Hard-Drive Search Raises Fourth Amendment Issue

Citing the dangers of overly broad search warrants for computer hard drives, a federal appeals court has vacated the conditional guilty plea of a Tioga County man who admitted to production and possession of child pornography.

Court to see if Miss. lawsuit OK on global issue

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court will consider whether the state of Mississippi can bring a state-level lawsuit in a global LCD screen price-fixing conspiracy.

Wall Street Takes Cyprus Issue Seriously

Wall Street stocks seesawed on Tuesday before ending mixed after Cyprus legislators rejected a tax on savings to help pay for a bank bailout.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 0.2 percent by the close of trading, and the Nasdaq composite index dropped 0.3 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average gained 3 points.

Investors took advantage of the unease in Europe to cash in some recent gains.

“The market is not acting as if there is a reason to panic, but it is another thing people need to look at,” Doreen Mogavero, chief executive of Mogavero, Lee & Co., said about Cyprus from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “It’s enough reason to be cautious.”

The overhanging concern was that account holders in other parts of Europe could make a run on their banks on concerns they will also be taxed to help their struggling economies, although no sign of a bank run or any proposal to tax accounts outside Cyprus appeared.

European bank shares extended their decline on Monday, as the sector’s index fell 2.2 percent. Market indexes overall were down from 0.3 percent to 2.2 percent in Europe.

In the United States, data showed housing starts rose in February and new permits for construction rose to their highest level since 2008.

“The data was good, but at the same time we need to think about, now that the housing market is getting better, will the Fed have to wait longer to get their foot off the gas pedal?” said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of trading at Themis Trading.

Among individual stocks, shares of Citigroup — which agreed on Monday to pay $730 million to settle a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors who said they were misled by the company’s disclosures — were down 1 percent.

The drug maker Affymax said it was considering selling itself or filing for bankruptcy protection among a range of alternatives, as it struggled to stay afloat after the recent recall of its sole commercial product, the anemia drug Omontys. The stock plunged 63 percent.

Times Reporter in China Is Forced to Leave Over Visa Issue

Chris Buckley, a 45-year-old Australian who has worked as a correspondent in China since 2000, rejoined The Times in September after working for Reuters. The Times applied for Mr. Buckley to be accredited to replace a correspondent who was reassigned, but the authorities did not act before Dec. 31, despite numerous requests. That forced Mr. Buckley, his partner and their daughter to fly to Hong Kong on Monday.

Normally, requests to transfer visas are processed in a matter of weeks or a couple of months.

The Times is also waiting for its new Beijing bureau chief, Philip P. Pan, to be accredited. Mr. Pan applied in March, but his visa has not been processed.

The visa troubles come amid government pressure on the foreign news media over investigations into the finances of senior Chinese leaders, a delicate subject. Corruption is widely reported in China, but top leaders are considered off limits.

On the day that The Times published a long investigation into the riches of the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, both its English-language Web site and its new Chinese-language site were blocked within China, and they remain so.

In June, the authorities blocked the English-language site of Bloomberg News after it published a detailed investigation into the family riches of China’s new top leader, Xi Jinping. Chinese financial institutions say they have been instructed by officials not to buy Bloomberg’s computer terminals, a lucrative source of income for the company.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment on Mr. Buckley’s forced departure. Ministry officials have not said if they are linking Mr. Buckley’s visa renewal or Mr. Pan’s press accreditation to the newspaper’s coverage of China. In a statement, The Times urged the authorities to process Mr. Buckley’s visa as quickly as possible so that he and his family could return to Beijing.

“I hope the Chinese authorities will issue him a new visa as soon as possible and allow Chris and his family to return to Beijing,” Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The Times, said in the statement. “I also hope that Phil Pan, whose application for journalist credentials has been pending for months, will also be issued a visa to serve as our bureau chief in Beijing.”

The Times has six other accredited correspondents in China, and their visas were renewed for 2013 in a timely manner. David Barboza, the Shanghai bureau chief, who wrote the articles about Mr. Wen’s family, was among those whose visas were renewed.