China has named the female astronaut who on Saturday is set to become the nation's first woman in space.
Liu Yang, 33, an air force pilot, will join two male colleagues on board the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft, state-run news agency Xinhua says.
The spacecraft will dock with the Tiangong 1 space station module, as China bids to establish a permanent space base in orbit.
Liu will work on the mission with astronauts Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang.
"From day one I have been told I am no different from the male astronauts," Ms Liu was quoted by state broadcaster CCTV as saying before her assignment was announced.
"I believe in persevering. If you persevere, success lies ahead of you," she said.
Xinhua, which describes her as a veteran pilot who enlisted in the People's Liberation Army in 1997, said she was recruited to be an astronaut in May 2010.
The Shenzhou 9 mission, China's fourth manned space flight and its first since 2008, is expected to blast-off at 18:37 local time (10:37 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in China's north-west Gansu province.
The astronauts aboard the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft will dock with the Tiangong 1 - an experimental module currently orbiting Earth - and carry out scientific experiments on board.
Last year, China completed a complicated space docking manoeuvre when an unmanned craft docked with the Tiangong 1, or Heavenly Body, by remote control.
This is China's first manned space docking mission, Xinhua says.
Culled from BBC
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China suspended three officials and apologized to a woman who was forced to undergo an abortion seven months into her pregnancy in a case that sparked a public uproar after graphic photos of the mother and her dead baby were circulated online.
The case has renewed criticism of China's widely hated one-child limit, which, while designed to control the country's exploding population, has led to often violently imposed forced abortions and sterilizations as local authorities pursue birth quotas set by Beijing.
Feng Jianmei, 27, was beaten by officials and forced to abort the baby at seven months on June 2 because her family could not afford a 40,000 yuan ($6,300) fine for having a second child, Chinese media reported this week.
Photos of her and the reportedly stillborn baby lying on a hospital bed were posted online and went viral, triggering a public outpouring of sympathy and outrage.
The government of Ankang city, where Feng lives in northwest China's Shaanxi province, said a deputy mayor visited Feng and her husband in the hospital, apologized to them and said officials would be suspended amid an investigation.
"Today, I am here on behalf of the municipal government to see you and express our sincere apology to you. I hope to get your understanding," Deputy Mayor Du Shouping said, according to a statement on the city government's website Friday.
The official Xinhua News Agency says three officials would be relieved of their duties: two top local family planning officials and the head of the township government.
Xinhua said Feng was not legally entitled to a second child under China's one-child limit, but added that late-term abortions are prohibited due to the risk of causing physical injury to the mother.
"The correct way to deal with the case would have been for local officials to allow her to deliver the baby first, and then mete out punishment according to regulations," the agency quoted an anonymous provincial family planning official as saying.
Abuses by family planning officials are often a target for popular frustration, especially amid a growing sense among better-off Chinese that the government has no right to dictate how many children people should have.
One reason that activist Chen Guangcheng enjoys a wider appeal within China than many other activists is that he and his wife documented complaints about forced abortions and sterilizations in the city that oversees his village. Among the cases were several women who said they were forced to have abortions within days of their due dates.
The couple's efforts angered local leaders. Chen was jailed and later placed under illegal house arrest, from which he fled six weeks ago in a daring escape. He is now living in New York with his wife and two young children.
The government says the one-child policy has prevented an additional 400 million births in the world's most populous country of 1.3 billion.
Critics of the controls point out that it leads to a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio. Families abort girls out of a traditional preference for male heirs.
Culled from AL-JAZEERA
The father-in-law of missing Utah woman Susan Powell is due to be sentenced in a Washington State court on Friday 15th June for recording images of two young neighbor girls in their bathroom.
Pierce County prosecutors are asking for an exceptional sentence of 10 years for Steven Powell on Friday. His attorneys are seeking zero to 12 months, saying it's not clear exactly when Powell took the pictures, and it could have been before the state made voyeurism a ranked felony in 2006.
The 62-year-old was convicted last month of 14 counts.
Powell is the father-in-law of Susan Powell, who disappeared from her home in West Valley City, Utah, in late 2009. His son — her husband — Josh Powell killed himself and two sons in a February fire at a home in Graham.
Culled from FOXNEWS
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Nationwide outrage continued to grow Thursday in China over a late-term abortion forced upon a woman by local family planning officials, even as authorities pledged to punish those responsible.
Feng Jianmei, 22, was illegally detained on May 30 in rural Shaanxi Province and coerced to undergo the procedure three days later in the seventh month of pregnancy.
Deng, a 29-year-old farmer, said he was trying to secure a birth permit up to the last minute but could not afford to pay the fine of 40,000 yuan ($6,300) demanded by the officials. He added that his wife remained traumatized in hospital.
The couple married in 2006 and Feng gave birth to a girl in 2007, local officials said in a statement. Under China's strict family planning law, which limits most married couples to only one child, Feng and Deng are ineligible to have a second child.
Graphic photos taken after the abortion showing a bloody baby lying next to Feng in a hospital bed have been circulating online and shocked Chinese netizens, prompting rare domestic media coverage and public debate on one of the country's most controversial policies.
After initially insisting the operation was voluntary, local officials acknowledged Thursday that the forced abortion was illegal.
Deng, the husband, told CNN that no officials above the county level had visited the family. He said village leaders who had shown up asked the family "not to hype the incident."
Deng himself has opened a Weibo account, posting developments and venting frustrations. His profile picture is one of the post-abortion photos of his wife, with the baby's image blurred, that have jolted the nation.
China's "one child" policy was recently thrown into the international spotlight when prominent human rights activist Chen Guangcheng escaped his house arrest and moved to New York. Chen's supporters maintain his long-time legal advocacy for victims of forced abortions and sterilizations had led to his persecution.
Since the government introduced the policy in the late 1970s to curb population growth in the world's most populous nation, millions of women have been forced to end their "illegal pregnancies." The number of "family planning abortions" peaked in 1983 with 14.37 million operations performed that year, according to the Health Ministry. Since 2000, such abortions have numbered about 7 million a year -- with a spike in 2008 to 9.17 million cases.
Culled from CNN
An asteroid the size of a city block is set to fly by Earth Thursday (June 14), and you may be able to watch it happen live.
The near-Earth asteroid 2012 LZ1, which astronomers think is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, will come within 14 lunar distances of Earth Thursday evening. While there's no danger of an impact on this pass, the huge space rock may come close enough to be caught on camera.
That's what the team running the Slooh Space Camera thinks, anyway. The online skywatching service will train a telescope on the Canary Islands on 2012 LZ1 and stream the footage live, beginning at 8:00 p.m. EDT Thursday (0000 GMT Friday).
2012 LZ1 just popped onto astronomers' radar this week. It was discovered on the night of June 10-11 by Rob McNaught and his colleagues, who were peering through the Uppsala Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
Researchers estimate that the space rock is between 1,000 and 2,300 feet wide (300-700 m). On Thursday evening, it will come within about 3.35 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) of our planet, or roughly 14 times the distance between Earth and the moon.
Because of its size and proximity to Earth, 2012 LZ1 qualifies as a potentially hazardous asteroid. Near-Earth asteroids generally have to be at least 500 feet (150 m) wide and come within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet to be classified as potentially hazardous.
2012 LZ1 is roughly the same size as asteroid 2005 YU55, which made a much-anticipated flyby of Earth last November. But 2005 YU55 gave our planet a much closer shave, coming within 202,000 miles (325,000 km) of us on the evening of Nov. 8. A space rock as big as 2005 YU55 hadn't come so close to Earth since 1976, researchers said.
Astronomers have identified nearly 9,000 near-Earth asteroids, but they think many more are out there, waiting to be discovered.
Culled from FOXNEWS
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British undercover police officers can start sexual relationships with suspected criminals if it means they are more plausible , a minister said on Wednesday. Home office minister Nick Herbert said that under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 officers were permitted to have sex as part of their job.
There had been confusion about whether undercover police were allowed to go that far following the collapse of a case against environmental activists in Nottinghamshire. It emerged that the group was infiltrated by an officer called Mark Kennedy, who had been in sexual relationships with two women in the campaign, The Telegraph reported. Kennedy spent seven years posing as long-haired dropout climber Mark 'Flash' Stone to infiltrate activists and admitted having sex with women during the operation.
Speaking in a debate in Westminster Hall, Herbert said it was important police were allowed to have sex with activists because otherwise it could be used as a way of outing potential undercover officers.
"But this would depend on the circumstances of each individual case and consideration should always be given to seeking legal advice."
Culled from TIMES OF INDIA
A Mumbai-born Indian doctor Suchitra Holgersson made a landmark breakthrough in medical science, as the first biologically tissue-engineered vein grown from a patient's own stem cells has been successfully transplanted into a 10-year-old girl with portal vein obstruction, dramatically enhancing her quality of life, reports The Lancet.
The report says, a team of doctors, funded by the Swedish government, grew veins in test tubes and successfully transplanted them in a Swedish child.
The report says, "a 10 year old girl with extrahepatic portal vein obstruction was admitted to the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, for a bypass procedure between the superior mesenteric vein and the intrahepatic left portal vein. A 9 cm segment of allogeneic donor iliac vein was decellularised and subsequently recellularised with endothelial and smooth muscle cells differentiated from stem cells obtained from the bone marrow of the recipient. This graft was used because the patient's umbilical vein was not suitable and other strategies, like liver transplantation, require lifelong immunosuppression." The results could offer hope of growing human cells in laboratory and a potential new way for patients lacking healthy veins to undergo dialysis or heart bypass surgery without the problems of synthetic grafts (that are prone to clots and blockages) or the need for lifelong immunosuppressive drugs.
Culled from NDTV
A Tunisian military court has convicted the former President in absentia of inciting violence and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in a month-long popular uprising last year and fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011.
Ben Ali's Wednesday conviction was for an incident, the day after he left when security forces opened fire on protesters in the central town of Ouardanine, killing four. Ben Ali has already been convicted of drug trafficking, illegal arms trading and abuse of the public funds and sentenced to 66 years in prison by a civilian court.
At least 338 people died in the uprising and another 2,147 were wounded.
Culled from NDTV
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Tens of thousands of Russians flooded Moscow’s tree-lined boulevards today- Tuesday in the first massive protest against President Vladimir Putin’s rule since his inauguration in May — a rally that came even as police interrogated key opposition leaders. Since embarking on his third presidential term, Putin has taken a stern stance toward the opposition, including signing a repressive new bill last week introducing heavy penalties for taking part in unauthorized rallies.
Police on Monday searched opposition leaders’ apartments, carting away computers, cellphones and other personal items. They also demanded that opposition leaders come in for questioning Tuesday just an hour before the rally began — widely seen as a crude attempt by the government to scare the protesters.
The march was being held on Russia Day, a national holiday that honors June 12, 1990, when Russian lawmakers decided that Russian laws should take priority over Soviet Union laws. The Soviet Union then collapsed in 1991.
Leftist politician Sergei Udaltsov snubbed the summons, saying he considered it his duty to lead the protest as one of its organizers. Russia’s Investigative Committee said it wouldn’t immediately seek his arrest but would interrogate him later.
Udaltsov said he and another opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, were handed summons by police right at the rally.
Culled from Chicago SUN Times
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Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, has died at age 78.
University spokesman Steve Hinnefeld said Ostrom died from cancer Tuesday morning at a Bloomington hospital.
Hinnefeld says the school was informed of Ostrom’s death by her longtime friend and IU colleague, Michael McGinnis, a professor of political science.
Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics with Oliver Williamson from the University of California, Berkeley. Both researchers were honored for analyzing the rules by which people exercise authority in companies and economic systems.
Ostrom had been an Indiana University faculty member since 1965.
Culled from Chicago Sun Times
A police union has said that three Saudi women who refused to remove their face veils at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport have been barred entry to France.
A 2011 French law bans people from wearing Islamic face-covering veils anywhere in public.
An official with the SGP-FO police union said on Tuesday that border police asked the women to remove their veils after they arrived on Monday on a flight from Doha, Qatar. The official said the women refused, the border police refused them entry in France, and they returned to Doha on Monday night. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly for the police.
Supporters of the ban say the veil contradicts France's principles of secularism and women's rights. Some Muslim groups say it stigmatises moderate Muslims.
Culled from TIMES OF INDIA
South African President Jacob Zuma has fired police chief Gen Bheki Cele, who had been accused of corruption.
Mr Zuma told a press conference in Pretoria he had "decided to release Gen Cele of his duties".
Gen Cele was suspended in October after it emerged that he had been implicated in alleged unlawful property deals - he had denied any wrongdoing.
He played a key role in Mr Zuma's hard-fought campaign to be elected president in 2009.
Last year a South African corruption investigator, Thuli Madonsela, ruled that police buildings were leased from a company at inflated prices.
Ms Madonsela - who is South Africa's public protector, a role similar to that of an ombudsman - accused Gen Cele of being among those who were ultimately responsible for the "fatally flawed" deals.
She investigated leases for buildings intended to serve as police headquarters in the capital, Pretoria, and the eastern city of Durban.
She ruled that the government paid the company inflated prices, concluding that the deals were "illegitimate".
Gen Cele was promoted to become police chief in 2010, when his predecessor Jackie Selebi was convicted of taking $156,000 (£100,378) in bribes from drug dealer Glenn Agliotti.
Culled from BBC
The commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan apologized Friday for civilian deaths in a coalition airstrike earlier this week -- the first confirmation by NATO forces that civilians were killed in the operation.
Marine Gen. John Allen flew to Logar province to personally deliver his regrets to villagers and provincial officials for the deaths of women, children and village elders in Wednesday's pre-dawn raid to capture a Taliban operative.
Afghan officials have said the airstrike called in by NATO troops killed 18 civilians.
"I know that no apology can bring back the lives of the children or the people who perished in this tragedy and this accident,
but I want you to know that you have my apology and we will do the right thing by the families," Allen told the group of about two dozen Afghans gathered at a base at the provincial capital of Pul-i-Alam.
NATO and Afghan officials have said the troops were on an operation to capture a Taliban leader who had holed up in the house in Baraki Barak district's Sajawand village. As they tried to breach the compound, they came under fire and fought back, eventually calling in an airstrike.
Villagers have said there was a wedding at the house the evening before and that it was full of families visiting for the celebration. The morning after the bombing, they piled the bodies of the dead into vans and drove them to the provincial capital to protest the strike.
An Afghan doctor who examined the bodies and interviewed two women injured in the airstrike said a group of Taliban fighters decided to spend the night in the house because they thought the wedding would provide them cover. When NATO and Afghan troops started advancing on the house in the middle of the night, they called out for civilians to come out, but the insurgents didn't allow them to leave, said Wali Wakil.
"The Taliban stopped them from getting out of the house," Wakil said. He said the 18 dead civilians including four women, two old men, three teenage boys and nine young children. Six Taliban fighters were also killed, Wakil said, citing the witnesses.
Allen said that the troops did not know that there were civilians inside the house when they called in the airstrike.
"They were taken under fire. A hand grenade was thrown. Three of our people were wounded. We called for the people who were shooting to come out and then the situation became more grave and innocent people were killed," he told The Associated Press after talking with the group gathered in Logar.
"Our weapons killed these people," Allen said.
In Logar, Allen met with the governor before taking his message to the assembled group of Baraki Barak residents and local officials. He invoked his own family, saying that he kept seeing the faces of his own children as he thought about the children who had been killed.
Nighttime raids on militants taking cover in villages have been a repeated source of strain between the Afghan government, which says the raids put civilians in the crossfire, and its international allies, who say such operations are key to capturing and killing insurgent leaders.
A deal signed in April was supposed to resolve the issue by putting the Afghan government in charge of such operations and the troops involved in Wednesday raid included both NATO and Afghan military. But Afghan President Hamid Karzai has put the blame for this week's deaths squarely on the international coalition, condemning their actions and calling for them to give a full account of how civilians ended up dead.
Culled from FOXNEWS
The Nigeria Police Force Headquarters in Maiduguri, Borno State, was on Friday afternoon struck by a bomb explosion.
Eyewitnesses said a suspected suicide bomber drove a bomb-laden car into the headquarters.
The car exploded at the gate of the Borno State police command on Damaturu road, directly opposite Government Secondary school in Maiduguri.
Although, casualties are reported, the number could not be immediately ascertained.
Culled from DAILY TIMES
UK government ministers are boycotting England's three group games in the European football championships over Ukraine's treatment of a jailed opposition leader.
The move is in protest at the "selective justice" being handed out to Yulia Tymoshenko.
Attendance at later matches, such as the final in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, is to be kept "under review".
Other EU leaders have threatened to boycott games over the issue.
Ms Tymoshenko played a key role in the Orange Revolution in 2004 and says her imprisonment is an act of political revenge by Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych.
The authorities have rejected Ms Tymoshenko's allegations. She was jailed for seven years in October, for abuse of power during her time as prime minister.
Last week, she ended a 20-day hunger strike after being moved to a hospital in Kharkiv where she is being treated by a German doctor.
Culled from BBC
Five men and a teenager have been jailed after police were "lured" to a pub fire and shot at in Birmingham during riots last August.
The men, who were convicted of rioting, reckless arson and firearms possession, were given sentences ranging from 18 to 30 years at Birmingham Crown Court.
Amirul Rehman, 17, was sentenced to 12 years for riot and firearms offences.
Twelve shots were fired at police after a petrol bomb attack on the Bartons Arms, Aston.
Judge William Davis said the aim of the disorder was to draw police to the area and attack them.
He said: "Members of the group attacked the building. They smashed windows, they went inside and ransacked the premises. They threw chairs and tables out on to the pavement.
"Other members of the group stayed on the pavement outside the building. Some threw missiles, bottles and the like, at a passing police car. Others lit petrol bombs that had been brought to the scene.
"The purpose of all this was not to loot or to steal. Nor was it mindless vandalism. The purpose, the common purpose, was to behave in such a way that the police would come to the scene and then to attack the police."
He told the court that at least four different firearms were used, at least 12 shots were fired and it was "wholly a matter of luck" nobody was injured.
He added that a "wave of lawlessness" had spread across many towns and cities and "severe penalties" had to be imposed to act as a punishment and a deterrent.
The five men were convicted of riot, reckless arson and possession of firearms with intent to endanger life.
Rehman, of Aston, was convicted of riot and firearms offences but cleared of arson. The teenager has been named after the judge lifted earlier reporting restrictions.
Nicholas Francis, 26, of Thetford Road, Great Barr, Birmingham, described by the judge as the most dangerous of the men, was jailed for 30 years.
Tyrone Laidley 20, of Chadsmoor Terrace, Nechells and Jermaine Lewis, 27, of Summerton Road in Oldbury were sentenced to 23 years.
Wayne Collins, 25, from Ouseley Close in Luton and Renardo Farrell, 20, of The Terrace, Finchfield, Wolverhampton, were jailed for 18 years.
In sentencing Mr Justice Davies said he had to take into account "the wellbeing of the city of Birmingham" faced by an "armed gang prepared to act in this way".
There were shouts from the public gallery as the sentences were handed down.
Jurors in the six-week trial were shown CCTV footage of a gunman, said by the prosecution to be Laidley, firing at the police helicopter as it tracked suspects during disturbances in the early hours of 10 August.
Two other defendants, Joyah Campbell, 19, of Hanover Court, Aston, Birmingham, and a 17-year-old, were acquitted last week of riot, arson and firearms possession.
Culled from BBC
Lake Chad is believed to host over 100 million inhabitants, out of which 50 million are Nigerians whose livelihoods are now threatened due to the drying up of the lake.
The water surface of the Lake Chad basin has gradually shifted since the 1960s from 25,000 kilometres square to less than 2,000 kilometres square as at today, largely due to climate change, population increase and water demand.
Minister of Water Resources, Mrs. Sarah Ochekpe, disclosed this while marking the ‘Lake Chad Day’ in Abuja, where she called for concerted efforts to save the lake and restore its dwindling fortunes.
.She said: “The causes of this severe shrinkage include not only climate change which is responsible for the decrease in rainfall pattern in the region and runoff from the Lake’s tributaries, but also water demands for agricultural activities and other human needs.
“This population is expected to grow and it is also a known fact the population solely depends on the natural resources of the lake and the region is suffering from a high poverty rate,” she added.
She lamented that if the situation was not addressed would affect wildlife and the economy of the states sharing its resources as well as encourage insecurity and conflicts over scarce resources.
House committee Chairman on Lake Chad, Abubakar Wambai, sadly noted that the lake Chad only retains 5 per cent of its original size; hence the need to urgently carry out an earlier planned inter-basin water transfer from River Congo through the Chari/Ubangi rivers as part of efforts to resuscitate and rescue the Lake from completely drying up.
Culled from THISDAY
Facebook announced Tuesday that it had joined a consortium of other companies and security experts to help alert hundreds of thousands of websurfers of a computer infection called DNSChanger that may knock their computers off the Internet this summer.
Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system will be shut down July 9 -- killing connections for those people.
The FBI has run an impressive campaign for months, encouraging people to visit a website that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.
Infected Facebook users will now be treated to a special message when visiting the social network that informing them of their potential risk as well as helping them clean it up.
"Facebook's Product Security Team is working constantly to protect users from malicious content and malware like viruses, trojans, and worms," Facebook wrote in a blog post Tuesday, June 4.
"As a result of our work with the DNSChanger Working Group, Facebook is now able to notify users likely infected with DNSChanger malware and direct them to instructions on how to clean their computer or networks."
Facebook followed in the footsteps of Google, who on May 22, announced that it would throw its weight into the awareness campaign, rolling out alerts to users via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected computers.
“We believe directly messaging affected users on a trusted site and in their preferred language will produce the best possible results,” wrote Google security engineer Damian Menscher in a post on the company’s security blog.
“If more devices are cleaned and steps are taken to better secure the machines against further abuse, the notification effort will be well worth it,” he wrote.
The challenge, and the reason for the awareness campaigns: Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
Last November, when the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers, the agency realized this may become an issue.
"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get `page not found' and think the Internet is broken."
On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers.
But it wasn't enough time.
A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.
Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.
This is what happened:
Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.
The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address -- such as http://www.foxnews.com -- into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.
The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.
When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.
The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.
Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.
FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.
"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division. "Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."
Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Culled from FOXNEWS
