Problems with Alaska's new touchscreen voting machines slowed election returns Tuesday and caused elections officials to hand count and manually upload vote totals from several precincts across the state.

Election officials worked into the early morning hours manually uploading the information from those precincts into the overall election results.

"We've got new technology. Particularly in rural Alaska, we're going from the paper ballot to cutting-edge technology and the entire process is being slowed down," said Division of Elections Director Whitney Brewster.

"I can say there are many systematic problems with Diebold machines that have been identified in many contexts," Brown said. "That there were technical glitches with the machines is not surprising, and it's one indication of the kinds of things that can go wrong with the machines and it's something to be concerned about."

The Diebold electronic voting machines nationwide have been criticized by voter groups and computer scientists who say they are vulnerable to fraud. Diebold has defended the machines, saying they are secure when elections officials follow proper procedures.

Mardin Amin, 29, was en route to Turkey on 16 August with his dear old ma and two small children when a female security operative extracted a "small, black, squeezable rubber object" from his backpack. Since he was standing next to his mum, Amin decided to whisper out of the corner of his mouth that it was a "pump". The guard misheard it as "bomb", with inevitable consequences.

That, at least, was the version offered yesterday by Amin's defense attorney, Eileen O'Neill-Burke, in the Cook County courtroom where the pneumatic defendant sought to clarify the misunderstanding. As "snickering police officers watched the court proceedings", O'Neill-Burke explained: "He told her it's a pump. He's standing with his mother. Of course he's not going to shout this out."

On Wednesday, the company's services division filed a lawsuit in U.S district court in San Antonio, Texas, to block 25 unnamed "John Doe" defendants who have allegedly pretended to be customers to gain access to account information.

AT&T customers affected by the data breach have been notified and access to their online accounts has been frozen, the company said.

"Regrettably, there are always people looking for ways to circumvent the system," Priscilla Hill-Ardoin, chief privacy officer for AT&T, said in a statement. "But we intend to remain vigilant in order to keep our customers' information secure."

When trap-jaw ants need to get out quick, they use their heads, not their legs to escape. This large species of Costa Rican ant smashes its jaw into the ground, causing the ant to catapult up and away from danger.

Videos of Odontomachus bauri show that this ant can propel itself 8 centimetres up into the air using jaws that snap shut at a speed of nearly 65 metres per second - perhaps the fastest predatory strike measured.

The snapping jaw gives the ants a bizarre multi-purpose tool for hunting and defence. The ants often approach other insects with their jaws cocked open. Snapping them shut can both give the ant a quick escape and also knock down the combatant, stunning it so the ant can come back with a successful attack.

Helped by these skills, O. bauri thrives throughout Central and South America. They are amazing because of the way they work together to stay safe, says Fisher. "A group of ants can confuse predators by performing multiple, simultaneous escape jumps, creating what I call the popcorn effect."

Two men removed from a Monarch Airlines flight from Malaga to Manchester last Wednesday were targeted because of passenger concerns over their behaviour and the fact that they may have been speaking Arabic, the BBC reports.

Monarch Airlines said passengers had "demanded the men were removed because they were acting suspiciously". Passenger Heath Schofield explained to the BBC: "We all started boarding the flight. Our daughter noticed a couple of guys that were perhaps acting a bit strange. They went to the front of the queue, went to the back of the queue, and then they went and sat down by themselves."

"It became apparent that the reason that some of the people didn't board the plane was because somebody had overheard the gentlemen in question speaking - I think it was Arabic."

At least 800 volunteers will be needed for China's second and third phases of AIDS vaccine trials, health officials said Friday.

The second phase of clinical trials of China's AIDS vaccine would need at least 300 volunteers and the third phase at least 500, said Sang Guowei, director of the National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products.

The first phase of clinical trials indicates China's first AIDS vaccine is safe and possibly effective, government officials announced at the press conference after a two-month-odd assessment.

"Forty-nine healthy people who received the injection showed no severe adverse reactions after 180 days, proving the vaccine was safe," said Zhang Wei, head of the pharmaceutical registration department of the SFDA.

"The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," he told the press conference.

Among teens aged 12 to 17 who were polled, 69 percent said they thought it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21 percent said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music for free. Similarly, 58 percent thought it was legal to copy a friend's purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19 percent thought copying was legal if the movie wasn't purchased.

Those figures are a big problem for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have spent millions of dollars to deter copying of any kind. The music industry now considers so-called "schoolyard" piracy -- copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates -- a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA.

"We've made substantial progress educating people that downloading copyrighted music for free is illegal," says Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman. "But we still confront a significant challenge educating kids that copying a CD for a friend is also a crime. This is a major focus for the entire industry."

A judge has told the Bush administration that its domestic wiretap programme violates American civil rights and has ordered it to stop.

US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the wiretaps under a five-year-old "Terrorist Surveillance Program" violated freedom of speech, and protections against unreasonable searches.

She said that the Bush administration had flouted a constitutional check on the power of the presidency.

She added that there were no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.

Not surprisingly the US government has appealed saying that the programme is protecting people from terrorism.

Harbored by a country where 1.2 million out of 9 million citizens tell the census that they engage in file sharing, the Pirate Bay is as much a national symbol as it is a website. Protected by weak Swedish copyright laws, the Bay survived and grew as movie studio lawyers felled competing BitTorrent trackers one-by-one. Today it boasts an international user base and easily clears 1 million unique visitors a day. New movies sometimes appear at the top of the site's most-popular list before flickering onto a single theater screen.

So when, on May 31, Swedish police finally arrived with a search warrant and carted off enough servers to fill three rental trucks, the entertainment industry was quick to proclaim victory. The Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release announcing a milestone.

So fast was the Bay's rebound that some news articles reporting the site's demise went to print after it was back up, recalls Peter. The resuscitated site had a few glitches, but the resurrection was remarkable in that it had never really happened before; when the major American rights holders take a website down, it stays down. The pirates delivered a victory message to the MPAA, and the Swedish equivalent, APB, through the site's reverse-DNS, which now read: hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org.

Remember Captain Copyright? The educational program up in Canada that appeared to tell an incredibly one-sided story concerning copyrights to children? Yes, the same one who may have "copied" his entire idea from a different Captain Copyright and who was violating the copyright of others while also claiming you couldn't link to the site if you said anything negative and you couldn't even make use of fair use copying of text from the site.

Turns out the folks who created this bumbling hero are now saying they've heard the critics and are about to do a total rewrite of the Captain Copyright concept, including a much more balanced look at copyright issues -- though, as Michael Geist notes, this only comes after a bunch of schools dumped their links to Captain Copyright's site and the group behind it is getting worried about losing some funding. Geist also points out that the explanation for the bizarre and totally unenforceable linking policy makes no sense. The group claims it was put in place to "protect children from inappropriate content." Ah, right, the ever popular "to protect the children" excuse. Of course, it's hard to see how banning inbound links protects any children at all.