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.

DULUTH, Minn. – Wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, Mayor Don Ness strolled to the end of a dock jutting into frigid Lake Superior. He grinned, waved his arms to a cheering crowd, and jumped in.

“I’ve laid down the gauntlet!” Ness cried, shivering and dripping as he emerged from the lake in a video posted on YouTube. “All right, you other mayors! You want Google Fiber, you jump in Lake Superior!”

They may not be taking a lake plunge, but city leaders around the country are competing hard for Google’s experimental fiber-optic network, which promises to be more than 100 times faster than the Internet connections currently available to most Americans.

Topeka, Kan., informally renamed itself “Google, Kansas,” for the month of March. A group in Baltimore launched a Web site that uses Google mapping to plot the location of more than 1,000 residents and gives their reasons for wanting the service. Other cities in pursuit include Cincinnati, Portland, Ore., Grand Rapids, Mich., Rochester, N.Y., Baton Rouge, La. More than 200 groups on Facebook are pushing different cities and counties for Google’s broadband plan.

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.

WASHINGTON – A Google Inc. executive said Tuesday that the company is still considering its next step in China – seven weeks after it pledged to stop censoring search results there and threatened to pull out of the country altogether.

Google Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the company is continuing to investigate a hacking attack that emanated from China and attempts to snoop on dissidents’ e-mail.

Since disclosing the incident in January, Google has called on the Chinese government to stop requiring it to remove links to Web sites that the government deems subversive or offensive. The company is in talks with Chinese officials to try to reach an agreement that would allow it to continue to do business there.

“The attack on our corporate infrastructure and the surveillance it uncovered – as well as attempts over the past year to limit free speech on the Web even further – led us to conclude that we are no longer willing to censor our search results in China and we are currently reviewing our options,” Wong said.

Young adults who used marijuana as teens were more likely than those who didn’t to develop schizophrenia and psychotic symptoms including hallucinations and delusions, an Australian study found.

Those who used the drug for six or more years were twice as likely to develop a psychosis such as schizophrenia or to have delusional disorders than those who never used marijuana, according to research released online by the Archives of General Psychiatry. They were also four times as likely to score high on a list of psychotic-like experiences.

The findings build on previous research and shows that marijuana use isn’t as harmless as some people think, lead study author John McGrath said yesterday in an e-mail. The study was the first to look at sibling pairs to discount genetic or environmental influence and still find marijuana linked to later psychosis, the authors said in the study.

“This is the most convincing evidence yet that the earlier you use cannabis, the more likely you are to have symptoms of a psychotic illness,” said McGrath, a professor at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia, in a statement. “The message for teenagers is: if they choose to use cannabis they have to understand there’s a risk involved.”

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.

BRUSSELS – EU data protection authorities have urged U.S. Internet search giant Google to shorten the period it stores images from its controversial Street View web service because of privacy concerns.

Launched in San Francisco in 2007, Street View allows users to navigate around a 360-degree view of city streets, buildings, traffic and people, using pictures taken by Google’s camera vehicles.
Now available in many countries, critics of the service accuse Google of failing to obscure sensitive images and setting its cameras in a way that allows them to peer over fences, hedges and walls into private property.

Google, which now keeps the images for a year should halve this period, privacy authorities wrote in a letter to the company’s global counsel, Peter Fleischer.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon announced on Friday it has authorized the use Twitter, Facebook and other so-called “Web 2.0″ sites across the U.S. military, saying the benefits of social media outweighed security concerns.

The decision, which comes at a time of growing concern over cyber-security, applies only to the military’s non-classified network.

But it could mean big changes for large portions of the armed forces, including the Marines, which had selectively banned social media on work computers.

The Department of Defense also had bans in place since 2007 on accessing certain bandwidth-gobbling Web sites like YouTube on its network.

SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp made its most vehement and public attack on Google Inc on Friday, calling its internet rival’s actions potentially anti-competitive, and urging victims to file complaints to regulators.

The broadside comes days after a Microsoft-owned business, along with two other small online companies, complained to European Union regulators about Google’s operations there. Microsoft is also fighting a plan by Google to digitize millions of books, currently under scrutiny by the Department of Justice.

“Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content — like Google Books — and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly,” wrote Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, in a blog published on the company’s website on Friday.

Software giant Microsoft Corp has won a U.S. court approval to deactivate a global network of computers that the company accused of spreading spam and harmful computer codes, the Wall Street Journal said.

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, granted a request by Microsoft to deactivate 277 Internet domains, which the software maker said is linked to a “botnet,” the paper said.