities.”

Instead, Washington, under GHW Bush and his successors, “chose stealth, deception, lies and wars to attempt to control the Eurasian Heartland – its only potential rival as an economic region – by military (political, and economic) force,” and by extension planet earth through an agenda later called “full spectrum dominance.”

Newly obtained MoD emails reveal alarm over the discovery that Wikileaks is freely publishing manuals that are used by patrols in Iraq.

One email says: “There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands. Not just UK MoD but other places as well. Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was ‘restricted’ … It is huge.”

Dismay was sparked by the discovery that Wikileaks had posted copies of a 2007 manual on UK tactics for Iraq and Afghanistan, and a handbook on Istar (intelligence surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance) on its website.

The Iraq “stability operations” manual contains details on how to organise roadblocks, conduct searches and tackle suicide bombers, advising: “Immediate incapacitation of the suicide bomber, using lethal force, is likely to be the only means of stopping him.”

The manual contains “cultural awareness” advice on Arab and Afghan etiquette, warning soldiers that it is “very rude” to make the thumbs-up sign in Afghanistan. It advises: “Feel free to return a hug or kiss on the cheek, initiated by an Iraqi man. This is a sign of friendship, not homosexuality.”

“Restricted” is the lowest level of security classification, but MoD officials feared that terminals at some of Britain’s 1,100 military locations were being used by disaffected soldiers to email copies of the documents.

After an “urgent” investigation, one unnamed official warned that it “might be quite tricky to block” because Wikileaks has a variety of domain names.

The MoD’s directorate of information, headed by John Taylor, nevertheless went ahead and instructed BT, which has a private contract to manage the military’s landlines, to block access to Wikileaks and one of their main servers in Sweden.

A Wikileaks source said yesterday: “Wikileaks has many alternative names. MoD site blocking has not prevented dissident MoD staff providing us with material exposing the UK involvement in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Asked why it had blocked access to Wikileaks, an MoD spokesman told the Guardian: “MoD staff are unable to access Wikileaks because there is no compelling business reason to have the facility.”