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The couple and their three children were put under surveillance without their knowledge for more than two weeks using powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

The family only found out about the spying when a school admissions manager told them.

The authority said it used the legislation to watch the family at home and in their daily movements because it wanted to know if they lived in the catchment area for a school which their three-year-old daughter wanted to attend.

Human rights pressure group Liberty called the spying “disproportionate” and “intrusive”.

James Welch, legal director for Liberty said: “It’s one thing to use covert surveillance in operations investigating terrorism and other serious crimes, but it has come to a pretty pass when this kind of intrusive activity is used to police school catchment areas.

“This is a ridiculously disproportionate use of RIPA and will undermine public trust in necessary and lawful surveillance.”

The anonymous mother told the Bournemouth Echo she was shown the surveillance record, listing her movements from February 13 to March 3, including school runs with her children and the routes they drove.

The angry family told the newspaper the surveillance team wrote down detailed notes such as “female and three children enter target vehicle and drive off” and “curtains open and all lights on in premises”.

The outbreak of the viral disease came despite the widespread use of a second dose of a mumps vaccine, produced by Merck, beginning in 1990.

Securities firms can borrow against collateralized loan obligations at the Federal Reserve’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the analysts said. The Fed set up the facility last month, its first extension of credit to non-banks since the Great Depression.

The creation last month of CLOs comprised of loans for private-equity buyouts or other leveraged loans to larger companies totaling $11.4 billion ended “the deep freeze” in the market, and many arose from unusual motives, today’s report said. “At least one” recent CLO was probably done to take advantage of the Fed’s new facility, it said.

“It’s not cheap to finance loans today in the market,” Vishwanath Tirupattur, a Morgan Stanley analyst in New York, said in a telephone interview.

At first, the decision threw Flagler Productions Inc. into a panic. Now it’s Wal-Mart that’s squirming.

In recent months, Flagler has opened its trove of some 15,000 Wal-Mart tapes to the outside world, with an eye toward selling clips. The material is proving irresistible to everyone from business historians and documentary filmmakers to plaintiffs lawyers and union organizers.

Among the revealing moments: A former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company’s corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in its stores. In 1991, founder Sam Walton describes Hillary Clinton, then a Wal-Mart director, as “one of us.”

The best part, maintains plaintiffs lawyer Gene P. Graham Jr., is that “Wal-Mart has no control over this stuff.”

The world’s third-largest company by market value fell as much as 12 percent, the most since 1987, in New York trading after GE also cut the forecast that Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt once told investors was “in the bag” for 2008.

“We hate disappointing investors,” Immelt said in an interview on the company-owned CNBC television network. “It’s not part of the company. It’s not part of the culture. We take accountability for that.”

Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company’s desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.

Winkler says he and his team were hired by the power company, which he would not name, to test the security of its network and the power grid it oversees. He would not say when the test was done, but referred to the timeframe as “now.” The company called off the test after the team took over the machines.

Not one hand went up.

This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.

I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.

I nodded charitably, then attempted to define the word in its more public context. I described specific accounts of U.S. abductions of foreign citizens, of the likely treatment accorded such prisoners when placed in the hands of countries like Syria and Egypt, of the months and years of detention. I spoke of the lack of formal charges, of some prisoners’ eventual release and how their subsequent lawsuits against the U.S. government were stymied in the name of national security and secrecy.

The students were visibly disturbed. They expressed astonishment, then revulsion. They asked how such practices could go on.

I told them to look around the room at one another’s faces; they were seated next to the answer. I suggested that they were, in part, the reason that rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo detention, warrantless searches and intercepts, and a host of other such practices have not been more roundly discredited. I admit it was harsh.

That instance was no aberration. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don’t know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Power for 2009 in Germany, Europe’s biggest electricity market, climbed to a record 65.50 euros ($105) a megawatt hour, gaining 1.2 percent, according to broker GFI Group Inc. The contract traded at 65.25 euros at 3:35 p.m. Berlin time. French, Dutch and U.K. contracts also rose to records.

European electricity prices are in the third year of a rally as the price of oil is surging and after the introduction of the European Union’s emissions-trading program. The increased costs for the continent’s 306 million people and industry may dent an economy that’s being threatened by a possible U.S. recession and add to inflation pressures.

“Commercial and industrial users will definitely have to pay these prices, and the broader public too,” said Per Lekander, a utilities analyst at UBS AG in London today. “It’s short-term pain and long-term gain for the utilities.”