Earth may be crashing through dark matter walls

Earth is constantly crashing through huge walls of dark matter, and we already have the tools to detect them. That's the conclusion of physicists who say the universe may be filled with a patchwork quilt of force fields created shortly after the big bang.

Observations of how mass clumps in space suggest that about 86 per cent of all matter is invisible dark matter, which interacts with ordinary matter mainly through gravity. The most popular theory is that dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles.

WIMPs should also interact with ordinary matter via the weak nuclear force, and their presence should have slight but measurable effects. However, years of searches for WIMPs have been coming up empty.

"So far nothing is found, and I feel like it's time to broaden the scope of our search," says Maxim Pospelov of the University of Victoria in Canada. "What we propose is to look for some other signatures."

Bubbly cosmos

Pospelov and colleagues have been examining a theory that at least some of the universe's dark matter is tied up in structures called domain walls, akin to the boundaries between tightly packed bubbles. The idea is that the hot early universe was full of an exotic force field that varied randomly. As the universe expanded and cooled, the field froze, leaving a patchwork of domains, each with its own distinct value for the field.

Having different fields sit next to each other requires energy to be stored within the domain walls. Mass and energy are interchangeable, so on a large scale a network of domain walls can look like concentrations of mass – that is, like dark matter, says Pospelov.

If the grid of domain walls is packed tightly enough – say, if the width of the domains is several hundred times the distance between Earth and the sun – Earth should pass through a domain wall once every few years. "As a human, you wouldn't feel a thing," says Pospelov. "You will go through the wall without noticing." But magnetometers – devices that, as the name suggests, measure magnetic fields – could detect the walls, say Pospelov and colleagues in a new study. Although the field inside a domain would not affect a magnetometer, the device would sense the change when Earth passes through a domain wall.

Dark matter walls have not been detected yet because anyone using a single magnetometer would find the readings swamped by noise, Pospelov says. "You'd never be able to say if it's because the Earth went through a bizarre magnetic field or if a grad student dropped their iPhone or something," he says.

Network needed

Finding the walls will require a network of at least five detectors spread around the world, Pospelov suggests. Colleagues in Poland and California have already built one magnetometer each and have shown that they are sensitive enough for the scheme to work.

Domain walls wouldn't account for all the dark matter in the universe, but they could explain why finding particles of the stuff has been such a challenge, says Pospelov.

If domain walls are found, the news might come as a relief to physicists still waiting for WIMPs to show up. Earlier this month, for instance, a team working with a detector in Russia that has been running for more than 24 years announced that they have yet to see any sign of these dark matter candidates.

Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in Pospelov's study, isn't yet convinced that dark matter walls exist. But he is glad that physicists are keeping an open mind about alternatives to WIMPs.

"We've looked for WIMP dark matter in so many ways," he says. "At some point you have to ask, are we totally on the wrong track?"

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.021803

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WP will strengthen the voice of the opposition: Lee Li Lian

SINGAPORE: Workers' Party (WP) candidate for the Punggol East by-election, Lee Li Lian said having another WP member in Parliament will strengthen the voice of the opposition.

It means more airtime for the opposition to ask more questions on behalf of Singaporeans and this, she said will definitely make a difference.

Ms Lee refuted talk that having the WP members in Parliament did not make a difference, saying they have done an excellent job.

She was speaking to reporters after a morning walkabout at Rivervale Plaza.

- CNA/ck

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Historic D.C., hidden in plain sight

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

Locals reveal the D.C. you don't know

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Washington, D.C. holds a lot of nearly hidden history


• A tennis court occupies the site of the execution of Lincoln assassination conspirators


• A present-day parking garage once hosted a historic Beatles show

Washington (CNN) -- Ordinarily, I'm not a fan of vandalism.

But years ago I spotted some graffiti in Washington that struck a chord. Someone had spray painted the symbol for anarchy -- a circled "A" -- on a Chinatown grocery store.

And I wondered: Did they know?

Did they know that that building, a century earlier, had been Mary Surratt's boarding house? Did they know that conspirators had gathered there to plot the kidnapping and assassination of an American president? Did they know that the site had played a role in the biggest act of anarchy in this country's history?

Was the graffiti just accidentally appropriate? Or could punks with paint be profound?

I don't know the answer, of course. But I know that this city is teeming with people who, like me, relish its hidden history.

Washington is a town of majestic monuments and memorials. And those are worth visiting. But if you limit your sightseeing to the obvious -- if you ignore the obscure -- you'll miss the good stuff.

That is what I had in mind when I asked historians and history buffs to show me places -- off the beaten path -- that have stirred their love of history and this great town.

WASHINGTON COLISEUM: "I Saw Them Standing There"

Four boys, in dire need of haircuts, come to town, looking to conquer it.

The British tried it once before, in 1814. Burned the city. It left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

But this time, they try soft diplomacy. A little twist and shout. A little ditty about wanting to hold your hand.

And it works.

Improbable as it sounds, it happened in a barrel-shaped architectural ruin just north of the Capitol on 3rd Street NE.

Shortly after 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 11, 1964 -- two days after appearing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- the Beatles took the stage in Washington Coliseum. It was the Beatles' very first stage concert in the United States.

Critics later say the concert is as singular moment in rock history -- a moment when the early Beatles seemed even more joyous than their shrieking teen-age fans.

Richard Layman, who fought to preserve the Coliseum, cherishes this place for many reasons. Built in 1940 and 1941, the building served as an ice rink, sports arena, worship hall, trash transfer station and parking garage. Nation of Islam leaders Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed spoke here. It hosted numerous professional sports teams, and was home to the Ice Capades.

For Beatle devotees, this is a shrine.

They still have ticket stubs, and remember whether they paid $2, $3 or $4. They gush about how Paul smiled at them.

An age of innocence? Not exactly. The Russians threatened us from outer space. The pains of segregation and integration were rocking the country. And, just three months earlier, an assassin felled the leader of the free world.

But for about 35 minutes on a cold February night in 1964, four boys from Liverpool entered a converted ice rink and warmed a generation's heart.

COURTROOM DRAMA: Last act of the Civil War

The man, a tavern owner, took the witness stand.

"I was acquainted with John Wilkes Booth," he said. "Booth came into my restaurant [adjoining Ford's Theater] on the evening of the 14th of April."

Booth "walked up to the bar, and called for some whiskey, which I gave him; he called for some water, which I also gave him; he placed the money on the counter and went out. I saw him go out of the bar alone, as near as I can judge, from eight to ten minutes before I heard the cry that the President was assassinated."

Peter Taltavul spoke those words, in this room, just one month after Lincoln died.

By then, authorities had already tracked down Booth, cornered him, and killed him. And they had rounded up eight people who they believe had assisted him.

They convened a military commission to conduct the trial in the third floor of what was then a federal penitentiary. The co-conspirators, they reasoned, were not "civilians," but were "enemy belligerents." The nation was seeking justice and vengeance, and it would come swiftly.

On July 6, 1865 -- less than three months after the assassination -- the commission found all eight conspirators guilty. It sentenced four to hang, and four to prison terms. The condemned were hanged the next day.

A year later, the Supreme Court would rule that a defendant could not be tried by military commission when civilian courts were functioning. But it was too late.

The penitentiary is now closed and largely demolished. The land is part of Fort McNair at the southernmost point of Washington.

Visitors -- mostly lawyers and Civil War buffs -- are frequently overwhelmed when they enter the room, said Susan Lemke, a special collections librarian who has accumulated artifacts related to the trial. "There's no substitution for actually witnessing or being in the middle of a historic site like that," she said.

THE GALLOWS: Where generals "serve," conspirators hanged

Michael Kauffman is struck by the incongruity of it all.

On the edge of a Fort McNair tennis court, where generals now casually toss their gym bags, Abraham Lincoln's death was avenged.

Here in this spot, near the penitentiary room where the sentences were handed down, on a miserably hot day in July 1865, Union Army Capt. Christian Rath raised his hands and clapped three times. On the third clap, soldiers knocked supports out from under a gallows, and four prisoners fell. Their bodies jerked violently at the ends of their ropes. The prisoner in the dress appeared to die instantly. But one of her three accused accomplices writhed for five minutes before surrendering his ghost.

"I am one of those people who think that if you really want to understand history, you have to go to where it happened," says Kauffman, an expert on the Lincoln assassination.

So Kauffman leads me to this empty tennis court. It is drizzly and cold, and there is little here to evince the images and emotions of that hot July day. The penitentiary's tall wall has been demolished, and a building prominent in photos of the hanging has been altered almost beyond recognition.

Almost.

Kauffman shows me the place where the wall met the building. And in my mind's eye, the gallows fall into place.

"There's this strange sort of excitement that you get when you've read about something, and you visualize it, and you think you know all about it. And then all of a sudden you go there and it's right in front of you. It surrounds you. And it's always somehow different from what you had imagined," Kauffman said.

Different, to be sure. But more real than ever.

CHADWICKS: Where the U.S. was shaken, and stirred

It is known as "The Big Dump."

On June 16, 1985, CIA officer Aldrich Ames walked into Chadwicks, a Georgetown pub, with two shopping bags full of classified information and, over lunch, gave them to a Soviet diplomat.

"In those bags was every piece of paper he could get his hands on that revealed almost all of our operations in the Soviet Union," said Peter Earnest, a former CIA official who is now executive director of the International Spy Museum in D.C.

Five to seven pounds of secrets.

The enormity of the breach became known only after the Soviet Union began rounding up some of the United States' most valuable assets in Russia. At least 10 were executed.

The CIA launched a hunt for a possible mole. It compiled a list of 190 CIA officers with access to relevant classified information, and culled it to 28. And in 1994 -- nine years after the Big Dump -- Ames and his wife were arrested.

Earnest says he doesn't "romanticize" the Chadwick's site, but says "the repercussions of what he did ripple through the government today -- the need to have more polygraphs, the concerns about our records ... the nature of the questions asked."

It's also a waypoint in the Spy Museum's bus tour, which notes the role that Ames' "high-maintenance" wife Rosario played in his betrayal of his country.

Tour guides note that after Ames was arrested, FBI agents who eavesdropped on their conversations made an astonishing comment: They were so disgusted with Rosario's constant badgering about money, her criticisms of Ames and her treatment of their son that although they could never forgive Ames for spying, they said, they would have understood if he had killed his wife.

ALEXANDRIA SLAVE PEN: From slave to freeman

"PRICE, BIRCH & CO," the sign read. "DEALERS IN SLAVES."

The sign is long gone, but the building, known as the "Alexandria Slave Pen," still stands in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington.

"I often tell my students, 'You've gone into towns where you just see row after row of car dealerships. Duke Street was that -- but slave dealerships,'" says Chandra Manning, associate professor of history at Georgetown University.

In 1861, the slave trade was thriving when Virginia seceded from the union. But on May 24 of that year, the Union Army's First Michigan Infantry marched into town, and one of the first things it did was liberate the slaves.

Ironically, the slave pen became a refuge for runaway and freed slaves seeking the protection of the Union Army.

Today, 1315 Duke Street is home to the Alexandria branch of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization. A historical marker stands outside, and there's a small museum in the basement.

But Manning believes most passersby have no idea about the building's horrific past.

Most, but not all.

"If you're walking with me," Manning says, "you have no choice but to know what happened here."

THE FORGOTTEN CRASH: History lost and relived

On a fog-shrouded evening on the penultimate day of 1906, a dead-heading train roared down this stretch of tracks near Washington's Catholic University, coming upon a slower passenger train heading the same direction on the same track. There was no time to stop.

Railroad workers have an antiseptic -- but descriptive -- word for what happened next: Telescoping.

The massive steel engine of the speeding train plowed through the flimsy wooden passenger car of the slower train, killing and dismembering its occupants. It plowed through the next car as well, and the one after that. When the trains came to a stop, cinders and soot from the locomotive's fire box rained down on the splintered wooden planks, clothing, Christmas gifts and human remains. Fifty-three people died, and more than 70 were injured.

Today, the "Terra Cotta" crash is all but lost to history. Every day, thousands pass the site, where there isn't even a hint of the horror that happened.

But Richard Schaffer, a D.C. firefighter who spent 10 years researching the crash, says Terra Cotta nonetheless changed railroading. It hastened the conversion of passenger cars from wood to steel and led to improvements in railroad signaling. That happened, he says, because the crash happened on "the route to Congress."

There's a saying, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

History rhymed in June 2009 -- nearly 103 years later -- when a D.C. Metro subway train plowed into another subway train. The cars telescoped, killing nine and injuring dozens.

"The irony was it was practically the same location and practically all the same problems, human error, signaling problems, construction quality of the trains," Schaffer said.

Both wrecks deserve to be remembered.

"If you forget what's happened before you," Schaffer says, "you don't have a foundation to live upon."

CONGRESSIONAL CEMETERY: The last hurrah

Can there be any doubt what happens here when the sun goes down?

Can there be any doubt that, when the gates close and the last visitor leaves this historic burial ground, band leader John Philip Sousa reaches for his baton, Civil War photographer Mathew Brady tweaks his camera, and J. Edgar Hoover tries to keep the whole mess under control?

This is Congressional Cemetery, where Washington's political and social establishment rests in eternal peace. In the 1800s, its heyday, this was the site of grand funeral processions. Tens of thousands of Washingtonians would gather to watch soldiers carry fallen leaders down a slate path to graves or crypts.

"I'm sure there are quite a few secrets buried here," says Abby Johnson.

Abby and her husband Ronald, professors of literature and history respectively at Georgetown University, take me to the "Public Vault," a crypt the size of a one-car garage. Built in the 1830s, the vault was used to store the bodies of public officials until the ground thawed, or until they were moved to other locations.

You need a skeleton key, of course, to get inside.

Dolly Madison slept here. As did three presidents: William Henry Harrison (1841), John Quincy Adams (1848), and Zachary Taylor (1850). Harrison's three-month stay was three times longer than his presidential term. All the presidents' bodies have since been moved to their home states.

Today, Congressional Cemetery, which boasts of being "in the shadow" of the U.S. Capitol, is overshadowed by a more prominent cemetery -- Arlington. But the Johnsons are devoted to keeping Congressional's memory alive. At least as long as they are alive. And then maybe, just maybe, beyond.

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Algerian assault ends crisis, 23 hostages dead

Last Updated 4:18 p.m. ET

AIN AMENAS, Algeria Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the middle of the Sahara desert on Saturday in a "final assault" that ended a four-day-old hostage crisis, according to the state news agency and two foreign governments.

Play Video

Panetta: "We know that lives have been lost" in Algeria

The Algerian government says 32 militants and 23 captives were killed during a three-day military operation to end the hostage crisis.

The provisional death toll was issued by the Interior Ministry on Saturday after the special forces operation crushed the last holdout of militants at the gas refinery, resulting in 11 extremists killed along with seven hostages.

A total of 685 Algerian and 107 foreigner workers were freed over the course of the standoff, which began on Wednesday, the statement added.

The military also confiscated machine guns, rocket launchers, missiles and grenades attached to suicide belts.

The ministry added that the militants involved consisted of 32 men of various nationalities, including three Algerians.

An earlier report said the army was forced to intervene Saturday after a fire broke out in the plant, and said the militants killed the hostages. It wasn't immediately possible to verify who killed the captives.

The report, quoting a security source, also didn't give the nationalities of the dead.

The Ain Amenas plant is jointly run by BP, Norway's Statoil and Algeria's state-owned oil company. The governments of Norway and Britain said they received confirmation the siege was over.

A high-resolution satellite image of the Amenas gas facility taken on Dec 7, 2012.

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GeoEye Satellite Image

The entire refinery was mined with explosives and set to blow up, the Algerian state oil company Sonatrach said in a statement, adding that the process of clearing the explosives had begun. The Algerian media reported that the militants had planned to blow up the complex.

The siege transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al Qaeda stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world.

Algeria's response to the crisis was typical of the country's history in confronting terrorists — military action over negotiation — and caused an international outcry from countries worried about their citizens. Algerian military forces twice assaulted the areas where the hostages were being held with minimal apparent negotiation — first on Thursday and then on Saturday.

The latest deaths bring the official Algerian tally of dead to 19 hostages and 29 militants, although reports on the number of dead, injured and freed have been contradictory throughout the crisis. Militants originally said they had seized 41 foreign hostages.

The al Qaeda-linked militants attacked the plant Wednesday morning. They crept across the border from Libya, 60 miles (100 kilometers) away, and fell on a pair of buses taking foreign workers to the airport. The buses' military escort drove off the attackers in a blaze of gunfire that sent bullets zinging over the heads of crouching workers. A Briton and an Algerian — probably a security guard — were killed.

Frustrated, the militants turned to the vast gas complex, divided between the workers' living quarters and the refinery itself, and seized hostages, the Algerian government said. The gas flowing to the site was cut off.

On Thursday, Algerian helicopters opened fire on a convoy carrying both kidnappers and their hostages, resulting in many deaths, according to witnesses.

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Algeria Hostage Crisis Over, One American Dead

After the Algerian military's final assault on terrorists holding hostages at a gas complex, the four-day hostage crisis is over, but apparently with additional loss of life among the foreign hostages.

One American, Fred Buttaccio of Texas, has been confirmed dead by the U.S. State Department. Two more U.S. hostages remain unaccounted for, with growing concern among U.S. officials that they did not survive.

But another American, Mark Cobb of Corpus Christi, Texas is now confirmed as safe. Sources close to his family say Cobb, who is a senior manager of the facility, is safe and reportedly sent a text message " I'm alive."

Inside Algerian Hostage Crisis, One American Dead Watch Video

American Hostages Escape From Algeria Terrorists Watch Video

In a statement, President Obama said, "Today, the thoughts and prayers of the American people are with the families of all those who were killed and injured in the terrorist attack in Algeria. The blame for this tragedy rests with the terrorists who carried it out, and the United States condemns their actions in the strongest possible terms. ... This attack is another reminder of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups in North Africa."

According to Algerian state media, 32 militants are dead and a total of 23 hostages perished during the four-day siege of the In Amenas facility in the Sahara. The Algerian Interior Ministry also says 107 foreign nationals who worked at the facility for BP and other firms were rescued or escaped from the al Qaeda-linked terrorists who took over the BP joint venture facility on Wednesday.

The Japanese government says it fears "very grave" news, with multiple casualties among the 10 Japanese citizens working at the In Amenas gas plant.

Five British nationals and one U.K. resident are either deceased or unaccounted for in the country, according to British Foreign Minister William Hague. Hague also said that the Algerians have reported that they are still trying to clear boobytraps from the site.

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NASA planet-hunter is injured and resting

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter

(Image: NASA/Kepler mission/Wendy Stenzel)

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope has put its search for alien Earths on hold while it rests a stressed reaction wheel.

The injured wheel normally helps to control the telescope's orientation, keeping it pointed continuously at the same patch of sky. Kepler stares at the thousands of stars in its field of view to watch for the telltale blinks that occur when a planet crosses in front of its star. It has found nearly 3000 potential planets outside our solar system since its launch in 2009, transforming the field of exoplanet research and raising hopes of someday finding alien life.

When it launched, Kepler had four reaction wheels: three to control its motion along each axis, and one spare. But last July, one wheel stopped turning. If the spacecraft loses a second wheel, the mission is over.

So when another wheel started showing signs of elevated friction on 7 January, the team decided to play it safe. After rotating the spacecraft failed to fix the problem, NASA announced yesterday that they're placing Kepler in safe mode for 10 days to give the wheel a chance to recover.

The hope is that the lubricating oil that helps the wheel's ball bearings run smoothly around a track will redistribute itself during the rest period.

The telescope can't take any science data while in safe mode. But if the wheel recovers on its own, Kepler's extended mission will run until 2016, leaving it plenty of time to make up for the lost days.

"Kepler is a statistical mission," says Charlie Sobeck, Kepler's deputy project manager at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California. "In the long run, as long as we make the observations, it doesn't matter a lot when we make the observations."

Despite the high stakes, the team doesn't seem too worried.

"Each wheel has its own personality, and this particular wheel has been something of a free spirit," Sobeck says. "It's had elevated torques throughout the mission. This one is typical to what we've seen in the past, and if we had four good wheels we probably wouldn't have taken any action."

"I prefer to picture the spacecraft lounging at the shore of the cosmic ocean sipping a Mai Tai so that she'll be refreshed and rejuvenated for more discoveries," wrote Kepler co-investigator Natalie Batalha in an email.

The team will check up on the wheel on 27 January and return to doing science as soon as possible.

There are two exoplanet missions currently being considered for after Kepler is finished, says Doug Hudgins at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. One, TESS (Terrestrial Exoplanet Survey Satellite), would scan the entire sky for planets transiting the stars nearest to the sun. The other, FINESSE (Fast Infrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer), would take spectra of planets as they passed in front of their stars as a way to probe their atmospheres.

The missions are being evaluated now, and NASA will probably select one this spring, Hudgins says. The winner will launch in 2017.

If Kepler goes down with its reaction wheel, that won't affect which mission wins, he adds. "That's a straight-up competition based on the merits of the two concept study reports."

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Fate of two Malaysians unknown in Algerian crisis

KUALA LUMPUR: The fate of two Malaysians believed to have been caught up in the ongoing hostage crisis at a gas complex in the Algerian desert remains unknown, the foreign ministry said Saturday.

It said that three other Malaysians who were working at the gas plant were safe. The embassy in Algeria "is still determining the fate" of the other two, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Al-Qaeda-linked gunmen stormed the gas plant in eastern Algeria on Wednesday. They have demanded an end to the French intervention in neighboring Mali, according to Mauritania's ANI news agency.

The number of foreigners held at the plant is unclear.

The kidnappers have said they are still holding seven at the site deep in the Sahara desert near the border with Libya. An Algerian security official put their number at 10.

An Algerian security official said a dramatic military assault during the week to rescue those held had left dead 12 hostages and 18 kidnappers dead.

- AFP/ck

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American among those killed in Algeria hostage crisis

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: 18 attackers "neutralized," Algerian Press Service reports


• Algeria says 12 hostages were killed in the wake of a military operation


• Terrorists are "entrenched" in a gas refinery with captives, APS says


• The U.S. rejects a reported prisoner exchange offer voiced by a jihadist spokesman

(CNN) -- After three days of chaos, drama and an unknown number of deaths, Algerian special forces troops were holding their fire Saturday in the hostage crisis at a gas facility in the nation's remote eastern desert.

Survivors described harrowing escapes from Islamic militants who attacked the site early Wednesday. Some invented disguises, others sneaked to safety with locals, and at least one ran for his life with plastic explosives strapped around his neck.

Yet others didn't make it -- either because they were killed or were still being held.

Algerian troops staged a military offensive that some nations criticized as endangering the lives of the hostages.

On Friday evening, they were trying a different tack, the state-run Algerian Press Service reported.

"The special forces ... are still seeking a peaceful settlement before neutralizing the terrorist group currently entrenched in the refinery, and free a group of hostages who are still detained," it said.

It was not clear how many hostages were seized by the Islamist militants and how many were being held. Thursday's military operation ended with 650 hostages -- including 100 foreigners -- freed, while at least 12 Algerian and foreign workers were killed, the Algerian Press Service reported in what it said was a "provisional toll."

In addition, 18 of the attackers were "neutralized," APS said.

The dead include one American, identified as Frederick Buttaccio, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, as well as one French and a Briton.

At least 30 foreign workers were unaccounted for, according to the official media report.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday that "significantly" fewer than 30 of his countrymen remained hostage. There could be as few as three Americans still being held, two U.S. officials said earlier this week.

The fate of eight workers with Norway's Statoil, some of them Norwegians, was unclear, the company said. The same was true for the 14 Japanese unaccounted for, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo. And Malaysia's state-run news agency, citing its foreign ministry, reported Thursday two of its citizens were held captive.

A spokesman for Moktar Belmoktar, a veteran jihadist who leads the Brigade of the Masked Ones -- a militant group associated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb -- reportedly offered to free U.S. hostages in exchange for two prisoners.

The prisoners are Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman jailed in the United States on terrorism charges, the spokesman said in an interview with a private Mauritanian news agency.

Asked Friday about the offer, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland rejected it, restating U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

Opinion: Algeria situation is a wake-up call for the U.S.

"This is an act of terror," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday. "The terrorists ... are the ones who have assaulted this facility (and took) hostage Algerians and others (from) around the world who were going about their daily business."

A dangerous escape

The incident began when the militants -- apparently angry about Algeria's support in a rout of their comrades in neighboring Mali -- targeted the gas field, which is operated by Algeria's state oil company in partnership with foreign companies.

At the start of the siege, the militants gathered the Westerners into a group and tied them up, survivors said.

The kidnappers were equipped with AK-47 rifles and put explosives-laden vests on some hostages, a U.S. State Department official said.

Some escaped by disguising themselves, according to Regis Arnoux, who runs a catering firm at the site and had spoken with some of his 150 employees who were freed. He said they all were "traumatized."

Some Algerian hostages were free to walk around the site but not to leave, Arnoux said. Still, a number of them escaped, he said.

As the Algerian military launched its operation Thursday, the militants moved some hostages, according to one survivor's account.

With plastic explosives strapped around their necks, these captives were blindfolded and gagged before being loaded into five Jeeps, according to the brother of former hostage Stephen McFaul.

McFaul, with the explosives still around his neck, escaped after the vehicle he was in -- one of several targeted by Algerian fighters -- crashed, his brother told CNN from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

"I haven't seen my mother move as fast in all my life, and my mother smile as much, hugging each other," Brian McFaul said upon his family hearing his brother was safe. "... You couldn't describe the feeling."

McFaul said the other four Jeeps were "wiped out" in an explosion, and his brother believed the hostages inside did not survive.

Nations mobilize to help citizens caught up in crisis

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, speaking in London, said the United States was working round the clock to ensure the safe return of its citizens.

Those freed include some Americans, while other U.S. nationals were unaccounted for, U.S. officials said.

The United States was evacuating 10 to 20 people caught up in the crisis, a U.S. defense official told CNN on Friday. They were to be taken to U.S. facilities in Europe, where their condition would be assessed, the official said.

Britain has sent trauma experts and consular affairs officers who can issue emergency passports to a location about 450 kilometers (280 miles) away from the plant, a Foreign Office official said, so they'll be "as close" as possible to the scene.

BP, which helps operate the gas field, said Friday that a "small number of BP employees" were unaccounted for. The same held for some workers with Statoil, though nine others with the company -- including five who escaped -- were safe. Four Norwegians and a Canadian with that oil firm were in an airport hotel in Bergen, Norway, after being taken from Algeria, Statoil spokeswoman Sissel Rinde said.

Both BP and Statoil -- two of the foreign companies with In Amenas operations -- were pulling their personnel out of Algeria, which is Africa's largest natural gas producer and a major supplier of natural gas to Europe.

BP said it had flown 11 of its employees and several hundred staffers from other companies out of the North African country Thursday and was planning another flight Friday.

Mark Cobb, a Texan who has a LinkedIn profile identifying him as general manager for a BP joint venture out of In Amenas, told CNN he had escaped on the first day and was safe.

A U.S. military C-130 plane flew 12 people who were wounded in the ordeal out of Algeria on Friday, a U.S. defense official said. None of them were Americans, though efforts continue to evacuate freed Americans.

There is so much conflicting information on safety of the hostages.
Yoshihide Suga, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary

Three workers for a Japanese engineering company that was working on the site have been contacted and are safe, said Takeshi Endo, a senior manager for JGC Corp. But the company had not been able to contact 14 others, he said.

France's foreign ministry said that, in addition to one death, three of its citizens were rescued.

Japan 'terribly disappointed' in Algerian military operation

Algeria faces tough questions from governments of the kidnapped nationals over its handling of the crisis. Neither the United States nor Britain, for instance, was told in advance about Algeria's military operation Thursday.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said his nation's officials had urged Algeria's government to avoid exposing hostages to danger. "We are terribly disappointed about the Algerians' military operation," Suga said.

Japanese Vice Minister Shunichi Suzuki summoned Algeria's ambassador Friday to express Tokyo's concern.

U.S. officials made a similar plea to the Algerians, urging them to be cautious and make the hostages' safety their first priority, an official in President Barack Obama's administration said.

A senior U.S. official said American officials did not trust information they got from the Algerians, "because we hear one thing and then we hear something else."

But Algeria acted out of a sense of urgency after noticing hostages being moved toward "a neighboring country," where kidnappers could use them "as a means of blackmail with criminal intent," Communications Minister Mohamed Said told state television.

Algerian troops fired on at least two SUVs trying to leave the facility, Algerian radio said. And a reporter saw clashes near the site, according to the Algerian Press Service and radio reports.

"There were a number of dead and injured, we don't have a final figure," the communications minister said of casualties following the operation.

Belmoktar, the man behind the group claiming responsibility for the attack and kidnappings, is known for seizing hostages.

French counterterrorism forces have long targeted Belmoktar, an Algerian who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan in his teens. Libyan sources said he spent several months in Libya in 2011, exploring cooperation with local jihadist groups and securing weapons.

The militants said they carried out the operation because Algeria allowed French forces to use its airspace in attacking Islamist militants in Mali. Media in the region reported the attackers issued a statement demanding an end to "brutal aggression on our people in Mali" and cited "blatant intervention of the French crusader forces in Mali."

Latest on the Mali situation

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the Algerian hostage situation "confirms the gravity of the terrorist threat and the necessity to fight it with a determined and united front."

That sentiment was echoed by Clinton, the top U.S. diplomat. She stressed the need for a concerted, international effort to address terrorist and other threats around Africa.

"It is absolutely essential that, while we work to resolve this particular terrible situation, we continue to broaden and deepen our counterterrorism cooperation," she said Friday. "It is not only cooperation with Algeria, it is international cooperation against a common threat."

CNN's Barbara Starr, Laura Smith-Spark, Mike Mount, Joe Sutton, Elwyn Lopez, Frederik Pleitgen, Dan Rivers, Mitra Mobasherat, Saskya Vandoorne, Laura Perez Maestro, Junko Ogura, Dheepthi Namasivayam, Saad Abedine, Elise Labott and Tim Lister contributed to this report, as did journalists Peter Taggart from Belfast and Said Ben Ali from Algiers.

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At least one American dead in Algerian hostage crisis

Updated at 6:41 p.m. ET

An American in the Algerian hostage standoff in the Algerian desert has been killed, CBS News has learned.

Fredrick Buttaccio from Katy, Texas near Houston, was an employee of the oil company BP. It is unknown how he died, but U.S. government sources tell CBS News his body has been recovered and his family has been notified.

Meanwhile, a U.S. military plane has landed in Amenas, Algeria to pick up nine passengers - one American and eight foreign nationals - to be transported to Landstuhl, Germany, a military source told CBS News.

The flight, which contains an air medical evacuation team, was expected to have departed Algeria by Thursday afternoon.

It's not clear exactly how many total casualties have resulted from the fighting, but Algeria's state news agency reported that 12 foreign and Algerian workers had died since the start of the operation, citing an unidentified security source. That information could not be independently confirmed.

As CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reported, the freed hostages told of how they fled in the confusion as the Algerian army attacked. Many were injured, some badly. One person said: "It happened so fast."

But it hasn't ended quickly, reported Phillips. The Algerians say they've freed nearly a hundred foreigners. And as they were being bused away, many thanked their rescuers. "They kept us all nice and safe and fought off the bad guys," said another person.

Also, more detail of the ordeal has emerged with the freed hostages. Some say they had explosives hung around their necks as they were placed in a convoy of vehicles by their captors. When the cars began to move, the Algerian Army units surrounding the site feared the captives were being taken out of the compound -- and opened fire.

The al Qaeda-linked Masked Battalio, led from afar by Moktar Belmoktar, may still be holding some of the roughly 30 foreigners still unaccounted for.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not get into specifics on the crisis Friday afternoon, but described it as an "extremely difficult and dangerous situation" and called on the Algerian government to "preserve innocent life" in their efforts to fully resolve the crisis. Clinton spoke after the State Department said that Americans were still being held hostage.

The desert siege erupted Wednesday when the militants attempted to hijack two buses at the plant, were repulsed, and then seized the sprawling refinery, which is 800 miles south of Algiers. They had claimed the attack came in retaliation for France's recent military intervention against Islamist rebels in neighboring Mali, but security experts have said it must have taken weeks of planning to hit the remote site.

Since then, Algeria's government has kept a tight grip on information about the siege.

The militants had seized hundreds of workers from 10 nations at Algeria's remote Ain Amenas natural gas plant. The overwhelming majority were Algerian and were freed almost immediately.

Algerian forces retaliated Thursday by storming the plant in an attempted rescue operation that left leaders around the world expressing strong concerns about the hostages' safety.

Militants claimed 35 hostages died on Thursday when Algerian military helicopters opened fire as the Islamists transported the hostages around the gas plant. While Algerian officials acknowledged some hostage deaths, the number could not be independently confirmed.

On Friday, trapped in the main refinery area, the militants offered to trade two American hostages for two prominent terror figures jailed in the United States. Those the militants sought included Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks and considered the spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist convicted of shooting at two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

But U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said there would be "no place to hide" for anyone who looks to attack the United States.

"Terrorists should be on notice that they will find no sanctuary, no refuge, not in Algeria, not in North Africa, not anywhere," Panetta said Friday.

Workers kidnapped by the militants came from around the world — Americans, Britons, French, Norwegians, Romanians, Malaysians, Japanese, Algerians.

A high-resolution satellite image of the Amenas gas facility taken on Dec 7, 2012.

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GeoEye Satellite Image

World leaders have expressed strong concerns in the past few days about how Algeria was handing the situation and its apparent reluctance to communicate.

Terrorized hostages from Ireland and Norway trickled out of the plant. BP, which jointly operates the plant, said it had begun to evacuate employees from Algeria.

A U.S. military C-130 transport plane flew a number of people including former Ain Amenas hostages from the Algerian capital of Algiers to a U.S. facility in Europe, a U.S. official said. He declined to be specific about the destination, their nationalities or the extent of the wounds that he said some had.

A flood of foreign energy workers were being evacuated from the North African nation amid security concerns.

BP evacuated one U.S. citizen along with other foreign energy workers from Algeria to Mallorca and then London. The oil giant said three flights left Algeria on Thursday, carrying 11 BP employees and several hundred energy workers from other companies.

A fourth plane was taking more people out of the country on Friday, BP said.

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One American Confirmed Dead in Algeria

U.S. officials told ABC News that at least one American has been killed in the hostage standoff at an Algerian gas plant, and the family of the deceased American has been notified.

An al Qaeda-linked group called the Masked Brigade and led by the one-eyed jihadi Mokhtar Belmokhtar raided the BP joint venture facility in In Amenas on Wednesday, taking an undetermined number of hostages from more than half a dozen nations, including at least two Americans.

On Friday, the group demanded the release of two convicted terrorists held in U.S. prisons, including the "blind sheikh" who helped plan the first attack on New York's World Trade Center, in exchange for the freedom of two American hostages, according to an African news service.

The terror group reportedly contacted a Mauritanian news service with the offer. In addition to the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, they demanded the release of Aifia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who shot at two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2008.

Asked about the unconfirmed report of a proposed swap, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said firmly, "The United States does not negotiate with terrorists." She repeated the statement again when questioned further. She also said she was not prepared to get into any details about the status of Americans in "an ongoing hostage situation."

At least three Americans were being held hostage by the militants when the Algerian military mounted a rescue operation at the facility Thursday that reportedly resulted in casualties.

Five other Americans who were at the facility when it was attacked by the terrorists are now safe and believed to have left the country, according to U.S. officials.

Algeria Hostage Situation: Military Operation Mounted Watch Video

Reports that dozens of hostages were killed during the Algerian military's attempt to retake the compound have not been confirmed, though Algeria's information minister has confirmed that there were casualties. It's known by U.S. and foreign officials that multiple British, Japanese and Norwegian hostages were killed.

According to an unconfirmed report by an African news outlet, the militants said seven hostages survived the attack, including two Americans, one Briton, three Belgians and a Japanese national. U.S. officials monitoring the case had no information indicating any Americans have been injured or killed, but said the situation is fluid and casualties cannot be ruled out.

On Friday, a U.S. military plane evacuated between 10 and 20 people in need of medical attention, none of them American, from In Amenas and took them to an American medical facility in Europe. A second U.S. plane is preparing to evacuate additional passengers in need of medical attention.

British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament today that the terror attack "appears to have been a large, well coordinated and heavily armed assault and it is probable that it had been pre-planned."

"The terrorist group is believed to have been operating under Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a criminal terrorist and smuggler who has been operating in Mali and in the region for a number of years," said Cameron.

Cameron said Algerian security forces are still in action at the facility. On Thursday, he said that the situation was "very bad … A number of British citizens have been taken hostage. Already, we know of one who has died. ... I think we should be prepared for the possibility for further bad news, very difficult news in this extremely difficult situation."

The kidnappers had earlier released a statement saying there are "more than 40 crusaders" held "including 7 Americans."

U.S. officials had previously confirmed to ABC News that there were at least three Americans held hostage at the natural gas facility jointly owned by BP, the Algerian national oil company and a Norwegian firm at In Amenas, Algeria.

"I want to assure the American people that the United States will take all necessary and proper steps that are required to deal with this situation," said Panetta. "I don't think there's any question that [this was] a terrorist act and that the terrorists have affiliation with al Qaeda."

He said the precise motivation of the kidnappers was unknown.

"They are terrorists, and they will do terrorist acts," he said.

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Matching names to genes: the end of genetic privacy?

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Are we being too free with our genetic information? What if you started receiving targeted ads for Prozac for the depression risk revealed by your publicly accessible genome? As increasing amounts of genetic information is placed online, many researchers believe that guaranteeing donors' privacy has become an impossible task.

The first major genetic data collection began in 2002 with the International HapMap Project – a collaborative effort to sequence genomes from families around the world. Its aim was to develop a public resource that will help researchers find genes associated with human disease and drug response.

While its consent form assured participants that their data would remain confidential, it had the foresight to mention that with future scientific advances, a deliberate attempt to match a genome with its donor might succeed. "The risk was felt to be very remote," says Laura Lyman Rodriguez of the US government's National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Their fears proved to be founded: in a paper published in Science this week, a team led by Yaniv Erlich of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used publicly available genetic information and an algorithm they developed to identify some of the people who donated their DNA to HapMap's successor, the 1000 Genomes Project.

Anonymity not guaranteed

Erlich says the research was inspired by a New Scientist article in which a 15-year-old boy successfully used unique genetic markers called short tandem repeats (STRs) on his Y chromosome to track down his father, who was an anonymous sperm donor. Erlich and his team used a similar approach.

First they turned to open-access genealogy databases, which attempt to link male relatives using matching surnames and similar STRs. The team chose a few surnames from these sources, such as "Venter",and then searched for the associated STRs in the 1000 Genomes Project's collection of whole genomes. This allowed them to identify which complete genomes were likely to be from people named Venter.

Although the 1000 Genome Project's database, which at last count had 1092 genomes, does not contain surname data, it does contain demographic data such as the ages and locations of its donors. By searching online phonebooks for people named Venter and narrowing those down to the geographic regions and ages represented in the whole genomes, the researchers were able to find the specific person who had donated his data.

In total, the researchers identified 50 individuals who had donated whole genomes. Some of these were female, whose identity was given away because of having the same location and age as a known donor's wife.

Matter of time

Before publishing their findings, the team warned the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other institutions involved in the project about the vulnerability in their data. Rodriguez says that they had been anticipating that someone would identify donors, "although we didn't know how or when".

To prevent Erlich's method from being used successfully again, age data has been removed from the project's website. Erlich says that this makes it difficult, although not impossible, to narrow the surnames down to an individual.

"The genie's out of the bottle," says Jeffrey Kahn of Florida State University in Tallahassee. "It's a harbinger of a changing paradigm of privacy." A cultural zeitgeist led by companies such as Facebook has led to more information sharing than anyone would have thought possible back in 2002 when HapMap first began, he says.

Recurring problem

This is not the first time genome confidentiality has been compromised. When James Watson made his genome public in 2007, he blanked out a gene related to Alzheimer's. But a group of researchers successfully inferred whether he carried the risky version of this gene by examining the DNA sequences on either side of the redacted gene.

While someone is bound to find another way to identify genetic donors, says Rodriguez, the NIH believes it would be wrong to remove all of their genome data from the public domain. She says that full accessibility is "very beneficial to science", but acknowledges that the project needs to strike a careful balance between confidentiality and open access.

It is especially pertinent, says Kahn, because genetic data does not just carry information from the person from whom it was taken. It can also reveal the genetic details of family members, some of whom might not want that information to be public. A relative's genome might reveal your own disease risk, for example, which you might not want to know or have an employer learn of. While laws prohibit health insurers and employers from discriminating against people based on their genetic data, it would not be difficult to give another reason for denying you a job.

An individual's relatives could not prevent that individual from learning about themselves, says Rodriguez, but researchers should encourage would-be genome donors to discuss the risks and benefits with their families.

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Three dead in S. Korean fishing boat fire: Japan coastguard

TOKYO: Three people were dead and five missing Friday in a fishing boat fire in waters near islands at the centre of a dispute between Tokyo and Beijing, Japan's coastguard said.

"We have been informed by South Korean officials that three people died and five are missing from a South Korean fisheries ship that caught fire in waters near Uotsuri island," a spokesman said, referring to an island in the East China Sea.

A coastguard patrol plane "discovered part of a boat that is believed to be the South Korean vessel at 8:24 am (2324 GMT)," the Japanese coastguard said in a statement, adding it was continuing the search for the missing crew members.

The incident was first discovered by a South Korean vessel in waters some 100 nautical miles north of Uotsuri, the largest island in the Tokyo-controlled Senkaku chain, claimed by Beijing as the Diaoyus.

The coastguard said the ship had nine crew members aboard, comprising seven South Korean nationals and two Chinese nationals, it said.

The other South Korean vessel had recovered four of the nine crew members, of whom three were already dead, it said.

The Japanese coastguard, after receiving the initial report from South Korea's coastguard, sent a patrol plane and two patrol boats to the area.

"We don't know yet the nationality of the dead and missing," the spokesman said.

-AFP/fl

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Prepare for 'bad news' in hostage crisis, official says

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: A Belfast man says his brother had explosives around his neck when he escaped


• Islamist militants take Algerian and foreign hostages at a gas plant in Algeria


• British, Norwegian, U.S. and Japanese citizens are among those held hostage


• "There are still hostages, and there are still terrorists," a senior U.S. official says

(CNN) -- British Prime Minister David Cameron warned his compatriots to prepare for "bad news ahead" related to kidnapping of dozens of hostages at a gas facility in Algeria.

Nearly 600 workers and four foreign nationals -- two Scots, a Kenyan and a French citizen -- were free by late Thursday after an operation launched by Algeria's military, according to the state-run Algerian Press Service.

Some hostages were still presumably being held, and the crisis is far from over.

"It is a fluid situation, it is ongoing," Cameron told the Reuters news agency. "But I think we should be prepared for the possibility of further bad news, very difficult news, in this extremely difficult situation."

The Algerian military operation was over by Thursday evening, according to the Algerian Press Service. At that point, there was no immediate indication as to how many had been killed or injured, how many hostages were still being held, what their condition was or if future action would be taken.

The military operation led to numerous casualties, though the exact number wasn't known, APS reported. Two people -- an Algerian and British national -- died when the kidnappers attacked Wednesday, according to the same news agency. Cameron acknowledged, in his Reuters interview, that a British citizen "very sadly died."

While the Algerian military raid wrapped up on Thursday, a senior U.S. official stressed later that night that more military operations could be coming.

"There are still hostages, and there are still terrorists," the official said. "So tomorrow is another day."

Algerians and foreign workers were taken hostage at the gas plant in Wednesday's assault, apparently in direct response to France's offensive in nearby Mali. The gas field is 60 kilometers (40 miles) west of the Libyan border and 1,300 kilometers (about 800 miles) from the Algerian capital, Algiers.

The kidnappers have AK-47 rifles and put explosives-laden vests on some of the hostages, a U.S. State Department official said. It is not clear whether the hostage-takers wore the suicide vests when they staged the action, another U.S. official said.

Islamists take foreign hostages in attack on Algerian oil field

The attackers put the number of hostages at "more than 40," including seven Americans, two French, two British and other Europeans. Another Islamist group told the Mauritanian News Agency there were 41 "Westerners."

The APS, though, reported that just over 20 foreign nationals were being held.

Officials from Norway, the United States, Japan and Great Britain have said some of their nationals are among the hostages.

Nine Norwegian employees of Statoil are unaccounted for, while five Norwegian nationals -- as well as three Algerians -- who work for the company are safe, the company said in a statement.

CNN affiliate BFM-TV reported that a French citizen, who is a nurse who worked on the site, was recently freed. CNN could not independently confirm the report.

Former hostage Stephen McFaul had plastic explosives strapped around his neck, duct tape over his mouth and rope around his hands, his brother Brian McFaul told CNN from Belfast.

McFaul made a break for freedom after the vehicle he was in -- one of several targeted by Algerian fighters -- crashed, with the explosives still around his neck.

"The joy was unreal," Brian McFaul said upon hearing his brother was safe. "I haven't seen my mother move as fast in all my life, and my mother smile as much, hugging each other ... You couldn't describe the feeling."

An unspecified number of Americans are among the hostages held by terrorists at BP's In Amenas facility in Algeria, White House spokesman Jay Carney said. There could be as few as three American hostages, two U.S. officials said Wednesday.

One of the kidnapped Americans is a Texas man, a family member told CNN.

By Thursday night, some Americans had been freed and spoke with family members back home, while others remained unaccounted for, U.S. officials said.

"This incident will be resolved -- we hope -- with a minimum loss of life," said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "But when you deal with these relentless terrorists, life is not in any way precious to them."

Heavy clashes and drones

The man behind the group claiming responsibility for the attack and kidnappings is a veteran jihadist known for seizing hostages.

Moktar Belmoktar, an Algerian who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan in his teens, has long been a target of French counterterrorism forces. Libyan sources said he spent several months in Libya in 2011, exploring cooperation with local jihadist groups and securing weapons.

Algerian forces launched their operation upon noticing the hostages being moved toward "a neighboring country," where kidnappers could use them "as a means of blackmail with criminal intent," Algerian Communications Minister Mohamed Said said Thursday on state TV.

Algerian troops fired on at least two SUVs trying to leave the kidnapping site, Algerian radio said, citing local sources. And an Algerian reporter saw heavy clashes near the site, APS and radio reports said.

"There were a number of dead and injured, we don't have a final figure," Said said.

An unarmed Predator drone has flown over the plant to gather intelligence, a U.S. official said Thursday. Satellite imagery was taken previously.

Earlier, Algeria's state media reported that all Algerian nationals who had been held hostage were free: some had fled, while others were released. The hostages still detained are foreigners, Algerian Interior Minister Dahou Ould Kablia said.

In addition to the hundreds of freed workers, 30 Algerian workers escaped -- recovered by helicopters flying over the site -- according to the GPS report.

Meanwhile, two oil companies that operated at the site -- BP and Statoil -- are pulling all of their non-essential personnel from Algeria.

"Our focus is 100 percent on the safety and welfare of those people and their families, and we are now beginning a staged and planned reduction in non-essential workforce on a temporary basis, pulling them out of the country," said BP Vice President Peter Maher from London's Gatwick Airport, where a chartered flight from Algeria was set to arrive Thursday night.

Militants blame Algeria for letting French use its air space

The militants said they carried out the operation because Algeria allowed French forces to use its air space in attacking Islamist militants in Mali. Media in the region reported that the attackers issued a statement demanding an end to "brutal aggression on our people in Mali" and cited "blatant intervention of the French crusader forces in Mali."

The fallout escalated after rebels kidnapped the Westerners, dragging governments beyond Africa into the region's conflicts and insecurity.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in Europe meeting with NATO allies, called the hostage-taking "a terrorist act."

Japan and the United Kingdom sent officials to Algeria to get the latest information. French President Francois Hollande earlier confirmed the presence of French citizens on site but would not say whether any were hostages.

Cameron -- who canceled a Friday speech in the Netherlands -- talked with U.S. President Barack Obama about the situation Thursday, according to a Downing Street statement.

Before Algeria launched its military operation, U.S. officials urged the Algerians to be cautious and make the hostages' safety their first priority, an Obama administration official said.

However, Algerian government officials did not tell their U.S. counterparts in advance about their military raid, according to the official.

A senior U.S. official said, at this point, the United States doesn't trust the information it is getting from the Algerians, "because we hear one thing and then we hear something else."

There are also fears that the tactics used by the Algerian forces may have put hostages in jeopardy, though the official acknowledged they could have hit even harder.

"In all fairness, they could have ended it today," the senior U.S. official said. "They haven't used all the severeness they could. They know hostages are left."

CNN's Joe Sterling and Greg Botelho wrote this story from Atlanta. CNN's Elise Labott, David Mattingly, Athena Jones, Barbara Starr, Jethro Mullen, Tim Lister and Faith Karimi contributed to this report, as did journalists Peter Taggert from Belfast Said Ben Ali contributed from Algiers.

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Manti Te'o kept girlfriend myth alive after revelation

SOUTH BEND, Ind. Not once but twice after he supposedly discovered his online girlfriend of three years never even existed, Notre Dame All-American linebacker Manti Te'o perpetuated the heartbreaking story about her death.

13 Photos

Manti Te'o

An Associated Press review of news coverage found that the Heisman Trophy runner-up talked about his doomed love in a Web interview on Dec. 8 and again in a newspaper interview published Dec. 11. He and the university said Wednesday that he learned on Dec. 6 that it was all a hoax, that not only wasn't she dead, she wasn't real.

On Thursday, a day after Te'o's inspiring, playing-through-heartache story was exposed as a bizarre lie, Te'o and Notre Dame faced questions from sports writers and fans about whether he really was duped, as he claimed, or whether he and the university were complicit in the hoax and misled the public, perhaps to improve his chances of winning the Heisman.

Yahoo sports columnist Dan Wetzel said the case has "left everyone wondering whether this was really the case of a naJive football player done wrong by friends or a fabrication that has yet to play to its conclusion."

Gregg Doyel, national columnist for CBSSports.com, was more direct.

"Nothing about this story has been comprehensible, or logical, and that extends to what happens next," he wrote. "I cannot comprehend Manti Te'o saying anything that could make me believe he was a victim."

On Wednesday, Te'o and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said the player was drawn into a virtual romance with a woman who used the phony name Lennay Kekua, and was fooled into believing she died of leukemia in September. They said his only contact with the woman was via the Internet and telephone.

Te'o also lost his grandmother — for real — the same day his girlfriend supposedly died, and his role in leading Notre Dame to its best season in decades endeared him to fans and put him at the center of college football's biggest feel-good story of the year.

Relying on information provided by Te'o's family members, the South Bend Tribune reported in October that Te'o and Kekua first met, in person, in 2009, and that the two had also gotten together in Hawaii, where Te'o grew up.

Te'o never mentioned a face-to-face meeting with Kekua in public comments reviewed by the AP. And an AP review of media reports about Te'o since Sept. 13 turned up no instance in which he directly confirmed or denied those stories — until Wednesday.

Among the outstanding questions Thursday: Why didn't Te'o ever clarify the nature of his relationship as the story took on a life of its own?

Te'o's agent, Tom Condon, said the athlete had no plans to make any public statements Thursday in Bradenton, Fla., where he has been training with other NFL hopefuls at the IMG Academy.

Notre Dame said Te'o found out that Kekau was not a real person through a phone call he received at an awards ceremony in Orlando, Fla., on Dec. 6. He told Notre Dame coaches about the situation on Dec. 26.

Play Video

Manti Te'o's girlfriend hoax: How did it happen?

The AP's media review turned up two instances during that gap when the football star mentioned Kekua in public.

Te'o was in New York for the Heisman presentation on Dec. 8 and, during an interview before the ceremony that ran on the WSBT.com, the website for a South Bend TV station, Te'o said: "I mean, I don't like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer. So I've really tried to go to children's hospitals and see, you know, children."

In a story that ran in the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., on Dec. 11, Te'o recounted why he played a few days after he found out Kekau died in September, and the day she was supposedly buried.

"She made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play," he said.

On Wednesday, Swarbrick said Notre Dame did not go public with its findings sooner because it expected the Te'o family to come forward first. But Deadspin.com broke the story Wednesday.

Reporters were turned away Thursday at the main gate of IMG's sprawling, secure complex. Te'o remained on the grounds, said a person familiar with situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because neither Te'o nor IMG authorized the release of the information.

"This whole thing is so nutsy that I believe it only could have happened at Notre Dame, where mythology trumps common sense on a daily basis. ... Given the choice between reality and fiction, Notre Dame always will choose fiction," sports writer Rick Telander said in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Which brings me to what I believe is the real reason Te'o and apparently his father, at least went along with this scheme: the Heisman Trophy.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass blasted both Te'o and Notre Dame.

"When your girlfriend dying of leukemia after suffering a car crash tells you she loves you, even if it might help you win the Heisman Trophy, you check it out," he said.

He said the university's failure to call a news conference and go public sooner means "Notre Dame is complicit in the lie."

"The school fell in love with the Te'o girlfriend myth," he wrote.

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Officials: 5 Americans Escaped from Algeria Terrorists

Five Americans who were at an Algerian natural gas facility when it was raided by al Qaeda linked terrorists are now safe and believed to have left the country, according to U.S. officials. At least three Americans, however, were being held hostage by the militants when the Algerian military mounted an rescue operation earlier today that reportedly resulted in casualties.

Reports that as many as 35 hostages and 15 Islamist militants at a BP joint venture facility in In Amenas have been killed during a helicopter raid have not been confirmed, though Algeria's information minister has confirmed that there were casualties. According to an unconfirmed report by an African news outlet, the militants say seven hostages survived the attack, including two Americans, one Briton, three Belgians and a Japanese national. U.S. officials monitoring the case have no information indicating any Americans have been injured or killed.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said that Algerian forces had attacked the compound, and that the situation "was ongoing."

"We face a very bad situation at this GP gas compound in Algeria," said Cameron. "A number of British citizens have been taken hostage. Already we know of one who has died. ... I think we should be prepared for the possibility for further bad news, very difficult news in this extremely difficult situation."

An unarmed U.S. Predator drone is now above In Amenas and is conducting surveillance. A U.S. official says the U.S. was not informed in advance by the Algerians of the raid they launched today.

In a statement, BP, a joint owner of the facility, said it had been told by both the British and Algerian governments that "the Algerian Army is attempting to take control of the In Amenas site."

"Sadly, there have been some reports of casualties but we are still lacking any confirmed or reliable information," said the statement. "There are also reports of hostages being released or escaping."

Algerian troops had surrounded the compound in the Sahara desert, where hostages from the U.S., Algeria, Norway, Japan, France and other countries are being held by terrorists who claim to be part of Al Qaeda and are led by a one-eyed smuggler known as Mr. Marlboro.

SITE Intel Group/AP Photo

Leon Panetta on Americans Held Hostage in Algeria Watch Video

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told ABC News that as many as 100 hostages are being held, and that there may be seven or eight Americans among them. "Right now, we just really don't know how many are being held," said Panetta, who said information about the situation, including the total number of hostages and where they are being held, is "pretty sketchy." The kidnappers have released a statement saying there are "more than 40 crusaders" held "including 7 Americans."

U.S. officials had previously confirmed to ABC News that there were at least three Americans held hostage at the natural gas facility jointly owned by BP, the Algerian national oil company and a Norwegian firm at In Amenas, Algeria.

"I want to assure the American people that the United States will take all necessary and proper steps that are required to deal with this situation," said Panetta. "I don't think there's any question that [this was]a terrorist act and that the terrorists have affiliation with al Qaeda." He said the precise motivation of the kidnappers was unknown. "They are terrorists, and they will do terrorist acts."

The terror strike came without warning Wednesday morning when an estimated 20 gunmen first attacked a bus carrying workers escorted by two cars carrying security teams.

At least one worker was killed. The terrorists moved on to the residential compound where they are now holed up with the American and other western hostages, including Norwegian, French, British, and Japanese nationals.

There is growing concern this morning about the fate of the hostages, and intelligence officials say the situation is tense. Without the element of surprise, they say, a raid to free them will be very dangerous.
"They are expecting an attack and therefore, it's going to be very, very difficult for Algerian special forces to sneak in without being seen," said Richard Clarke, a former White House counter terrorism advisor and now an ABC News consultant.

Mr. Marlboro: Kidnapper, Smuggler

Intelligence officials believe the attack was masterminded by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a rogue al Qaeda leader who also runs an African organized crime network that reportedly has made tens of millions of dollars in ransom from kidnappings and smuggling. He is known as Mr. Marlboro because of his success smuggling diamonds, drugs and cigarettes. Officials think it unlikely that Belmohktar would actually be in the middle of the hostage situation, but would be calling the shots from his base in Mali more than 1,000 miles away.

Belmokhtar fought in Afghanistan alongside the mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1990s, and lost an eye. He was formerly associated with al Qaeda's North African affiliate, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and was said to be a liaison with al Qaeda's international leadership. Belmokhtar split with AQIM late last year over what other Islamist militants considered his preference for lucre over jihad. He remains affiliated with al Qaeda, however, heading a breakaway group that calls itself the "Signers with Blood Brigade" or the "Veiled Brigade."

According to a Canadian diplomat who was held hostage by Belmokhtar, Mr. Marlboro is "very, very cold, very businesslike."

Robert Fowler was a UN diplomat in Africa when he was kidnapped and held hostage by Belmokhtar for four months in 2009.

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