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The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

Both the former analyst’s account and the rising concern among some members of Congress about the N.S.A.’s recent operation are raising fresh questions about the spy agency.

Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, has been investigating the incidents and said he had become increasingly troubled by the agency’s handling of domestic communications.

In an interview, Mr. Holt disputed assertions by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was inadvertent.

“Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental,” Mr. Holt said.

Other Congressional officials raised similar concerns but would not agree to be quoted for the record.

Mr. Holt added that few lawmakers could challenge the agency’s statements because so few understood the technical complexities of its surveillance operations. “The people making the policy,” he said, “don’t understand the technicalities.”

The inquiries and analyst’s account underscore how e-mail messages, more so than telephone calls, have proved to be a particularly vexing problem for the agency because of technological difficulties in distinguishing between e-mail messages by foreigners and by Americans. A new law enacted by Congress last year gave the N.S.A. greater legal leeway to collect the private communications of Americans so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals “reasonably believed” to be overseas.

But after closed-door hearings by three Congressional panels, some lawmakers are asking what the tolerable limits are for such incidental collection and whether the privacy of Americans is being adequately protected.

“For the Hill, the issue is a sense of scale, about how much domestic e-mail collection is acceptable,” a former intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because N.S.A. operations are classified. “It’s a question of how many mistakes they can allow.”

While the extent of Congressional concerns about the N.S.A. has not been shared publicly, such concerns are among national security issues that the Obama administration has inherited from the Bush administration, including the use of brutal interrogation tactics, the fate of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and whether to block the release of photographs and documents that show abuse of detainees.

In each case, the administration has had to navigate the politics of continuing an aggressive intelligence operation while placating supporters who want an end to what they see as flagrant abuses of the Bush era.

The N.S.A. declined to comment for this article. Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Dennis C. Blair, the national intelligence director, said that because of the complex nature of surveillance and the need to adhere to the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret panel that oversees surveillance operation, and “other relevant laws and procedures, technical or inadvertent errors can occur.”

“When such errors are identified,” Ms. Morigi said, “they are reported to the appropriate officials, and corrective measures are taken.”

In April, the Obama administration said it had taken comprehensive steps to bring the security agency into compliance with the law after a periodic review turned up problems with “overcollection” of domestic communications. The Justice Department also said it had installed new safeguards.

Under the surveillance program, before the N.S.A. can target and monitor the e-mail messages or telephone calls of Americans suspected of having links to international terrorism, it must get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Supporters of the agency say that in using computers to sweep up millions of electronic messages, it is unavoidable that some innocent discussions of Americans will be examined. Intelligence operators are supposed to filter those out, but critics say the agency is not rigorous enough in doing so.

The N.S.A. is believed to have gone beyond legal boundaries designed to protect Americans in about 8 to 10 separate court orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to three intelligence officials who spoke anonymously because disclosing such information is illegal. Because each court order could single out hundreds or even thousands of phone numbers or e-mail addresses, the number of individual communications that were improperly collected could number in the millions, officials said. (It is not clear what portion of total court orders or communications that would represent.)

“Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” one senior intelligence official said. “That is the kind of problem they had.”

Overcollection on that scale could lead to a significant number of privacy invasions of American citizens, officials acknowledge, setting off the concerns among lawmakers and on the secret FISA court.

“The court was not happy” when it learned of the overcollection, said an administration official involved in the matter.

Defenders of the agency say it faces daunting obstacles in trying to avoid the improper gathering or reading of Americans’ e-mail as part of counterterrorism efforts aimed at foreigners.

Several former intelligence officials said that e-mail traffic from all over the world often flows through Internet service providers based in the United States. And when the N.S.A. monitors a foreign e-mail address, it has no idea when the person using that address will send messages to someone inside the United States, the officials said.

The difficulty of distinguishing between e-mail messages involving foreigners from those involving Americans was “one of the main things that drove” the Bush administration to push for a more flexible law in 2008, said Kenneth L. Wainstein, the homeland security adviser under President George W. Bush. That measure, which also resolved the long controversy over N.S.A.’s program of wiretapping without warrants by offering immunity to telecommunications companies, tacitly acknowledged that some amount of Americans’ e-mail would inevitably be captured by the N.S.A.

But even before that, the agency appears to have tolerated significant collection and examination of domestic e-mail messages without warrants, according to the former analyst, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

He said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

Other intelligence officials confirmed the existence of the Pinwale e-mail database, but declined to provide further details.

The recent concerns about N.S.A.’s domestic e-mail collection follow years of unresolved legal and operational concerns within the government over the issue. Current and former officials now say that the tracing of vast amounts of American e-mail traffic was at the heart of a crisis in 2004 at the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, as top Justice Department aides staged a near revolt over what they viewed as possibly illegal aspects of the N.S.A.’s surveillance operations.

James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, and his aides were concerned about the collection of “meta-data” of American e-mail messages, which show broad patterns of e-mail traffic by identifying who is e-mailing whom, current and former officials say. Lawyers at the Justice Department believed that the tracing of e-mail messages appeared to violate federal law.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

Updated: CREW says it filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. Here’s a copy of CREW’s complaint.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday she is urging school superintendents around the country to spend the summer preparing for that possibility, if the government goes ahead with mass vaccinations.

“If you think about vaccinating kids, schools are the logical place,” Sebelius told The Associated Press.

No decision has been made yet on whether and how to vaccinate millions of Americans against the new flu strain that the World Health Organization last week formally dubbed a pandemic, meaning it now is circulating the globe unchecked. But the U.S. is pouring money into development of a vaccine in anticipation of giving at least some people the shots.

While swine flu doesn’t yet seem any more lethal than the regular flu that each winter kills 36,000 people in the U.S. alone, scientists fear it may morph into a more dangerous type. Even in its current form, the WHO says about half of the more than 160 people worldwide killed by swine flu so far were previously young and healthy.

“It was pitch black outside and you could see people looking out from the office towers across the road from us,” McDonell said.

“In a couple of the photos you can see a clock in the distance showing it was around 11:30 am local time.”

The storms were expected to affect western and northern Xinjiang, most part of Inner Mongolia, north-east China and north China.

Today’s extreme weather follows yesterday’s hail storms across eastern China’s Anhui province, which killed 14 people and injured more than 180, AFP reports.

Anhui’s Civil Affairs Bureau said that more than 10,000 people were evacuated and nearly 9,700 houses collapsed in yesterday’s severe storm.

Anhui was struck by hail and winds of up to 104 kilometres per hour, causing $82 million worth of damage.

A similar hail storm struck the region in the first week of June, killing 23 people and injuring more than 200.

The ideas for alternative-style worship are part of an initiative launched by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to appeal to the younger generation.

They are set out in a new book compiled by the Church’s Fresh Expressions programme, which aims to boost church attendance with more relevant and exciting services.

However, traditionalists have criticised the unorthodox services as “pointless” and “shallow”, and have warned that experimenting with Church tradition would do more harm than good.

One Holy Communion service promoted in the book, called Ancient Faith, Future Mission, begins with the congregation being shown a video clip from the YouTube website about a United Nations anti-poverty campaign.

Worshippers are told that “our planet is messed up” and that “things are not right”.

The Rev Sue Wallace, who has pioneered the event by blending modern technology with ancient prayers, says that the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Many of the services promoted in the book feature physical activity and symbols alongside traditional sermons.

In chapter of the book, Archbishop Williams says: “The Bible is full of stories about God communicating through act and sign as well as language … Far from being bound to communication through clear information economically expressed in words, our society is still deeply sensitive to symbols and inclined to express important feelings and perceptions in this way.”

The Fresh Expressions initiative was launched by the Archbishop in 2004 to combat the significant drop in churchgoing that has been seen in Britian over recent decades. In the past few years the decline appears to have steadied.

Church leaders are particularly concerned about the loss of younger people, who are abandoning the pews at a greater rate than their older counterparts.

The Rt Rev Graham Cray, who heads the Fresh Expressions initiative, said that it was vital that the Church explored new ways of engaging with modern culture.

“We have to reconnect with a very large percentage of the population that has no contact or interest in traditional church,” he said.

“It is important to offer spirituality to people who are offered a multi-choice lifestyle and who think that the last place they’ll find it is in church.”

He said that the new services were carefully designed for specific communities and stressed they was not supposed to challenge traditional worship.

However, the Rev David Houlding, prebendary at St Paul’s Cathedral, bemoaned the Church’s attempt to widen its appeal.

“All this is tosh. It’s just a passing fad, irrelevant, shallow and pointless,” he said.

“There’s no depth to it and it’s embarrassing because it’ll make people think that we’re eccentric and silly.”

The goal of the project is to curb the transmission of HIV in two of the AIDS hotspots of the world, as circumcision has been shown to more than halve the risk of men becoming infected.

Funded for five years through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the programme is the first to massively scale up provision of circumcision by fully trained medical practitioners.

Traditional methods of circumcision sometimes harm and even kill boys and young men. The network of 250 teams of providers will be managed by Population Services International, a global health organisation based in Washington, DC.

“It’s great news, and this is exactly what’s needed,” says Catherine Hankins, chief scientific adviser at UNAIDS. “We’ve been working on development of guidance and technical support, and these development partners are now being funded to take it forward,” says Haskins.

Hankins said that Kenya has the most advanced programme, with 20,000 men newly circumcised, and plans are also well-advanced in Botswana and Namibia. But she stressed that circumcision can’t alone protect men or women against HIV, and that circumcised men should still take additional precautions, such as wearing condoms and not engaging in risky or promiscuous sex.

“What we need now is a dramatic change in world political thought,” said President Ahmadinejad in a Tuesday address to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Moscow.

“Western-style capitalism is falling apart, marking the end of the age of Imperialism,” he added.

The first “anti-stab” knife will soon go on sale in Britain and has been designed to work as normal in the kitchen, but be ineffective as a weapon.

…

The knife has a unique “combination tip” that reduces the risk of injury. The tip has a rounded edge instead of a point and the blade for cutting is underneath. While it can chop vegetables, the tip makes penetration more difficult. It also snags on clothing and skin, making it very unlikely to inflict a fatal wound.

Doctors have lobbied in the past for kitchen knives to be redesigned. They argue that while a redesign is not a complete solution to the complex problem of knife crime, it could help to save lives.

The law is expected to make lenders try harder to keep borrowers in their homes. Lenders must prove they tried to modify the delinquent loans before they can begin foreclosing.

But supporters acknowledge the California Foreclosure Prevention Act won’t stop thousands of foreclosures from eventually happening. There have been more than 365,000 foreclosures in California since early 2007, with many more already scheduled.