CHARLESTON, S.C. – Passengers have again fallen ill with a stomach bug aboard a cruise ship hit by a virus last month on its previous trip from South Carolina.

Celebrity Cruise spokeswoman Cynthia Martinez said Friday that 55 of the nearly 1,900 passengers on board the Celebrity Mercury were sick.

More than 400 passengers and crew fell ill during a cruise that ended in Charleston on Feb. 26. The vessel sailed again last weekend after a one-day delay to allow a crew to sanitize the ship.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said tests showed last month’s outbreak was caused by norovirus, which can spread quickly in closed quarters. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps.

South Carolina health officials have reported twice as many cases of norovirus as normal this winter.

The virus may have come on board the ship with passengers, crew members or supplies. But it’s almost impossible to pinpoint a specific cause in a closed place like a cruise liner, said Adam Myrick, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

“It’s so ubiquitous. It’s everywhere,” he said. “There’s no way you can say it came from this stairwell, this handrail in this stairwell.”

The United States and Britain are threatening to withhold support for a $3.75 billion World Bank loan for a coal-fired plant in South Africa, expanding the battleground in the global debate over who should pay for clean energy.

The opposition by the bank’s two largest members has raised eyebrows among those who note that the two advanced economies are allowing development of coal-powered plants in their own countries even as they raise concerns about those in poorer countries.

LONDON – It’s the new front in the nanny state: Microchips placed in garbage bins to monitor how much people throw away.

A pro-privacy group warns in a new report that more than 2.6 million of the chips have been surreptitiously installed in what is seen as a first step toward charging those who toss too much.

Proponents say it’s a bid to push recycling. Opponents say it stinks.

“They should mind their own business,” said Terry Williams, an unemployed Londoner who thinks the government is meddling. “I believe they have gone too far. It’s not like we are throwing away anything that is illegal.”

The advocacy group Big Brother Watch found through a series of Freedom of Information requests that many local governments, called councils in Britain, are installing the microchips in trash cans distributed to households, but in most cases have not yet activated them – in part because officials know the move would be unpopular.

“They are waiting for the political climate to change before they start using them,” said campaign director Dylan Sharpe, who predicted that families that produce large amounts of garbage would be fined.

The trash microchips are now part of the British information grid, which already includes a heavy reliance on closed-circuit television surveillance and cameras to monitor the population, particularly on the crowded public transportation system.

“This is yet another piece of surveillance that the councils are taking on in our daily life,” said Sharpe. “With this information they can tell if we are home or not, and the information is stored on their database, which is not that secure.”

He said the “pay as you throw” policy councils are planning to implement would discriminate against large families that generate more waste and might encourage people to burn their refuse – or dump it illegally – rather than pay extra.

“That’s what’s happened in Ireland, where they’re tried this,” he said. “Over the last 10 years we’ve seen a massive increase in CCTV, and the introduction of laws allowing police to search at random. There has been a general trend in this country toward gathering as much data as possible.”

BOSTON – The Transportation Security Administration on Friday announced nine more U.S. airports that will receive body-scanning technology, as the U.S. heightens its effort to detect hidden explosives and other weapons amid a threat highlighted by an attempted bombing on Christmas Day.

TSA security director Lee Kair said units will be fielded in the coming months at Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; San Jose, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; San Diego; Charlotte, N.C.; Cincinnati; Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; and Kansas City.

They will join three machines going online Monday at Boston’s Logan International Airport, and one being deployed next week at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.

All are among 150 machines bought with money from the federal stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama last year. They join 40 machines already in use at 19 airports nationwide.

The stolen identities allegedly used in the assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh are still valid documents for the purposes of conducting business online in Australia, an iTnews special investigation revealed.
Our investigation has revealed that the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) has either failed to cancel the stolen passport credentials of the three Australian citizens used in the attack, or has failed to update the My Passport database used by some Australian financial institutions to verify the identity of new customers.

Here is a list of earthquakes that registered at least magnitude 8.6.

- May 22, 1960: A magnitude 9.5 earthquake in southern Chile and ensuing tsunami killed at least 1,716 people.

- March 27, 1964: A magnitude 9.2 quake in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and ensuing tsunami killed 128 people.

- Dec. 26, 2004: A magnitude 9.1 quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami that killed 226,000 people in 12 countries, including 165,700 in Indonesia and 35,400 in Sri Lanka.

- Aug. 13, 1868: A magnitude 9.0 quake in Arica, Peru (now Chile) generated catastrophic tsunamis; more than 25,000 people were killed in South America.

- Jan. 26, 1700: A magnitude 9.0 quake shakes Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Colombia and triggers tsunami that damages villages in Japan.

HONOLULU – Hawaii sounded warning sirens and began evacuating residents near the coastline on Saturday ahead of a tsunami generated by a massive earthquake in Chile.

Civil defense sirens sounded across the island state at 6 a.m. local time (1600 GMT) after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said a tsunami was generated that could cause waves of up to 8 feet (2.4 meters) and damage along the coasts of all the Hawaiian islands.

“We’re not expecting this to be a worst-case scenario, but we are expecting dangerous waves to appear on shore,” said Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

Civil defense officials sent firefighters and firetrucks into neighborhoods bordering the coast, and used loud speakers urging residents to evacuate.

Gas stations in Honolulu were jammed with lines of cars stretching a quarter of a mile (400 metres) in some places as residents waited to fill gas tanks before evacuating.

Buses were to patrol beaches and take people to parks in a voluntary process expected to last five hours.

CONCEPCION – One of the world’s most powerful earthquakes in a century pounded Chile on Saturday, killing more than 300 people as it toppled buildings and triggered tsunamis that ravaged a port town and threatened Pacific coastlines as far away as Japan.

Buildings caught fire, others crumbled and bridges collapsed across swathes of central Chile, but the initial death toll was relatively low from a quake many times stronger than the one that devastated Haiti last month.

An apartment block with up to 200 people inside collapsed in Concepcion, the closest major city to the epicenter, and rescue officials said they were unsure how many escaped.

Overturned cars lay scattered below a fallen overpass in the capital Santiago and telephone and power lines went down across the narrow country, making it difficult to assess the full extent of the damage and loss of life.

SENDAI – Tsunami waves of up to 1.5 metres (5 feet) hit far-flung Pacific regions from the Russian far east and Japan to New Zealand’s Chatham Islands on Sunday after a powerful earthquake struck Chile, but there were no reports of injuries or serious damage.

Hundreds of thousands of residents in Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines and Russia’s Kamchatka were told to evacuate after one of the world’s strongest quakes in a century hit Chile on Saturday, killing more than 300 people.

Japanese officials had warned that tsunami waves of 3 metres or more could strike the country’s Pacific coast and ordered or advised around 630,000 households to evacuate.

“I feel the power of nature. The tsunami is coming from thousands of kilometres away,” said Akio Yone, a 70-year-old retired fisherman, as he watched from high ground on a chilly, windy evening on the outskirts of Sendai, northern Japan.

WASHINGTON – Over 1,000 possible suspects faced scrutiny before investigators finally concluded a U.S. Army scientist alone committed the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, according to Justice Department documents released on Friday.

Officially closing its investigation, the department said various steps taken in the past year only confirmed its earlier conclusion that the scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had mailed the anthrax-laced letters.

The letters killed five people, sickened 17 others, jolted a nation reeling from the September 11 hijacked-plane attacks and resulted in one of the FBI’s largest investigations ever.

In seven years after the attack, an “Amerithrax task force” of investigators spent more than 600,000 work hours, conducted some 10,000 witness interviews on six continents, and recovered about 6,000 items of potential evidence.