By David Gutierrez Only five states and the District of Columbia require that pharmaceutical companies report gifts they make to doctors, and even in these jurisdictions the laws are so poorly enforced that the details of these transactions remain a de facto secret, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers examined public records from Vermont and Minnesota, the only two states that ...

AP The latest audit report to Congress on Iraq reconstruction says corruption in the country, including fraud, theft and skimming amounts to a "second insurgency" is hindering the rebuilding effort. Stuart Bowen, who wrote the quarterly report, tells The Associated Press that except for security, corruption is the biggest challenge for the Iraqi government to overcome. Failure to maintain projects, once transferred to the Baghdad government, also figures in the report. As an ...

By Anne Broache A recent report documenting computer scientists' ability to hack into voting machines certified for use in the state of California has already begun reverberating on Capitol Hill. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who happens to be one of the chief sponsors of a ...

A House committee is requesting Justice Department documents on a data-mining project that identified the senders and recipients of calls and e-mails intercepted via the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program. In a Monday letter, Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to hand over "all opinions, memoranda and background materials, as well as any dissenting views, materials, and opinions" about the data-mining program. While the Bush ...

By Gemma Simpson  The ID cards scheme has cost more than £30m over the past financial year. During the year ending 31 March, 2007, the government spent £30.9m on setting up the National Identity Scheme (NIS) — up from the £27.7m expenditure in the previous year, according to Home Office figures. The £30.9m NIS-incurred expenditure was short of the initial budget of £55m, according to the Home Office Identity and Passport Service ...

By Sarah Spiller The government's ID card system will give thousands of "false matches" when more than six million people are registered on its database, an academic has claimed. Biometric data holding a person's unique physiological characteristics will be stored on a microchip in the cards. But Professor John Daugman, said using fingerprints as a key biometric measure will cause major ...

Guidelines raise concerns over security, consent and access By Dinah Greek MPs have criticised new guidance from Becta that shows schools can fingerprint pupils without first asking for parental permission. Although the guidelines from Becta, the Government’s schools ICT agency, say schools should "fully involve parents in any decision to introduce biometric or fingerprint technology", it is not mandatory to do so. Under the Data Protection ...

By Andrew Grice Gordon Brown has paved the way for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq by telling George Bush he would not delay their exit in order to show unity with the United States. After four hours of one-to-one talks with the US President at his Camp David retreat, Mr Brown told a joint press conference he would make a Commons statement in October on the future ...

By Ben Bold Britain's defence chiefs are spending millions of pounds on more than 1,000 spin doctors to improve the public image of the armed forces, but admit that they have no idea who these PRs are or whether they are having an impact. The startling admission was made in a report called The Defence Communications Strategy, which also marks the government's first official acknowledgement that there is little or ...

by Adam Thomas US President George W. Bush today asked for more powers to wiretap without warrants, in effect retroactively legalizing the unlawful National Security Agency wiretapping, which the President ordered in 2002. The NSA wiretapping order is illegal under the terms of the The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but Bush administration, led by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has proposed a Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal ...

By Adam Thomas The Department of Defense is planning to implant microchips in soldiers' brains for monitoring their health information, and has already awarded a $1.6 million contract to the Center for Bioelectronics, Biosensors and Biochips (C3B) at Clemson University for the development of an implantable "biochip". Soldiers fear that the biochip, about the size of a grain of rice, which measures and relays information on soldiers vital signs ...

War, Technology Drive Up Spending By Renae Merle Several of Washington's largest defense contractors said last week that they continue to benefit from a boom in spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as sustained government demand for information technology, defying predictions that the sector's expansion would begin to slow. Profit reports from Northrop Grumman, ...

David Batty Monday July 30, 2007 Guardian Unlimited Police want to drop the field impairment test for drivers suspected of drug driving. Photograph: Niall Carsonpa/PA   Anyone who drives after taking illegal drugs should be prosecuted, senior police officers said today.The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) called for the law to be ...

By Matthew Moore It is a conspiracy theory worthy of a Dan Brown novel. New claims that Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper contains a hidden image of a woman holding a child are provoking a storm of interest on the internet. The figure allegedly appears when the 15th Century mural painting is superimposed with its mirror image, and both are made partially transparent....