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The first human egg cells that have been grown entirely in the laboratory from stem cells could be fertilised later this year in a development that will revolutionise fertility treatment and might even lead to a reversal of the menopause in older women.

Scientists are about to request a licence from the UK fertility watchdog to fertilise the eggs as part of a series of tests to generate an unlimited supply of human eggs, a breakthrough that could help infertile women to have babies as well as making women as fertile in later life as men.

The companies have avoided U.S. taxes on almost every penny of their international profits by keeping the money offshore. And nearly that entire haul has been designated by top executives of those firms as “permanently” or “indefinitely” reinvested abroad, partly because of the 35 percent U.S. tax rate companies must pay to bring home foreign money.

That $455.6 billion, along with hundreds of billions more dollars in other earnings parked overseas, lies at the center of a tug of war between lobbyists, Congress and the White House over how to tax international profits.

The U.S. military armed and trained members of a dissident Iranian opposition group during the Bush administration, according to a report published Friday in The New Yorker.

The report claims members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq organization were provided with extensive training by the U.S. Defense Department's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). The training sessions were allegedly conducted in secret at a site belonging to the U.S. Department on Energy in Nevada.

A former CIA officer who became a key player in the debate over waterboarding as an interrogation technique was indicted on charges he leaked classified secrets to journalists, including the role of an associate who participated in a covert mission to track down a top al-Qaida figure.

The indictment of John Kiriakou, returned by a federal grand jury on Thursday, is part of an aggressive justice department crackdown on leakers and is one of a half-dozen such cases opened during the Obama administration.

Austrian and Japanese researchers on Wednesday unveiled solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk that are flexible enough to be wrapped around a single human hair.

“You could attach the device to your clothes like a badge to collect electricity (from the sun)… Elderly people who might want to wear sensors to monitor their health would not need to carry around batteries,” Sekitani told AFP.

A former CIA officer who expressed public doubts over the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique was indicted Thursday on charges that he leaked classified secrets to journalists, including the role of an associate who worked with him on a covert mission to track down and capture a top al-Qaida figure.

Kiriakou received public attention for his statements on waterboarding, which he called an “unnecessary” form of interrogation during a 2007 interview with ABC. Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," has generated widespread media attention this year, but little has been reported on the ways in which fracking may have unique impacts on women.

Chemicals used in fracking have been linked to breast cancer and reproductive health problems, and there have been reports of rises in crimes against women in some fracking "boom" towns, which have attracted itinerant workers with few ties to the community.

Financial speculators are gambling on oil the same way they gambled on the housing market a few years ago — a frightening prospect for the fragile economy, a Democratic congressional committee was told Wednesday.

"It is similar to the gambling Wall Street did on whether or not people would pay their subprime (below-market rate) mortgages in the mortgage meltdown," said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former federal regulator of financial markets. "Now they are betting on the upward direction of the price of oil."