LONDON – British dog owners may be forced to microchip their pets and take out insurance, part of a proposed crackdown on the country’s dangerous canines.

Postmen are delighted, but civil libertarians grumble that Britain’s sprawling surveillance state now wants to track the nation’s estimated 8 million dogs. Others complain that the insurance plan would impose a financial penalty on innocent pet owners – while criminals who own violent animals will simply shirk the law.

“This is yet more surveillance and continuous data-grabbing by government who want to have as much information on us as it can possibly have,” said Dylan Sharpe, a campaigner with privacy rights group Big Brother Watch. Opposition lawmaker Nick Herbert said the proposal risked “penalizing millions of law-abiding dog owners with the blunt instrument of a dog tax.”

REPEAT drink-drivers and drug-drivers who are a “menace to society” will be banned from driving for life under reforms pledged by Premier Mike Rann.

Mr Rann today announced the Police Commissioner would be given the power to suspend the licences of repeat offenders and branded cars “lethal weapons” in a similar class to guns.

Mr Rann also pledged to increase penalties for hoon street racers who “use suburban roads as a racetrack”.

A blogger, who had faced a military trial for an article critical of Egypt’s armed forces, has been released without bail after apologising and on condition he removes the posting, his lawyer said on Sunday.

Ahmed Moustafa, 20, an engineering student, had been charged by a military court with “disseminating false information” and “tarnishing the image of the military”. He was detained in Kafr el-Sheikh, a city north of Cairo.

“The military court retracted its position and released Ahmed without giving reasons,” Moustafa’s lawyer, Hamdi al-Assiuty, told Reuters. But he said the authorities had kept the case on file which meant it could be pulled out in future.

A conviction could have resulted in a one-year jail term.

The Committee to Protect Journalists and other rights groups had called on Egypt to drop charges against Moustafa and have criticised the treatment of Egyptian bloggers, who are often rounded up for posting anti-government articles.

GENEVA – The result was emphatic: Swiss voters don’t think abused animals need to have their own lawyers.

It’s a proposal that would never even come near a referendum in other countries, but the measure’s defeat Sunday disappointed animal rights advocates, who say Switzerland’s elaborate animal welfare laws aren’t being enforced.

Opponents of the proposal, including key farmers’ groups and the government, had argued that existing laws are sufficient and appointing special lawyers to act on behalf of animals would be unnecessarily expensive for taxpayers.

“The Swiss people have clearly said our animal protection laws are so good we don’t need animal lawyers,” Jakob Buechler, a lawmaker for the centrist Christian People’s Party, told Swiss television SF1.

Official results showed that 70.5 percent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal to extend nationwide a system that has been in place in Zurich since 1992. Some 29.5 percent of voters backed the proposal, with turnout at just over 45 percent.

LAS CRUCES, N.M. – Las Cruces police said a woman has been arrested for allegedly stabbing her ex-husband. Police said a 27-year-old woman was charged with three counts of aggravated battery against a household member and one count of battery. She was being held on $15,000 bond at the Dona Ana County Detention Center. The woman’s ex-husband was taken to a hospital for treatment of his wounds after the Thursday night altercation.

According to police, Shaw and her 29-year-old ex-husband were at her home late Thursday when she became upset after looking through his cell phone’s call history.

Detectives said Shaw pulled out a knife and started swinging at her ex-spouse, striking him at least three times. Authorities said his injuries were not life-threatening.

The victim left the home and got a ride to the Las Cruces Police Department where he was interviewed by officers.

WAUKESHA, Wis. – A Wisconsin teenager who blackmailed dozens of fellow high school students into sex acts by using photos and videos obtained in a Facebook scam faces up to 50 years in prison after pleading no contest to two felonies Tuesday.

Anthony R. Stancl, 19, of New Berlin, had faced 12 charges that carried a maximum penalty of nearly 300 years.

He pleaded no contest to repeated sexual assault of the same child and third-degree sexual assault. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed charges that included second-degree sexual assault, child enticement and possession of child pornography.

PHILADELPHIA – A Pennsylvania school district accused of secretly switching on laptop computer webcams inside students’ homes is under investigation by federal authorities, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press.

The FBI will look into whether any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws were violated by Lower Merion School District officials, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the investigation, told the AP on Friday.

Days after a student filed suit over the practice, Lower Merion officials acknowledged Friday that they remotely activated webcams 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing student laptops. They insist they never did so to spy on students, as the student’s family claimed in the federal lawsuit.

LOS ANGELES – An ex-Boeing Co engineer, found guilty last year of passing space shuttle secrets to China in America’s first conviction under a 1996 espionage law, was sentenced on Monday to 15 years in prison.

Dongfan “Greg” Chung, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was convicted in July of economic espionage and acting as an agent for the People’s Republic of China.

In sentencing Chung to 188 months behind bars, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, who presided over the 10-day trial in Santa Ana, California, said he wanted to send a signal to China to “stop sending your spies here,” according to prosecutors.

Chung, 73, the first person convicted at trial under the Economic Espionage Act, told the judge he was innocent.

“Your honor, I’m not a spy, I’m an ordinary man,” he said. “I was planning to write a book. Those documents were going to be used for my references.

A new study suggests laws banning the use of hand-held devices while driving have not reduced the rate of accidents in three states and the District of Columbia.

In addition to the nation’s capital, the report by the Highway Loss Data Institute reviews insurance claims in New York, Connecticut and California. It also compares the data to other areas that do not have cell phone bans.

“The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” said Adrian Lund, president of the Highway Loss Data Institute.

A Nebraska man is expected to plead guilty next week to launching a cyber attack that shut down the Church of Scientology’s Web sites, federal prosecutors said Monday.