The voices of those justices and 30 others, as well as thousands of lawyers who have argued before the court, are now part of a massive Internet archive assembled by the Chicago-based Oyez Project. The group has spent more than a decade putting together recordings going back to 1955, when an audio recorder was first installed at the court.

Now, the group is finishing work that makes the archive even more accessible, linking the audio to simultaneously scrolling transcripts that also identify the justices and arguing lawyers as they speak. In all, almost 14,000 hours of audio are available for free. It would take more than a year and a half of continuous listening to hear everything.

"The only way to be authoritative is to say we have it all," said Jerry Goldman, the director of the project, which is based at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Goldman said the audio contains gems ranging from the sound of one justice forming a spit wad during the days when chewing tobacco in court was still acceptable to the time an arguing lawyer used the F-bomb, a word key to a 1971 case involving freedom of speech.

By this fall visitors to the project's website will be able to search all the argument transcripts, so someone could, Goldman says, search for and then listen to every time the phrase "strict scrutiny" has been used or every time someone said "broccoli" during last year's health care law debate.

The court's aural history has never been so accessible. Until fairly recently, the Supreme Court waited months before releasing the audio of proceedings. Now, oral argument recordings are released at the end of every week, but the court's own website only provides audio from 2010 forward.

The Oyez Project's website and an accompanying app are vastly more comprehensive. When Goldman began his work in the mid-1990s, he offered free streaming audio of about 100 hours of the court's most important cases.

In 2003, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Goldman was able to expand his offerings by digitizing reel-to-reel tape of the court's proceedings that had been archived in a warehouse in College Park, Md. Additional contributions from law firms and grants, including one from Google, helped him complete the project.

"This is still a work in progress, but I think it's fair to say it's essentially done," said Goldman, who drives a car with the license plate "Oyez," the name of his project but also the word the Supreme Court's marshal says three times at the beginning of any court session. Goldman's cellphone also rings with the marshal's cry, which is 11th-century French for "hear ye," and it's another piece of audio that's available on the project's website.

Last year, the site got more than 3 million unique visitors; lawyers and law students are common users.

Goldman sometimes also gets emails from people who have used the site to hear the voice of a relative who argued before the court. Martha Nichols sent one of those emails in 2010 when she found the audio of a 1984 case argued by her father, one of the more than 8,600 lawyers whose arguments are captured in the archive. Nichols' father, H. Louis Nichols, had just died, and Nichols said she was beginning to forget what he sounded like.

"Oh, my gosh, it brought me to tears the first time I heard it," she said.

Jeff Parsons, the Oyez Project's Seattle-based senior technical consultant who has listened to hundreds of hours of audio, says every case has potential.

Said Parsons: "Every case in the court represents some interesting question or dilemma that was interesting to someone."

___

Online:

Oyez Project: http://www.oyez.org

___

Follow Jessica Gresko on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jessicagresko

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - CBS sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" led comedy winners at the Critics Choice television awards on Monday, while AMC series "Breaking Bad" and HBO's fantasy epic "Game of Thrones" won top prizes for drama, edging out "Mad Men" and "Homeland".

HBO film "Behind the Candelabra" won best mini-series or movie, and Michael Douglas's turn as the camp and complex Liberace won the best actor in a mini-series or movie prize.

"The Big Bang Theory", about a group of nerdy scientists, was an early winner on the night, with co-stars Kaley Cuoco and Simon Helberg also winning best comedy supporting actor awards.

Cuoco's win was tied with Eden Sher of ABC family comedy "The Middle".

"The Big Bang Theory", in its sixth season beat "Louis", "New Girl", "Veep", "The Middle" and "Parks and Recreation".

"Game of Thrones", a medieval fantasy war epic, and "Breaking Bad", about a chemistry teacher-turned-drug king, tied for the Best Drama Series prize.

"Breaking Bad" lead star Bryan Cranston won Best Actor in a Drama Series for the second year running, thanking the critics, saying "if you were not a conduit, we would not be anywhere".

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, star of HBO's political comedy "Veep", won best comedy series actress, while Louis C.K. of FX's "Louie" picked up best comedy series actor for the second year running.

"I've spent my entire career making sure to ignore what critics say and what critics write. Tonight that strategy has changed," Louis-Dreyfuss quipped as she accepted her award.

Last year's big drama winner, "Homeland", lost in all three of its categories. "Mad Men" also failed to win the one category it was nominated in, best drama actress for Elisabeth Moss.

One of the big surprises of the night came from little-known Tatiana Maslany from BBC America drama "Orphan Black", in which she plays a woman with several identities. She won best drama actress, beating last year's "Homeland" winner Claire Danes.

Winners of the third annual Critics Choice Television Awards were chosen by members of the Broadcast Television Journalists Association, and handed out at a gala dinner in Beverly Hills, hosted by "Parks and Recreation" actress Retta.

Moss, best known for her role as Peggy Olson in "Mad Men," won best actress in a mini-series or movie for her role as a New Zealand detective in Sundance Channel's "Top of The Lake".

The award was her first accolade for acting, she said in her acceptance speech.

FX's psychological horror mini-series "American Horror Story: Asylum", with six nominations, came away with two wins for its stars Sarah Paulson and Zachary Quinto.

Hollywood comedian Bob Newhart was recognized with the Critics Choice Television Icon award, with actor Henry Winkler, best known as The Fonz in "Happy Days", paying homage to Newhart's long-running career in television.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

Officials said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman were set to launch what they call the Secure Our Smartphones Initiative at a New York news conference on Thursday.

The coalition includes prosecutors, police and political officials and consumer advocates from more than a dozen states and intends to put pressure on smartphone companies and their shareholders to help dry up the secondary market in stolen phones.

The announcement comes on the same day Gascon and Schneiderman are scheduled to co-host a "Smartphone Summit" with representatives from major smartphone makers Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Among the moves the prosecutors seek is the industry-wide introduction of a "kill switch" that would render stolen phones worthless.

Apple said at a conference of web developers this week that such a feature would be part of its iOS7 smartphone software to be released in the fall. Gascon and Schneiderman said in a statement they were "appreciative of the gesture" but would reserve judgment until they could "understand its actual functionality."

Almost 1 in 3 robberies nationwide involves the theft of a mobile phone, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

"The epidemic of violent street crime involving the theft and resale of mobile devices is a very real and growing threat in communities all across America," Schneiderman said in a statement. "According to reports, roughly 113 smartphones are stolen or lost each minute in the United states, with too many of those thefts turning violent."

In New York, police have coined the term "Apple-picking" to describe thefts of the popular iPhone and other mobile products like iPads.

Rupert Knox, Amnesty's Mexico investigator, said relatives are often forced to search for missing loved ones themselves, sometimes at considerable risk.

Adding insult to injury, Knox said police and prosecutors often don't even bother to use the information that relatives dig up. Instead, police routinely assume that the missing are caught up in Mexico's drug cartel conflicts.

"They are stigmatized, they are treated with disdain, and the typical thing is to say the victims were members of criminal gangs," Knox said. "That is a demonstration of the negligence that has allowed this problem to grow into a national scandal and a human rights crisis."

The federal government says some 26,000 people have been reported missing since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006, though officials have said the true number is probably lower, because some people reported missing have since been found or accounted for but never taken off the list.

Brenda Rangel is the sister of Hector Rangel, who disappeared along with two friends in 2009 after being stopped by police for a traffic violation and was never seen again. She is sure her brother wasn't involved in criminal activity. A young businessman, he had gone to the northern state of Coahuila, which is a hotbed of the Zetas drug gang, to collect a payment from a client.

Rangel says her brother last called to say he was in police custody, and she said the family has given authorities the number of the squad car, and even the names of the policemen involved in the detention. But she said prosecutors told her the officers were fired from the local police force in Monclova, Coahuila, and couldn't be located. In Mexico, it is not uncommon for local policemen to work for drug gangs.

Nearing the fourth year in her brother's disappearance, that kind of shrugging response is driving Rangel and her family to desperation, and into danger, since they can't let it rest.

"We have received death threats," she said, adding: "I have run risks, I have gone into safe houses, I have had to disguise myself in different ways to look for my brother."

One by one, other parents and siblings of missing Mexicans stood up and recounted their horror stories: cases in which authorities themselves, police or the military, appear to have been involved in the disappearances.

Mexico's government announced last week that it is creating a special unit to search for missing people. But the unit has only 12 federal investigators and a group of federal police agents to cover all the cases.

Knox said such agencies have been tried before in Mexico but have accomplished little, in part because they have lacked the resources, manpower and authority to really perform their task.

"The authorities have always seen them (the special units) as a way to reduce public pressure and blow off steam," Knox said.

While Rangel and the other victims' families maintain faith that their loved ones are still alive, perhaps subjected to forced labor by the drug cartels, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission has received information on 15,921 unidentified bodies that have passed through morgues in Mexico, some of which could belong to the missing.

A recent case in Mexico City has highlighted the difficulties surrounded cases of suspected disappearances.

On May 26, a group of young people disappeared from a Mexico City after-hours bar just off the city's main Reforma boulevard, a block and a half from the U.S. Embassy. Relatives had initially indicated 11 people were missing, but authorities raised the number of 12 Tuesday night.

The young people were from the rough-and-tumble Tepito neighborhood and their disappearance only came to light after their parents and other Tepito residents held a protest that blocked a major road. Media reports later said that the fathers of two of the missing young men were suspected former Tepito crime bosses currently doing time in prison.

A witness who said he escaped from the abduction said the young people were taken away by gunmen in masks after partying through the night at the bar. Prosecutors said Tuesday night that surveillance video was found showing the young people entering the bar, but wouldn't say if there was footage showing them leaving or being abducted.

The witness who reported the kidnapping can no longer be found. The bar's owner also is missing, but prosecutors said Tuesday night that two waiters and a woman had been detained in the case.

The families have put up missing-person posters with photos of their loved ones throughout the area, and say that almost 10 days later they still have not come home.

Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said Friday a directive signed by President Barack Obama last year calls for government cyber tools to be "integrated with the full array of national security tools we have at our disposal."

Hayden was responding a report in the British newspaper The Guardian that says Obama has ordered national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential cyber targets overseas.

The Guardian report comes as Obama was about to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, with alleged Chinese hacking against the U.S. to be one of the main topics of discussion.

While the newspaper report offers details about Obama's directive that had not been made public before, the White House released a declassified summary of the directive in January.

Moreover, the Pentagon acknowledged in March that it was setting up a series of cyber teams charged with carrying out offensive operations to combat the threat of an electronic assault on the United States.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the top officer at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, testified March 12 before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the potential for an attack against the nation's electric grid and other essential systems is real and that the federal government needed to take more aggressive steps.

At the time, Alexander said 13 cyber teams were being formed to guard the nation against destructive attacks in cyberspace, stressing that their role would be offensive. He also said the teams would work outside the United States, but he did not say where.

"This directive will establish principles and processes that can enable more effective planning, development and use of our capabilities," Hayden said in a statement Friday. "It enables us to be flexible, while also exercising restraint in dealing with the threats we face. It continues to be our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats and that we will prioritize network defense and law enforcement as the preferred courses of action."

The timing of Friday's report coincides with Obama's two days of meetings with Xi at a California retreat. Top issues are cybersecurity and North Korea's nuclear threats.

The Guardian's report is the third significant leak of classified information this week. Following other revelations, the Obama administration has conceded that it has been secretly seizing phone records from millions of Americans and scouring U.S. Internet data for evidence of potential terrorist plotting.

Obama himself weighed in Friday, defending the counterterrorism measures and noting that they are authorized and reviewed by Congress. He also said the Internet surveillance program does not apply to U.S. citizens or to people living in the United States.

"I don't welcome leaks, because there's a reason why these programs are classified," Obama said, before the latest Guardian report. "In our modern history, there are a whole range of programs that have been classified because, when it comes to, for example, fighting terror, our goal is to stop folks from doing us harm, and if every step that we're taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or on television, then presumably the people who are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventive measures."

____

Associated Press writer Richard Lardner contributed to this report.

A prominent expert called the work a landmark, but noted that a different, simpler technique now under development may prove more useful.

Stem cells can turn into any cell of the body, so scientists are interested in using them to create tissue for treating disease. Transplanting brain tissue might treat Parkinson's disorder, for example, and pancreatic tissue might be used for diabetes.

But transplants run the risk of rejection, so more than a decade ago, researchers proposed a way around that: Create tissue from stem cells that bear the patient's own DNA, obtained with a process called therapeutic cloning.

If DNA from a patient is put into a human egg, which is then grown into an early embryo, the stem cells from that embryo would provide a virtual genetic match. So in theory, tissues created from them would not be rejected by the patient.

That idea was met with some ethical objections because harvesting the stem cells involved destroying human embryos.

Scientists have tried to get stem cells from cloned human embryos for about a decade, but they've failed. Generally, that's because the embryos stopped developing before producing the cells. In 2004, a South Korean scientist claimed to have gotten stem cells from cloned human embryos, but that turned out to be a fraud.

In Wednesday's edition of the journal Cell, however, scientists in Oregon report harvesting stem cells from six embryos created from donated eggs. Two embryos had been given DNA from skin cells of a child with a genetic disorder, and the others had DNA from fetal skin cells.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University, who led the research, said the success came not from a single technical innovation, but from revising a series of steps in the process. He noted it had taken six years to reach the goal after doing it with monkey embryos.

Mitalipov also said that based on monkey work, he believes human embryos made with the technique could not develop into cloned babies, and he has no interest in trying to do that.Scientists have cloned more than a dozen kinds of mammals, starting with Dolly the sheep.

The new work was financed by the university and the Leducq Foundation in Paris.

Dr. George Daley, a stem cell expert at Children's Hospital Boston who didn't participate in the work, called the new results "one landmark step in a very long journey" toward creating DNA-matched transplant tissue.

Now, Daley said, scientists must compare the embryo-cloning approach with another technology that reprograms blood or skin cells directly into substitutes for embryonic stem cells. This reprogramming approach is technically simpler and doesn't involve embryos or require the donation of human eggs, and it was widely acclaimed when it was reported in 2007. Its Japanese developer shared a Nobel Prize last year.

But these substitute cells show some molecular differences compared to embryonic ones, which has led to questions about whether they can safely be used for treating patients. So it's essential to compare the cells from the two methods, Daley said.

The new results mean "we have another tool," he said. "We have to learn more about this tool."

Daley said he believed scientists will prefer using the reprogramming approach unless it can be proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that embryo cloning produces better cells for treating patients.

Mitalipov said he believed his technique would present a particular advantage for treating patients with a certain type of rare diseases. These are caused by mutations in genes of the mitochondria, the power plants of cells. He noted his technique, unlike the cell-reprogramming approach, would supply tissue with new mitochondrial genes that could replace defective ones. Those new genes would come from the egg.

The Rev. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for National Catholic Bioethics Center, an independent think tank in Philadelphia, reiterated his opposition to embryo cloning, calling the approach unethical.

"It involves the decision to utilize early human beings as repositories for obtaining desired cells," he said. "You're creating them only to destroy them."

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, Calif., said she was glad that Mitalipov doubted the embryos could be used to clone babies. She said the report still provides a good opportunity for the federal government to ban the use of cloning for reproduction.

___

Online:

Journal Cell: http://www.cell.com/

___ Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/malcolmritter

Dexter Lewis and brothers Joseph and Lynell Hill each face multiple counts, including first-degree murder, felony murder, robbery and arson stemming from the attack last October. They pleaded not guilty Friday.

Prosecutors have until July 26 to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

Investigators allege the men went to Fero's Bar & Grill intent on robbery. They were arrested after an informant for the federal government in another case told authorities he was with the men during at least part of the attack. A defense lawyer in the case has questioned the informant's credibility.

PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) - Gulf telecom operator Etisalat has offered a higher price for Vivendi's Maroc Telecom stake than rival Qatari bidder Ooredoo, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Etisalat's bid needs further work, however, and has more legal conditions than Ooredoo's offer, so Vivendi has not yet made a final choice, the people said.

"If Etisalat cleans up its offer, then it wins," said one of the sources, who is close to the process. "If not, it will go to Qatar, who also made an offer that Vivendi can accept."

While the exact prices of the offers were not clear, sources earlier told Reuters that they had come in lower than the 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion) Vivendi had initially hoped for and closer to the market value of the stake.

Vivendi's 53 percent shareholding in Maroc Telecom is now worth 4.34 billion euros.

Maroc Telecom offers fixed-line, mobile and Internet services in the kingdom and is one of Africa's top telecom firms, with units in Burkina Faso, Gabon, Mali and Mauritania.

The buyer will inherit a firm that has been a reliable cash machine for Vivendi but has seen slower growth in recent years, analysts say, although there is growth potential in sub-Saharan Africa, where sales and profits rose last year.

Vivendi has been in talks in recent weeks with Etisalat to remove some of the legal clauses in its bid, the sources said. The UAE-backed group has scheduled an extraordinary shareholder meeting on May 28 to approve the financing package for the bid.

Ooredoo, meanwhile, crafted its offer with minimal conditions to make it simple and less risky for Vivendi, the group's strategy chief told Reuters earlier.

Vivendi has not asked Ooredoo to improve its offer so far, the first source said. Ooredoo is frustrated with the slowness of the process and what it sees as a lack of communication from Vivendi, said two other sources familiar with the situation.

Vivendi may choose a preferred bidder with whom to continue exclusive negotiations next week after the Etisalat vote, but it could also take longer, the first source said.

Spokesmen for Vivendi, Etisalat and Ooredoo declined to comment on Friday.

GROWTH SPRINGBOARD

Both bidders are eager to sign a deal with Vivendi before the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which begins in early July.

For Vivendi, the sale of Maroc Telecom is crucial to its ambition to lessen exposure to capital-intensive telecoms and focus on its media activities in video games, pay TV and music.

Investors have been eagerly awaiting progress on the divestments, especially after Vivendi's attempted sales of its video games and Brazilian telecom units fell through.

Vivendi previously said the Maroc Telecom sale would not be finalized before the autumn and that it was working closely with the Moroccan state, which owns 30 percent of Maroc Telecom and will have to approve the buyer.

Both Etisalat and Ooredoo see Maroc Telecom as a way to expand their footprints in Africa, and both have expanded aggressively overseas in the past decade.

Etisalat, which is 60 percent owned by the UAE, relies more on its home market for revenue and sales than Ooredoo, however, with 60 percent of revenue and 71 percent of core profit earned domestically, according to HSBC research.

"We think it will be a very close-fought race," HSBC analysts wrote in a note. "We expect the victor, whoever it is, to use Maroc Telecom as a springboard to further acquisitions in the Africa region."

($1 = 0.7751 euros)

(Additional reporting by Christian Plumb in Paris and Dinesh Nair in Dubai; Editing by James Regan)

So-called junk DNA, the vast majority of the genome that doesn't code for proteins, really isn't needed for a healthy organism, according to new research.

"At least for a plant, junk DNA really is just junk it's not required," said study co-author Victor Albert, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo in New York.

While the findings, published Sunday (May 12) in the journal Nature, concern a , they could have implications for the human genome as well. Genes make up only 2 percent of the human genome, and researchers have argued in recent years that the remaining 98 percent may play some hidden, useful role. []

Trash or treasure

For decades, scientists have known that the vast majority of the genome is made up of DNA that doesn't seem to contain genes or turn genes on or off. The thinking went that most of this vast terrain of dark DNA consisted of genetic parasites that copy segments of DNA and paste themselves repeatedly in the genome, or that it consists of the fossils of once useful genes that have now been switched off. Researchers coined the termto refer to these areas.

"Nobody's really known what junk DNA does or doesn't do," Albert told LiveScience.

But in recent years, researchers have debated whether "junk" might be a misnomer and if this mysterious DNA might play some role. A massive project called ENCODE, which aimed to uncover the role of the 3.3 billion base pairs, or , in the human genome that don't code for proteins, found that in test tubes, about 80 percent of the genome seemed to have some biological activity, such as affecting whether genes turn on. Whether that translated to any useful or necessary function for humans, however, wasn't resolved.

Lean genome

Albert and his colleagues sequenced the genome of , Utricularia gibba, which lives in wet soil or fresh water throughout the world and sucks swimming microorganisms into its tiny, 1-milimeter-long bladders.

The genome had just 80 million base pairs. Compared with most other plant species, that genome was positively tiny, Albert said. The lily genome, for instance, can have 40 billion base pairs.

Yet the bladderwort had about 28,500 genes, not much different from plants of similar type and complexity.

The difference was in the junk: The bladderwort plant seemed to have stripped out a vast amount of noncoding DNA. Yet the plant did just fine without that material.

In fact, through a genetic quirk the bladderwort had its entire genome duplicated meaning the plant got two full copies of the genome three separate times since it diverged from . Yet the carnivorous plant somehow retained its tiny genome.

Unnecessary bulk

The findings suggest junk DNA really isn't needed for healthy plants and that may also hold for other organisms, such as humans.

But it's still a mystery why some organisms have genomes bloated with junk while other genomes are studies in minimalism.

One possibility is that there was someto strip the genome of extra material. But that's unlikely given that similar plants with huge genomes don't seem to fare badly, Albert said.

It's more plausible that, by chance, the bladderwort plant has biological processes that favor stripping out extraneous DNA over adding it in, Albert said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter .FollowLiveScience , & . Original article on.