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The men were arrested on suspicion of trying to contact militant groupsView this Post in:
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Five young Americans held in Pakistan on suspicion of plotting attacks have been indicted on terrorism charges, their lawyer has said.
The five men, aged 18 to 25, denied the charges at a court in a jail in the eastern city of Sargodha.
They were arrested in the city in December on suspicion of trying to contact al-Qaeda-linked groups.
The five face life imprisonment if found guilty. Pakistan earlier barred their deportation to the US.
The men have claimed they were tortured in custody, and that US officials directed the abuse, but prison officials have denied the accusations.
The US embassy in Islamabad, which has also dismissed the allegations, confirmed that an American consular official attended Wednesday’s hearing.
Journalists were not allowed in, but afterwards defence lawyer Shahid Kamal told journalists: “Charges have been laid against all the accused,” reports AFP news agency.
“All these charges are terrorism related. The offences are punishable by life imprisonment. All the accused unanimously rejected them.”
The five young Muslims disappeared from the US state of Virginia in November.
Their families reported them missing after finding a farewell video message, which is said to have shown scenes of war and calls for Muslims to be defended.
Prosecutors and police have alleged the men were plotting attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and had sought links with extremists.
Officials say the men were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.
But the accused have denied any links to al-Qaeda and insist they wanted to go to Afghanistan for charity work.
Two of them are Pakistani-Americans, while the remaining three are said to be of Eritrean, Ethiopian and Egyptian origin. All of them have US passports.
The next hearing is scheduled for 31 March, when prosecutors are expected to produce evidence.
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Police said the boys had been out drinking on MondayView this Post in:
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The legality of the drug mephedrone will be examined “very speedily, very carefully” following the deaths of two teenagers, Lord Mandelson has said.
The business secretary said the government would take “any action that is justified to deal with this”.
Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19, died in Scunthorpe on Monday after taking the drug.
The Home Office said it will receive advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) on 29 March.
The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) says a ban on the substance should be considered.
Lord Mandelson said the government would “take any action that is needed… to avert such tragic consequences occurring in the future”
He also admitted that he had never previously heard of the drug.
According to BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw, a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has said he expects the ACMD to make a decision on whether mephedrone should be banned at its next meeting in March.
The member, speaking anonymously, said he would be “very surprised” if the ACMD did not make its decision at that point.
The ACMD will then write a full report, containing its recommendations, and present it to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson.
It is understood the ACMD had already held a full day’s meeting looking at the available evidence and research on mephedrone. This included a presentation from the Guy’s and St Thomas’s Toxicology Service and research from drug users describing their experiences.
The ACMD member said there was also “some understanding” of the science behind mephedrone, though it was “far from perfect”.
A meeting of the ACMD’s technical committee, which is looking at mephedrone, is scheduled for next week.
Plant food
Mephedrone is known by various names, including “M-Cat”, “MC”, “mieow”, “meow”, “4MMC” or simply plant fertiliser.
It is usually a white or yellowish powder, which is snorted, but can also be obtained in pills and capsules. It is marketed as plant food.
Police made three arrests following the death of the two teenagers.
NAHT general secretary Mick Brookes told the BBC the use of the drug had become more widespread.
He said: “This drug clearly has the same inherent dangers as any Class A drug and I think serious consideration should be given to banning it.
“The problem with that is that you then criminalise the people who take it, so we need to think very carefully about what we do, but act with some speed.”
Some heads say the drug should be made illegal immediately - even if it risks some children getting a criminal record.
Schools have become increasingly worried that because the drug is legal, children as young as 12 are trying it.
BBC science correspondent Tom Feilden said the ACMD was asked by the Home Office last year to examine the use of legal highs such as mephedrone.
A sub-committee was set up to do just that, and was due to report back this month, our correspondent added.
Prof Nutt was sacked as the government’s chief drugs adviser last October. He was dismissed after publicly disagreeing with the government’s decision to re-classify cannabis as a Class B drug and not to downgrade ecstasy.
Five ACMD members then resigned in the row that followed Prof Nutt’s departure.
Club scene
Websites selling the drug have told their customers it is a case of “when” not “if” mephedrone will be banned.
The two teenagers who died were found collapsed at their homes after a night out in Scunthorpe.
Humberside Police said the drug appeared to have contributed to their deaths. They had been out drinking in the hours before they died.
Two men, aged 26 and 20, and a 17-year-old boy have been arrested in connection with the incident.
Post-mortem examinations are being carried out.
Mephedrone has become popular on the UK club scene in recent months.
Its side effects are said to include psychosis, palpitations, burning throat, nosebleeds and insomnia.
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Spain is among the country’s the EU has expressed concern overView this Post in:
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The European Union has criticised the UK and other European nations for having “optimistic” growth assumptions and bloated deficits.
The UK must tackle “uncertainty” in plans to cut its deficit, the EU said.
EU rules say government deficits must be below 3% of GDP, but the UK’s deficit is expected to hit £178bn - or 12.6% of GDP - this year.
Germany, France, Spain and Italy were also warned they were over-reliant on economic recovery to meet debt targets.
Brussels was commenting on plans by some of the biggest EU countries to bring down public spending.
‘Absence of detail’
As was reported earlier in the week, the report warned that the UK was not on course to cut its deficit in line with EU rules by a deadline of 2015.
“The absence of detailed departmental spending limits is a source of uncertainty,” the European Commission said.
The UK chancellor argues it has been right not to cut spending more quicklyIn the run-up to next week’s Budget, UK chancellor Alistair Darling has defended the government’s approach to the deficit, arguing that cutting it too quickly by reducing government spending would risk harming the UK’s emergence from recession.
The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said the report’s conclusions - that the government needed to cut spending more rapidly - were “a heavy blow for Gordon Brown’s credibility”.
One of the other countries criticised was Spain. The report said Spain’s forecast that it would cut its deficit to 3% of GDP in 2013 from 11.4% in 2009 was based on “markedly” optimistic growth forecasts.
The pace of bank restructuring in Spain, which the EU said posed a risk to growth, was also attacked as being too slow.
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The success of Apple’s App store has spawned an industry of imitatorsView this Post in:
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The global appetite for mobile applications will explode over the next two years, new research suggests.
A study done for Getjar, the world’s second biggest app store, said the market will grow to $17.5bn (£12bn) in the next two years.
The study claimed downloads would climb from 7bn last year to 50bn by 2012 - a 92% year-on-year increase.
It found there had been a gold rush with the number of app stores rising from four before 2008 to 48 today.
The study also suggests Apple’s domination of the market could be challenged.
“We wanted to find out the real value of the industry because we felt certain segments like the iPhone were being over-hyped and so-called feature phones were being under-hyped,” said Getjar founder and chief executive officer Ilja Laurs.
Feature phones are less powerful than smart phones but can still run some third-party software.
Smart rush
While Apple’s App Store is regarded as the dominant player, there are many more to choose from including those from BlackBerry, Microsoft, Google, Nokia, and Samsung.
Nokia is just one of the many players with its own app storeGoogle’s Android Marketplace, for instance, has more than 30,000 apps made for smartphones running on its mobile operating system.
Mr Laurs said the figures attributed to the iPhone’s value have been unbelievable in some cases.
“The value of the iPhone App store ranges from as low as $700m (£466m) to $2.5bn (£1.66bn). You can see the range is huge,” he said.
Mr Laurs said the research found that feature phones should not be ignored in the rush to create apps for smartphones.
“It is almost as if these phones don’t exist. We know smartphones are an extremely important phenomenon, but in terms of consumer mindshare and revenue share, feature phones represent 90% of the global market compared to 10% for smartphones and data cards.”
Industry shake-out
Researcher Chetan Sharma of Chetan Sharma Consulting said that the charging model which dominates the app ecosystem is changing.
“Advertising and the sale of virtual goods has helped expand choices for developers and we will see all of that ramp up in the next couple of years,” he told the BBC.
But most commentators think Apple’s paid model will survive for the foreseeable future.
Developers are looking at what opportunities the iPad offers them“I wouldn’t say it is going to die, but the industry is going to evolve in alternative directions ,” said Getjar’s Mr Laurs.
Apple’s iPad, for example, is expected to boost the app market according to statistics from analytics firm Flurry.
It reported that developer activity for the iPhone has risen 185% in advance of the iPad’s April arrival. Applications for the iPhone can be ported over to the new device.
“We have definitely seen a shift back to the iPhone with the anticipation of the iPad and a little bit of the disappointment with the Nexus 1 (Google phone),” Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry Analystics told business site MarketWatch.com.
“Definitely there has been a rush of applications. It will invite a new wave of developers and it is a very cool device so people are going to develop for it.”
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Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the United States for the first time last week, industry analysts showed.
Facebook’s homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.
The “important milestone,” as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 per cent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.
By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine per cent in the same time - although the tracker does not include Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service, YouTube and Google Maps.
Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 per cent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.
Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.
In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google, the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that echoes Gmail’s format.
Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.
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