The federal authorities are investigating whether three recent attacks against the power grid in Arkansas are linked, and utility officials have asked residents to remain alert to the threat of more trouble.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that two power poles in Lonoke County, just east of Little Rock, were deliberately severed early on Sunday. The authorities said that a stolen tractor, which had an extendable arm with a circular saw blade at its tip, was used to take down one of the poles.

The incident came more than six weeks after the F.B.I. opened an inquiry into a report by Entergy Arkansas, a utility company, that one of its high-voltage transmission lines had been brought down in Lonoke County. Investigators said someone had fastened a cable to the 100-foot transmission tower and laid it across a nearby railroad track in what the F.B.I. described as "an attempt to utilize a moving train to bring down the tower."

A 45-year-old tribal woman, on Monday, found seven idols of Hindu goddesses in a cave on the Khapra hilltop in Lakhampur village of Wada taluka. She said she went to the cave and started digging inside after repeatedly dreaming of a goddess trapped there.

"For the last three months, I regularly dreamt of some divine powers calling me to rescue them from the hilltop but I ignored the dreams. However, it soon started to affect my health and I eventually decided to follow my dream," said Usha Mukne, a daily-wage labourer in the village and a believer of Goddess Santoshi.

Mukne cleared the entrance to the cave, which had been blocked by trees as no one had gone there in a long time, and started digging.

Villagers hailed her dream-turned-into-reality as a miracle and blessing, especially as it coincided with Navratri, and thronged the hilltop to pray.

"I told the locals about my dream and findings. They couldn't believe goddesses had directed me this way," she said.

A local, Sunil Patil, said, "It's the first time that ancient artifacts have been found here."

Local authorities were also informed; they will inform the archaeological department.

West Palm Beach - A man is in extremely critical condition after he reportedly jumped from the train on which he was riding and was then struck by a second train.

According to officials, the incident took place Monday night around 8:11 p.m. at the Palm Beach Tri-Rail station after a 26-year-old Eddie Diaz apparently realized he had left his cell phone behind on a bench.

Witnesses told police Diaz broke the glass covering the emergency safety mechanism and pulled the lever. When the doors opened, he jumped. He landed on a platform but fell backward, hitting his head.

He was subsequently struck by another train and was taken to St. Mary's Medical Center.

The controversy over the death of Princess Diana took a new twist last night with the emergence of a photograph of an SAS sniper practising his deadly trade on the streets of Britain.

The remarkable image, now being examined by Scotland Yard detectives, shows the special forces soldier lying on a bridge in Wales peering at cars down the telescopic sights of a sniper's rifle.

The photograph was taken from the computer of Soldier N, a former SAS man who claims regiment members were responsible for the death of Diana in a Paris underpass. A total of 90 images were discovered.

The Metropolitan Police, whose specialist crime and operations command is investigating the assassination theory, last night said it would be "inappropriate" to comment on the new development.

The photograph shows two men on a bridge who are thought to be taking part in a counter-terrorism exercise.

The soldiers are practising a procedure known as high-speed vehicle interdiction, a tactic designed to stop vehicles being driven by terrorists travelling at speed.

One day last May, Ladar Levison returned home to find an F.B.I. agent's business card on his Dallas doorstep. So began a four-month tangle with law enforcement officials that would end with Mr. Levison's shutting the business he had spent a decade building and becoming an unlikely hero of privacy advocates in their escalating battle with the government over Internet security.

Prosecutors, it turned out, were pursuing a notable user of Lavabit, Mr. Levison's secure e-mail service: Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents that have put the intelligence agency under sharp scrutiny. Mr. Levison was willing to allow investigators with a court order to tap Mr. Snowden's e-mail account; he had complied with similar narrowly targeted requests involving other customers about two dozen times.

But they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much.

"You don't need to bug an entire city to bug one guy's phone calls," Mr. Levison, 32, said in a recent interview. "In my case, they wanted to break open the entire box just to get to one connection."

On Aug. 8, Mr. Levison closed Lavabit rather than, in his view, betray his promise of secure e-mail to his customers. The move, which he explained in a letter on his Web site, drew fervent support from civil libertarians but was seen by prosecutors as an act of defiance that fell just short of a crime.

As the nation's spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists' use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda's leaders and operatives.

"The switches weren't turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality" of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A. surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly talking about the information that Mr. Snowden has disclosed.

Senior American officials say that Mr. Snowden's disclosures have had a broader impact on national security in general, including counterterrorism efforts. This includes fears that Russia and China now have more technical details about the N.S.A. surveillance programs. Diplomatic ties have also been damaged, and among the results was the decision by Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, to postpone a state visit to the United States in protest over revelations that the agency spied on her, her top aides and Brazil's largest company, the oil giant Petrobras.

You have to wonder what he's got in those emails to be fighting so hard to keep people from seeing the supposedly mundane details of research.

Prince William FOIA case on global warming headed for Virginia Supreme Court

The fight by a conservative legal group and Del. Robert Marshall (R-Prince William) to obtain the e-mails written by leading climate change scientist Michael E. Mann while he was at the University of Virginia was shot down by a judge in Prince William County last year. But Marshall and the legal group appealed, and the Virginia Supreme Court has agreed to take the case and rule on whether the state's Freedom of Information Act exempts unpublished academic research from being disclosed to the public, even after it's been concluded or has been released elsewhere.

...

Richard C. Kast and Madelyn F. Wessel, U.Va.'s lawyers, argued that Judge Sheridan got it right when he ruled that the university had properly interpreted FOIA. They acknowledged that there was no judicial precedent on the FOIA exemption, but that "the policy of open government under the act is not 'absolute,'" citing more than 100 exemptions in Virginia's FOIA law. They noted that the Institute and Marshall challenge the judge's interpretation of "proprietary," but that the conservatives "offer no alternative definition or explanation as to why the plain meaning of the term should not apply." Plain meaning, in U.Va.'s view, being "a thing or property owned or in the possession of one who manages and controls them."

Mann said in an e-mail to me [the WaPo writer] that "I believe Judge Sheridan's ruling protecting faculty research correspondence is correct and is precisely what Sen. Thomas Michie intended when he proposed his legislation to amend Virginia's FOIA law and the legislature enacted in 1984 to enhance the ability of Virginia's public colleges and university's to protect the scholarly research endeavor."

If a murderer pointed a handgun directly at you, you'd notice, right? A recent incident in San Francisco proves that you might not - if you're staring at a cellphone.

Nikhom Thephakaysone boarded a crowded Muni train near San Francisco State University in September, and a security video now reveals that he repeatedly took out a .45-caliber gun and pointed it directly at passengers. But even after brandishing the loaded weapon several times, not one passenger noticed him, distracted as they were by their cellphones and tablets.

Only after Thephakaysone allegedly shot and killed Justin Valdez, a 20-year-old college student who was on the train, did the oblivious passengers take notice.

"These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this," District Attorney George Gascón told the San Francisco Chronicle.

"They're just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They're completely oblivious of their surroundings."

The fatal shooting that occurred in San Francisco - and the way the alleged killer was repeatedly ignored by dozens of people - highlights the degree to which people are increasingly absorbed in cellphones and other devices, to the extent that they're endangering their own lives and the lives of others.

A pipeline explosion in a rural northwestern Oklahoma town sent a fireball hundreds of feet into the air, and emergency responders on Wednesday were still at the scene, trying to extinguish the flames.

Deputy Cliff Brinson with the Harper County Sheriff's Department said the blast and fire sounded like the roar of jet engines and that the flames have reached two football field lengths into the sky, CBS reported.

Nobody's been injured, but residents living two miles away from the scene have been evacuated.

Northern Natural Pipeline engineers are still trying to cut the flow of natural gas. The explosion occurred Tuesday evening, but a day later, the fire was still raging.

One commenter at the local KSN television news site said in an early Wednesday morning Internet post: "We are seeing a glow from Lewis, Kansas."

Court case launched in New York over thousands of deaths blamed on sewage discharge from United Nations barracks

Victims of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti are filing a compensation claim against the United Nations in a New York court, demanding that billions of dollars in damages be paid to survivors and the relatives of those killed.

The outbreak has killed more than 8,000 people and made 650,000 ill, according to officials, and scientific studies have shown the cholera strain was likely introduced to the country by UN troops from Nepal, where the disease is endemic, when contaminated sewage was discharged from their barracks into a watercourse. Before that cholera cases had been rare in Haiti.