Twitter has begun testing User Streams, a new Streaming API that will finally give Twitter desktop apps real-time capabilities and streams.

According to Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary, Users Streams is now in “a limited testing period for desktop clients.” This is the first time that the User Streams API has been in the wild since its launch at Twitter’s Chirp conference.

The Twitter Streaming API gives desktop apps the ability to auto-update with new events as soon as they happen. It covers not only real-time Twitter updates, but retweets, direct messages, mentions, favorites, following and search. We saw the demo of this feature at Chirp back in April, and it certainly made TweetDeck and other desktop apps a lot more useful.

The second part of Twitter’s announcement focuses on TweetDeck and Echofon: They will be the first apps to test the new User Streams feature. However, “more desktop applications will follow with their own testing period shortly,” Singletary said.

There was one more gem in the announcement, though: a new Streaming API product called Site Streams. It will give developers the ability to consume and serve multiple user streams simultaneously. The company says that there will be releasing more information on Site Streams soon.

Reviews: Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitter

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Social recommendation service GetGlue has just announced a new partnership with HBO that will let fans of shows like True Blood, Entourage and Hung earn stickers and rewards when they check in to the programs using GetGlue’s new iPhone app.

GetGlue launched its new iPhone app [iTunes link] last month as a way for users to rate and recommend items on the go, as well as see their friends suggestions, but with the added social element of checkins. However, unlike traditional location-based checkin games, the GetGlue app has users check in to types of media — like TV shows, music, movies and books.

The new app really adds a new layer to the GetGlue service, which we’ve always praised for having a fantastic recommendation engine. Since the mobile app was released, GetGlue usage has skyrocketed, with more than 4.5 million ratings and checkins taking place across the network in just the past month.

GetGlue has a history of partnering with media brands with its Guru Giveaways, but with the new mobile app users can earn special content-specific stickers and also earn rewards. Basically this lets brands identify their most passionate users and rewards those users and fans with free stuff.

The partnership with HBO starts on Sunday, August 1 and stickers can be earned in a variety of ways. Some stickers can be won just by checking in to a show a few times, but other stickers will need to be unlocked. HBO will be offering hints as to how to unlock these stickers via its Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Check out the stickers for True Blood and Entourage:

What we love about GetGlue’s sticker program is that it’s not just about virtual stickers. Users will be able to order free physical copies of the stickers they earn from GetGlue.com. Offering a tangible reward really encourages continued use of the service.

Using Mobile to Reignite a Service

As mentioned previously, we’ve always been big fans of GetGlue’s recommendation engine, and we like that we can rate and comment on items across the web with the browser extensions; however, the service has sometimes felt too top heavy. What’s so brilliant about the iPhone app (Android and iPad apps are currently in the works right now) is that it makes using the service fast and easy, adds a new dimension of usability (earning stickers and rewards), and also makes it easy to see recommendations and what your friends are getting hooked on while on-the-go.

Brand tie-ins also now make a lot more sense to us. It’s easy to pull out your phone and check in to a show before watching it on TV or a movie before you enter the theater. That makes rating the type of content you consume away from the standard web browser much more feasible, thus giving the semantic recommendation engine that much more useful information.

Have you used the GetGlue iPhone app? What do you think?

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Twitter

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When I think about my project, SochiReporter, I often recall the seminal 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

This book challenged the conventional wisdom of city planners of that era and celebrated the vibrancy of the urban streetscape. It also encouraged citizen involvement in the development of neighborhoods. I wonder if Jacobs ever looked at the cities and the changes they undergo to host the Olympics, as Sochi will in 2014?

Life in a Day

Along the lines of citizen participation, July 23 was the day when anyone worldwide could make a short movie and submit it at YouTube's Life in a Day channel to participate in the Oscar-winning director Ridley Scott's new global project.

By January 2011, Scott will put together a movie containing short videos taken by professional and amateur film directors worldwide. We at SochiReporter submitted a video and it would be great if we're included. Even if we aren't, participation is the key.

This project reminds me of the recent YouTube Symphony Orchestra global initiative, which I previously wrote about for Idea Lab. But while the Orchestra experiment was targeted at a comparatively narrow and professional audience (musicians), Life in a Day is more popular and aims at reaching ordinary people living ordinary lives. This is probably why I liked this project, though it's pretty simple at its core.

It focuses on the small things happening in people's lives. The video "must be personal," according to Ridley Scott. The other person behind this project, Kevin McDonald, said that each video:

...could be something that to you seems really banal, it could be your journey to work, watching your baby at bath time, going to a hospital to visit a friend, your birthday, going for a walk in the countryside, or it could be something much more meaningful to you, much more emotional -- the knocking down of the building next to where you lived, that you've always loved, the death of a friend. It's a little snapshot of your life.

I think this project is in many ways similar to hyper-local journalism, which is about the daily life of an individual in his community. Hyper-local journalism puts a community online suddenly so anybody anywhere can see it and maybe criticize it or present it as an example.

McDonald said the resulting film will be a time capsule. He recommended people think about the three things while shooting their video:

1. What makes you frightened.

2. What makes you laugh.

3. What is in your pockets (literally) -- film it.

Covering the Special Olympics

This project made me think of Jordan Pascale, a city desk intern at the Lincoln Journal Star because the day to submit a video was also the closing day of the Special Olympics, which began in Lincoln, Neb., on July 17. I met Pascale when I was serving my six-day term as innovator-in-residence at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska, where he is a student. When the Special Olympics came to town, Pascale had a lot of work to do.

I saw an immediate connection between Lincoln and Sochi -- both are small towns hosting big sports events. I recently got in touch with Pascale to have him share how his paper covered the event, and how they documented the reactions of locals and the changes in the everyday life of the local community.

I was interested in how a local paper adapted to cover such a big event online using multimedia tools. I wanted to compare it with what we have been doing in Sochi. Here's what Pascale wrote in an email to me:

Our newsroom at the Lincoln Journal Star has been doing multimedia videos for a while, but thanks to new technology we recently bought, we are now equipped to cover events even better than before.

The Lincoln Journal Star has been using iPhones, Twitter and CoverItLive.com to provide Special Olympics fans with instantaneous updates from around the city.

Here's an example from Saturday.

Using twitter on the iPhones, our reporters in the field have been taking photos and videos and collecting snippets of "color" from each venue around the city. CoverItLive.com pulls our Twitter feeds into one place, making a convenient one-stop spot for readers.

It really has been a good learning experience for our newsroom. Few have ever used any of this technology but a lot have adopted it and are now comfortable reporting from the field this way. Web users from around the United States have been following our feed and we have received a lot of compliments for the depth and breadth of the coverage.

Back at his journalism school, Pascale participated in a new media and design class led by Adam Wagler. As part of that class, Pascale and his fellow students built a special website to cover the Special Olympics. That, too, is a feature that connects Lincoln and Sochi.

Facebook has begun the rollout of a new feature, Facebook Questions, which will allow users to get answers to their queries from the entire Facebook community.

Similar in concept to Yahoo! Answers, Quora and Mahalo, Facebook Questions gives users the opportunity to ask questions just by clicking the “Ask Question” button on the homepage. Questions is also available on friends’ profiles just as you would post on someone’s wall.

We first learned of Facebook’s Q&A feature two months ago, when the company started asking for volunteers to beta test the product. The world’s largest social network even went so far as to promise beta testers a trip to Facebook’s offices to meet with the Q&A team.

I had the chance earlier today to discuss the new feature with several Facebook employees. Questions has several defining features:

• Photo questions: For example, if you take a picture of a bird, but don’t know what species it is, you can post the picture on Facebook Questions and get your answer.
• Polling: If you’re simply looking for the answer to Which city is better: Chicago or Dallas?, you can get your answer by creating a poll.
• Tagging: The company seems to be placing a lot of emphasis on tagging questions based on category or topic. The goal seems to be to make Q&A discovery an easier and faster process by making it simple to look up questions on cooking, photography, San Francisco or a variety of other topics.
• Topic exploration: Facebook described this as a roulette-type feature that allows users to browse Facebook’s eventual mountain of Q&A. Under the “Questions about” drop-down menu, there’s a feature called “Everything” that allows users to browse the company’s catalog of questions.
• Following: You can follow specific questions for updates and new answers.
• Updated homepage: Facebook Questions does actually change the homepage, adding a new bar at the top of the page where you can choose to update your status, ask a question, add photos, or post a link.

There was one more thing that Facebook made clear to me: Facebook Questions is not an advertising product. While brands with Facebook Pages will eventually be able to answer questions, it’s not meant to be a promotional platform; it’s meant to be a useful and insightful product for users.

Facebook Questions will roll out to a limited group of beta testers today, but the company promises to “bring this product to all of you as quickly as we can.” The entire feature is public, so we don’t suggest posting those awkward bedroom questions on Facebook.

Will Facebook Questions prove to be more useful than Quora or even Twitter as a Q&A platform? We think so, if only because it the biggest advantage of them all: 500 million users.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

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More women than men across the world visit social networking sites and spend 30% more time per month using them.

As such, in the “Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet” report, comScore concludes that women are the digital mainstream, a group of savvy Internet explorers who are more engaged than their male counterparts, and are the primary drivers of online and group buying.

comScore analyzed the Internet behaviors of women everywhere and found that while women make up a little less than half of the global online population (46%), their online behaviors drastically distinguish them from male Internet users.

The detailed report, available for download, delves into everything from women’s entertainment predilections (they really like puzzle games) to search behaviors, mobile preferences to video-viewing activities (they watch a lot of YouTube). What follows is a closer examination of their social media and online retail activities.

Women and Social Media

On average, women spend more time online per month, 24.8 hours compared to 22.9 hours for men. But, when it comes to the social web, there’s an even bigger rift between the sexes.

“Nearly 56 percent of adult women say they use the Internet to stay in touch with people, compared to 46 percent of adult men,” according to the report. comScore pinpoints higher activity levels in social categories such as social networking, instant messenger and e-mail.

Those behaviors equate to women spending an average of 16.3% of their online time per month on social networks, a percentage that continues to rise month-to-month. Men spend just 11.7% of their time on the same activities.

Interestingly enough, comScore identifies middle-aged women, 45 plus, as the group most responsible for growth in social networking site usage. Fifteen to 24-year-olds, however, are the heaviest users and have the greatest reach. When it comes to Facebook in particular, the younger crowd use that site more than 350 minutes per month on average. That data seems to line up with an Oxygen Media study showing that more than a third of young women check Facebook first thing in the morning.

In terms of country breakdowns, 9 out of 10 North American women visit social networking sites, making them the group with the highest reach. Latin American and European women are practically equals in this category, with 83.6% and 83.4% social networking participation respectively.

Women and Twitter

comScore found that Twitter’s reach is only marginally higher among women than among men. Women also outpace men in the adoption of Twitter, but only marginally as well.

The slight differences between the sexes doesn’t accurately highlight the actual disparity in how the two sexes use the microblogging platform.

In a U.S. consumer survey conducted in April 2010, comScore asked men and women how they use Twitter. Responses demonstrate that women use Twitter more for finding deals, following celebrities and their own self-defined purposes than to post tweets or read tweets from the people they follow.

Women and Retail

Men and women visit retail sites in practically equal amounts, but women spend 20% more time on those sites. That time equates to more money spent in most retail categories, as women buy more frequently than men do.

Women spend significantly more money on apparel and accessories, with their dollars accounting for 71% of all dollars spent in that category in the U.S. for February. They also spend more on books and music, toys, and even video games and consoles.

comScore concludes that women are also driving growth on group-buying sites. They compromise a majority of the U.S. audiences on both Groupon (62%) and LivingSocial (67%). Women also make up 67% of the visitors to Gilt Groupe’s flash sale site.

What do you find particularly interesting about the findings?

[img credit: TheSeafarer]

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Q: Will all legal abortions be covered by federally subsidized health insurance policies in state "high-risk pools"? A: No. The Department of Health and Human Services says the only abortions covered will be those in cases of rape, incest or when the mother's life is endangered. FULL QUESTION Received this e-mail today and ...

We've posted no shortage of pieces on political attacks that leave context on the cutting room floor to give the public a misleading impression. An opponent's statements, cherry-picked and shorn of any language that could provide the intended meaning, can be shaped into a slashing ad.  Or they can lose a ...

BAGHDAD — The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation, according to an audit released Tuesday.

The report by the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds were being spent in a country where people complain basic services like electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The audit found that shoddy record keeping by the Defense Department left the Pentagon unable to fully account for $8.7 billion it withdrew between 2004 and 2007 from a special fund set up by the U.N. Security Council. Of that amount, Pentagon "could not provide documentation to substantiate how it spent $2.6 billion."

The funds are separate from the $53 billion allocated by Congress for rebuilding Iraq.

The report comes at a critical time for Iraq, which four months after inconclusive elections squabbling political factions have still not agreed on a new government.

Despite security gains made since 2008, bombings remain near a daily occurrence that compound the frustrations and fears of Iraqis increasingly weary of the political crisis — one many say reflects how the country's politicians are more interested in their own interests than those of the nation.

The continuing impasse was highlighted on Tuesday when Iraqi lawmakers gathered for the second time this month only to indefinitely postpone the parliamentary session because there was still no decision on the new government.

Acting speaker Fouad Massoum told reporters that the postponement was designed to give the political blocs more time to discuss contentious issues and agree on the distribution of positions in the new government.

"With every delay, the suffering of the Iraqi people and security risks are increasing," lawmaker Salman al-Jumaili told reporters, criticizing the move.

The U.S. audit is unlikely to do anything but further stoke that frustration felt by Iraqis who continue to suffer from poor infrastructure despite the billions spent.

The audit cited a number of factors behind the inability to account for most of the money withdrawn by the Pentagon from the Development Fund for Iraq.

It said most of the Defense Department organizations that received DFI money failed to set up Treasury Department accounts, as required.

In addition, it said no Defense Department organization was designated as the main body to oversee how the funds were accounted for or spent.

"The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss," the report said.

Calls to Iraqi officials for comment went unanswered.

The Defense Department, in responses attached to the audit, said it agreed with the recommendations laid out in the report about establishing better guidelines for monitoring such funds, including appointing an organization to be responsible for overseeing such funds mostly likely by November.

The audit found that the U.S. continues to hold about $34.3 million of the money even though it was required to return it to the Iraqi government.

The audit did not indicate that investigators believed there were any instances of fraud involved in the spending of these funds.

The DFI includes revenues from Iraq's oil and gas exports, as well as frozen Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the now-defunct, Saddam Hussein-era oil-for-food program.

With the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq shortly after the start of the U.S. invasion in 2003 until mid-2004, about $20 billion was placed into the account.

The Iraqi government had agreed to allow the U.S. continued access to the funds after the CPA was dissolved in 2004, but it revoked that authority in December 2007.

In other developments, seven people were killed in a series of bombings and apparent assassinations in Baghdad and Mosul, a northern city where al-Qaida is believed to still have a strong presence. Among those killed were two women shot dead in their home by gunmen and a Baghdad electricity official who died of wounds sustained after a morning roadside bombing.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghanistan's president says that a NATO rocket attack killed 52 civilians in the south of the country on Friday.

Hamid Karzai's statement issued Monday says the Afghan intelligence service determined that a NATO rocket hit Regi village in Helmand province's Sangin district. The dead included women and children. Karzai condemned the attack.

But NATO spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks says initial reporting from the area did not confirm any civilian casualties or NATO rockets gone astray.

He said insurgents and NATO forces fought Friday in an area about seven or eight kilometers (4.3 to 5 miles) away but there was no evidence in initial reporting that it was connected to the claims of rocket fire in Regi.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai asserted Monday that up to 52 civilians had been killed by NATO rocket fire in southern Afghanistan, a controversy that erupted just as thousands of leaked military documents depicted a pervasive pattern of underreported civilian deaths and injuries in the course of the long conflict.

Karzai's claim of civilian casualties last week in Helmand province was sharply disputed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force. Provincial authorities said the incident was still being investigated, and that neither the number of deaths nor culpability had been established.

But taken together, the leaked documents and the familiar scenario of conflicting claims emanating from a remote battle zone underscore that civilian casualties remain one of the most bitterly divisive issues between Western forces and Karzai's government.

Afghan human rights activists vowed to investigate civilian casualty cases described in documents posted Sunday on the Internet by the watchdog group WikiLeaks.

Most of the documents, from 2004 through 2009, are reports from field-level commanders. Many offer detailed descriptions of lethal encounters between Western forces and Afghan civilians.

"We will look to see how much of the information about these incidents provided by the military at the time matches up with what is in the leaked documents," said Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, told reporters in London that he believed some of the documents, particularly those involving civilian deaths, could be used as evidence in war crimes cases. The group has said it will release more of the classified reports.

According to the British newspaper the Guardian, the military reports contain 144 entries describing civilian deaths, in incidents ranging from shootings at checkpoints to airstrikes. The Guardian, the New York Times and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given advance access to 92,000 documents and spent weeks analyzing them before they were published Sunday.

Some of those incidents were big enough to make headlines and raise questions at the time; others were wrenching episodes that went all but unnoticed. One report describes the shooting in March 2007 of a villager who ran away from a Western military convoy. It turned out he was deaf and did not hear the soldiers' orders to stop.

Most Afghans have no way to view the leaked military documents, but word of their existence stirred intense curiosity, especially among those who lost loved ones in the fighting. The field reports, with harrowing tragedies rendered in impersonal and abbreviated military jargon, are likely to spur fresh outrage.

The Afghan government said the documents underscored what it described as longtime Western inattentiveness.

"Over the years, we have raised the issue of civilian casualties and how harmful these can be to achieving our joint objective of defeating terrorism," presidential spokesman Waheed Omar told reporters in Kabul, the capital, on Monday. "We have had a hard time trying to communicate this to our international partners."

But Omar also pointed to improvements during the last year and a half. The proportion of civilians accidentally killed by Western troops, as opposed to those killed by insurgents, declined significantly during that period, even as overall deaths continued to rise.

The leaked military documents suggest that some civilian fatalities were deliberately covered up, but also reflect how difficult it can be to determine exact circumstances in the heat of battle. Isolated locations and the tradition of swift burials can add to the confusion.

The latest dispute is a case in point. An undetermined number of villagers were reported killed Friday in a remote part of Sangin district in Helmand province, which has been the scene of near-constant battles between Western troops and insurgents.

Provincial spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said Monday that an investigating team had been sent to the village of Rigi, but had not yet returned. It was not yet known how many people were killed or who was responsible, he said.

Karzai's office, however, issued a statement saying that reports by the National Directorate of Security intelligence agency indicated that a house had been hit by a rocket fired by Western troops, killing up to 52 civilians, including women and children. He and the Cabinet condemned the strike "in the strongest possible terms."

Karzai has made civilian casualties one of the most high-profile issues of his presidency. He once wept publicly while decrying civilian deaths. But he also is capable of making political use of his complaints that NATO is careless in safeguarding civilian life. Often his most impassioned rhetoric on the subject coincides with Western pressure over government corruption — an issue that also received considerable attention in the leaked documents.

The NATO force said a joint investigation by Afghan officials and the Western military had thus far revealed no evidence of civilians injured or killed in last week's incident.

"Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi village is completely unfounded," said U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a senior spokesman.

Fierce fighting was taking place at the time, the military said, but it occurred about seven miles away. Afghan and Western forces were attacked with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, it said, and hit back with attack helicopters and precision-guided missiles. The statement said six insurgents were killed, including a Taliban commander.

The founder of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks today defended his decision to publish thousands of secret US military files about the war in Afghanistan, faced with criticism from the White House for placing troops in danger.

Julian Assange said his organisation was currently working through a backlog of further secret material and was expecting a "substantial increase in submissions" from whistleblowers after one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

He said the files showed that "thousands" of war crimes may have been committed in Afghanistan.

The documents have revealed unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and information about secret operations against Taliban leaders, as well as highlighting US fears that Pakistan's intelligence service was aiding the Afghan uprising.

Assange rejected accusations that the leak had compromised America's national security. "We are familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticise the messenger to distract from the power of the message."

"We don't see any difference in the White House's response to this case to the other groups that we have exposed. We have tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm. All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence."

Speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London, Assange said that the 90,000 leaked US military documents about the war in Afghanistan would help shape understanding of the past six years of fighting.

On the question of whether crimes had been committed, he said: "It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime. That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material."

Earlier, the White House said the leaks "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security".

It said that Wikileaks had made no effort to contact US security services, but insisted that what it called the "irresponsible leaks" would not "impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people".

In London, the security minister Lady Neville-Jones, former chair of the UK's joint intelligence committee, described the leak as "really serious stuff" and questioned how the documents had been obtained.

"We don't know how they got that material – it may be a combination of leaking of documents, but also one strongly suspects they have hacked into systems as well.

"This is a very, very big story. But if you stop to think about it for a moment, military systems have to be secure because people's lives are at stake."

The Guardian, along with the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel, were given access to the archive and have spent several weeks investigating the logs. In order not to compromise intelligence sources or to put forces at risk, the Guardian has only published a selection of the logs, relating to significant events.

The White House national security adviser, General Jim Jones, stressed that the documents related to a period from January 2004 to December 2009, during the administration of President George Bush and before President Obama ordered a "surge" in Afghanistan.

"President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qaida and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," he said.

Labour leadership candidate David Miliband, said the "war logs" showed that the war could not be won by military means alone.

"We cannot kill our way out of an insurgency. Instead, the battle for power is fought in the minds of the local population, insurgents and western publics. The purpose of military effort and civilian improvement is to create the conditions for political settlement.

"There is now a race against time to persuade the Afghan people that the correct strategy is in place and show our own people it can succeed. Better Afghan security forces, better police, better schooling and economic opportunities are all vital but not enough. None of them are durable or possible without a political settlement."

Miliband, the former foreign secretary, said any peace settlement "must include the vanquished as well as the victors" and urged the government in Kabul to involve Afghans in "defining a political endgame".

Elsewhere, experts analysed the damage inflicted on the war effort by the leak. British military expert professor Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said the leaked files were less damaging than the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal but would prove awkward for politicians.

"There is no doubt that the leaks are politically pretty damaging. The papers give an impression of a lack of military discrimination in how operations were conducted. They are also appearing at the worst possible time, particularly in the United States, because people are looking for an exit strategy. This is old bad news at a new bad time."

In the US, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee and former Democrat presidential candidate, John Kerry, responded to the leak with a direct challenge to the administration. "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said.

"Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right."

LONDON – The release of some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war is just the beginning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange promised Monday, adding that he still has thousands more Afghan files to post online.

The White House, Britain and Pakistan have all condemned the online whistle-blowing group's release Sunday of the classified documents, one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history. The Afghan government in Kabul said it was "shocked" at the release but insisted most of the information was not new.

The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict: U.S. special operations forces have targeted militants without trial, Afghans have been killed by accident, and U.S. officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.

Still, they also included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures.

Assange told reporters in London that what's been reported so far on the leaked documents has "only scratched the surface" and said some 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.

He said he believed that "thousands" of U.S. attacks in Afghanistan could be investigated for evidence of war crimes, although he acknowledged that such claims would have to be tested in court.

"It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime," he said.

Assange pointed in particular to a deadly missile strike ordered by Taskforce 373, a unit allegedly charged with hunting down and killing senior Taliban targets. He said there was also evidence of cover-ups when civilians were killed, including what he called a suspiciously high number of casualties that U.S. forces attributed to ricochet wounds.

White House national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones said the release of the documents "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk." In a statement, he took pains to point out that the documents describe a period from January 2004 to December 2009, mostly during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Jones noted that time period was before President Obama announced a new strategy.

Pakistan's Ambassador Husain Haqqani agreed, saying the documents "do not reflect the current on-ground realities," in which his country and Washington are "jointly endeavoring to defeat al-Qaida and its Taliban allies."

The U.S. and Pakistan assigned teams of analysts to read the records online to assess whether sources or locations were at risk.

Pakistan's powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, said Monday that the accusations it had close connections to Taliban militants were malicious and unsubstantiated.

A senior ISI official said they were from unverified raw intelligence reports and were meant to impugn the reputation of the spy agency. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with the agency's policy.

Hamid Gul, a former head of the ISI who is mentioned many times in the documents, also denied allegations that he'd worked with the insurgents.

The New York Times said the documents reveal that only a short time ago, there was far less harmony in U.S. and Pakistani exchanges.

The Times says the "raw intelligence assessments" by lower level military officers suggest that Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders."

The Guardian, however, interpreted the documents differently, saying they "fail to provide a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between the Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban.

The leaked records include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive U.S. special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what U.S. officials considered high-value insurgent and terrorist targets. Some of the raids resulted in unintended killings of Afghan civilians, according to the documentation.

During the targeting and killing of Libyan fighter Abu Laith al-Libi, described in the documents as a senior al-Qaida military commander, the death tally was reported as six enemy fighters and seven noncombatants — all children.

Task Force 373 selected its targets from 2,000 senior Taliban and al-Qaida figures posted on a "kill or capture" list, known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List, the Guardian said.

U.S. government agencies have been bracing for the deluge of classified documents since the leak of helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That was blamed on a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Spc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md. He was charged with releasing classified information earlier this month. Manning had bragged online that he downloaded 260,000 classified U.S. cables and transmitted them to Wikileaks.org.

Assange on Monday compared the impact of the released material to the opening of the East German secret police archives. "This is the equivalent of opening the Stasi archives," he said.

He also said his group had many more documents on other subjects, including files on countries from across the globe.

"We have built up an enormous backlog of whistleblower disclosures," he said.

Assange said that he believed more material would flood amid the blaze of publicity.

"It is our experience that courage is contagious," he said. "Sources are encouraged by the opportunities that they see before them."

___

Dozier reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON -- When the CIA sent word in 2005 to destroy scores of videos showing waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, there was an unusual omission in the carefully worded memo: the names of two agency lawyers.

Once a CIA lawyer has weighed in on even a routine matter, officers rarely give an order without copying the lawyer in on the decision. It's standard procedure, a way for managers to cover themselves if a decision goes bad.

But when the CIA's top clandestine officer, Jose Rodriguez, told a colleague at the agency's secret prison in Thailand to destroy interrogation videos, he left the lawyers off the note.

The destruction of the tapes wiped away the most graphic evidence of the CIA's now-shuttered network of overseas prisons, where suspected terrorists were interrogated for information using some of the most aggressive tactics in U.S. history.

Critics of that George W. Bush-era program point to the tapes' destruction and say his administration was trying to cover its tracks.

The reality is not so simple.

Interviews with current and former U.S. officials and others close to the investigation show that Rodriguez's order was at odds with years of directives from CIA lawyers and the White House. Rodriguez knew there would be political fallout for the decision, according to documents and interviews, so he sought a legal opinion in a way to gain needed legal cover to get the tapes destroyed - but not so much that anyone would stop him.

Leaving the lawyers he had consulted off his cabled order to destroy the tapes was so unusual that a top CIA official noted it in an internal e-mail just days later. The omission is now an important part of the Justice Department's 2 1/2-year investigation into whether destroying the tapes was a crime.

Prosecutors have focused on a little-used section of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law. That makes it illegal to destroy documents, even if no court has ordered them kept and no investigator has asked for them.

Rodriguez, who wasn't disciplined for what some former officials told prosecutors amounted to insubordination, is frequently back at CIA headquarters as a contractor.

The Associated Press has compiled the most complete published account to date of how the tapes were destroyed, a narrative that among other things underlines the challenges prosecutors face in bringing charges.

Most of the people interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. Some of the officials directly involved declined comment or were unavailable.

---

Taping CIA interrogations is unusual, but the 2002 captures of al-Qaida operatives Abu Zubaydah and Rahim al-Nashiri were unusual cases. The CIA wanted to unravel al-Qaida from within and the Bush administration allowed increasingly severe tactics to try to ensure cooperation.

Officers began videotaping to prove that Zubaydah arrived in Thailand wounded and to show they were following Washington's new interrogation rules.

Almost as soon as taping began, officials began discussing whether to destroy the tapes. Dozens of officers and contractors appeared on the tapes. If those videos surfaced, officials feared, nearly all those people could be identified.

In November 2002, CIA lawyer John L. McPherson was assigned to watch the videos and compare them with written summaries. If the reports accurately described the videos, that would bolster the case that the tapes were unnecessary.

Several of the 92 videos had been taped over, so the quality was poor. Others contained gaps. When one tape ran out, documents show, interrogators didn't always immediately insert a new one. Many contained brief interrogation sessions followed by hours of static.

McPherson concluded in January 2003 that the summaries matched what he saw. With that assurance, the CIA planned to destroy the tapes. But lawmakers who were briefed on the plan raised concerns, and the CIA scrapped the idea, agency documents show.

The White House didn't learn about the tapes for a year, and even then, it was somewhat by chance.

---

Near the end of a May 2004 meeting between CIA general counsel Scott Muller and White House lawyers, the conversation turned to the scandal over photos of abuse in the military's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

National Security Council lawyer John Bellinger's question was almost offhand: Does the CIA have anything that could cause a firestorm like Abu Ghraib?

Yes, Muller said.

David Addington, a former CIA lawyer who was Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, was stunned that videos existed, officials said. But he told Muller not to destroy them, and Bellinger and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales agreed, according to documents and interviews with former officials.

That order stood for more than a year. Muller's successor, John Rizzo, received similar instructions from the next White House counsel, Harriet Miers: Check with the White House before destroying the tapes.

All the while, courts and lawmakers looking into detainee treatment were unknowingly coming close to the tapes:

-A Virginia judge asked whether there were interrogation videos of witnesses relevant to Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. But that didn't cover Zubaydah, who the judge said was immaterial to the Moussaoui case, so the CIA didn't tell the court about his interrogation tape.

-A Washington judge told the CIA to safeguard evidence of mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay. But Zubaydah and al-Nashiri were overseas at the time, so the agency regarded the order as not applicable to the tapes of their interrogations.

-A New York judge told the CIA to search its investigative files for records such as the tapes. But the CIA considered the tapes part of its operational files and therefore exempt from FOIA disclosure and did not reveal their existence to the court.

-The Sept. 11 commission asked for many documents, but never issued a subpoena.

---

Despite the White House orders, momentum for destroying the tapes grew again in late 2005 as the CIA Thailand station chief, Mike Winograd, prepared to retire.

Winograd had the tapes and believed they should be destroyed, officials said. At CIA headquarters, Rodriguez and his chief of staff agreed. Winograd did not return several messages from the AP seeking comment.

On Nov. 4, 2005, Rodriguez asked CIA lawyer Steven Hermes whether Rodriguez had the authority destroy the tapes. Hermes said Rodriguez did, according to documents and interviews. Rodriguez also asked CIA lawyer Robert Eatinger whether there was any legal requirement to keep the tapes. Eatinger said no.

Both Eatinger and Hermes remain with the agency and were unavailable to be interviewed. But both told colleagues they believed Rodriguez was merely restarting the discussion. Because of previous orders not to destroy the tapes, they were unaware Rodriguez planned to move immediately, officials told the AP.

Rodriguez told Winograd to request approval to destroy the tapes. That request arrived Nov. 5. Rodriguez sent his approval three days later.

He and his chief of staff were the only names on the cable. Had he sent a copy also to the CIA lawyers - Rizzo, Hermes or Eatinger - or even to CIA Director Porter Goss, any of them could have intervened.

"Before Jose did what he did, he was confident it was legal, that there was no impediment to him doing it," his lawyer, Robert Bennett told the AP. "And he always acted in the best interest of the U.S. and its people."

It took about 3 1/2 hours to destroy the tapes. On Nov. 9, Winograd informed Rodriguez the job was complete. Goss and Rizzo wouldn't find out until the next day.

---

Rizzo was angry and Miers livid, according to internal CIA e-mails. Goss agreed with Rodriguez's decision, the e-mails said, but predicted he'd get criticized for it. Rodriguez was undeterred.

"As Jose said, the heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain - he said out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be devastating to us," said an e-mail from an aide to the agency's No. 3 official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo.

Such statements could be used as evidence if prosecutor John Durham seeks charges in the case. Even if Rodriguez genuinely worried about the safety of his officers and wasn't trying to obstruct an investigation, if he feared the tapes might someday be made public, that could be enough to violate the Sarbanes-Oxley obstruction law.

As the case winds down, McPherson, who reviewed the tapes in 2003, again has been thrust into a central role. McPherson has received immunity in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors, an unusual protection for a government lawyer.

CIA spokesman George Little said the agency is cooperating with investigators.

Rodriguez, now an executive with contractor Edge Consulting, a job that regularly gives him access to the national intelligence director's office and CIA headquarters, still hasn't received an official retirement party.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward will get an immediate annual pension worth about £600,000 ($930,000) when he leaves in October, the BBC has learned.

Mr Hayward is to stand down after sustained criticism of his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil leak.

However, a BP source said he would be nominated for a non-executive position at the firm's Russian joint venture.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said that the pension entitlement was "bound to be hugely controversial".

'Honour contract'

BP pension scheme rules say that those who joined before April 2006 can take the pension at any point from age 50. Mr Hayward is 53.

He will also receive a year's salary plus benefits worth more than £1m.

Mr Hayward's pension pot is valued at about £11m and he will keep his rights to shares under a long-term performance scheme which could - depending on BP's stock market recovery - eventually be worth several million pounds.

Our business editor said that because Mr Hayward was leaving by mutual agreement rather than being sacked, the BP board felt it had "to honour the terms of its contract with him".

He will be replaced by American colleague Bob Dudley, the BBC understands, though no formal announcement has yet been made.

Mr Dudley, who is in charge of the Gulf of Mexico clean-up operation, was the former chief of the BP-TNK joint venture, but was forced to leave Russia in 2008 amid a dispute with shareholders.

Criticised

BP is set to reveal its latest results on Tuesday. The accounts will cover spill compensation and costs of up to £19bn, and may result in the worst quarterly loss for a UK firm.

They are also likely to discuss terms of the severance package for Mr Hayward - whose performance in the crisis has been widely criticised.

Mr Hayward began his career with BP 28 years ago as a rig geologist in the North Sea before working his way up to board level. He was a popular choice for the top job when Lord Browne stepped aside in 2007.

But he will be seen to carry the can for being at the helm for the worst year in the company's history.

Questions raised

When he became chief executive in 2007, Mr Hayward told journalists his number-one task was to focus "laser-like" on safety and reliability.

The explosion on the drilling rig off Louisiana on 20 April, which killed 11 workers and triggered the worst oil spill in the US, raised questions about his leadership.

Mr Hayward has been heavily criticised by residents of the Gulf coast and US politicians for his handling of the clean-up and for a series of gaffes, including saying that he "just wanted his life back" and that the Gulf of Mexico was a "big ocean" following the leak.

He was also taken to task for attending a sailing event off the Isle of Wight in June. Oil-covered birds Images of environmental damage called by the spill have hurt BP's public perception

Mr Hayward was publicly rebuked by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month for "stonewalling" questions at a congressional hearing.

Journalist Tom Bower, who wrote a book called The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century, said Mr Hayward's departure was inevitable because he "hadn't changed the culture" at BP following previous accidents in the US.

"He knew what had to be done, but he didn't do it properly. He was too slow; he wasn't inspired; he wasn't focused enough," said Bower.

PR perspective

The man expected to replace Mr Hayward, BP managing director Mr Dudley, took over the day-to-day operations in the Gulf last month.

Many say that, from a public relations point of view, Mr Dudley has the advantage of being American.

He grew up in Mississippi and, according to BP, has a "deep appreciation and affinity for the Gulf Coast".

BP has lost 40% of its market capitalisation since the May spill.

The company's second-quarter results due on Tuesday are expected to reveal a provision for the costs of the clean-up, compensation claims and fines to be paid.

Meanwhile, the official overseeing the US government response to the oil spill has said the operation to plug the ruptured Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico permanently has been put back to allow more time for preparatory work.

Retired Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen said the last bit of pipe needed for the process would be put in place in the coming this week, with the actual plugging operation starting in the first week of August. A temporary cap has stopped oil from gushing for more than a week.

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Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they’re hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We’ve chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar — specifically women with coding skills — please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are “Internet famous.” Some, less so — for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We’ve even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She’s a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation’s CTO. She’s also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she’s affectionately known as “The Open Source Diva” in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she’s a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she’s the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how’s this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen’s goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we’d guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She’s done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She’s an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an “Internet engineer,” a self-applied job title we don’t see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can’t argue with the description. She’s a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She’s an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she’s the company’s VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she’s particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take — that means she started out before blogging was called “blogging.” She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she’s perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She’s currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda’s Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute’s Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration’s 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan’s Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O’Dell’s Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix’s Dev Chix

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It’s not quite as scary as looking up and seeing Godzilla lurking over the city skyline, but a two-story-tall Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) staring down from the side of a downtown Louisville office building caused a few surprised gasps Monday night.

In a bit of guerilla theater, AFSCME projected a 30-second silent video reminding passers-by about McConnell’s role as chief architect of the Republican’s obstructionist battle plan. The Party of No’s obstructionist tactics cost more than 2.5 million long-term jobless workers their unemployment insurance (UI) and blocked aid to state and local governments that would save or create nearly a million jobs for teachers, public employees, police officers, firefighters and others.

AFSCME chose Louisville because McConnell was there to speak before the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The group had just released a report that said without federal aid, more than half the nation’s states will see their budget shortfalls grow by as much as $72 billion next fiscal year, forcing cuts in vital services and jobs to make up for the shortfalls.

McConnell’s words of advice to the state legislators desperately scrambling to keep their budgets afloat? He was opposed to further federal stimulus help for the states and, in a nutshell, told state lawmakers: Get used to it—you all have been spoiled for years by federal funds.

Along with the video that was moved about and was projected on several buildings, AFSCME took out a full-page ad (click here) in the Louisville Courier-Journal telling McConnell, “It’s Time to End the Obstruction,” and highlighting editorials from around the country calling on Congress to approve badly needed federal aid for cash-strapped states.

A judge in Arizona blocks key parts of the state's strict new immigration law a day before it was due to take effect.

The Microsoft Mac team has posted the first in a series of videos that show off some of the new features in Microsoft Office for Mac 2011.

The next version of Office for Mac, which includes the valiant return of Outlook for Mac, is due out by the end of the year. The Mac Office team has been posting about some of the new features and some of the changes to the interface.

This Mac release is a big deal because it will finally put the Mac and Windows versions of Office on more equal footing. In addition to bringing back Outlook (no tears will be shed over the death of Entourage), the next version of Office for Mac will include the ribbon interface first introduced in Office 2007. Although Office for Mac 2008 had some of these elements, the next version will really take things a step further.

Additionally, some of the newest features from Office 2010 — like conversation view for Outlook — will be coming to the Mac version. Even better, the new database system for Outlook for Mac will be compatible with both Time Machine and Spotlight. This is actually a pretty big deal because one of the problems with Entourage is that it doesn’t work well with Time Machine.

You can check out the video of the Office for Mac team explaining some of these new changes below:

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A plane carrying around 150 people crashed into a wooded hillside on Wednesday while trying to land in bad weather north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Pakistan's interior minister told local media that all of those on board were killed.

Former first lady Nancy Reagan joined California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a ceremonial signing of a bill that sets aside every Feb. 6 to honor the late president and former California governor. Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911.

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