The admission on Thursday has reigniteda debate over privacyas it called the practice critical to protecting Americans fromattacks, butWhite House spokesman Josh Earnest saida court order allowingthe government to secretly collect millions of US citizens' telephonerecords was a critical tool to fight security threats

The admission came after Britain's newspaperTheGuardianpublished on Wednesday a secret court order related to the records of millions of Verizon Communications customers.

The surveillance appears to have involved the phone records of millions of Americans.

The National Security Agency is collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, TheGuardiansaid.

The paper said on Wednesday the order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and was good until July 19.

The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US andother countries.

The Guardian said the document, a copy of which it had obtained, shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens were being collected indiscriminatelyand in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press could not authenticate the order because documents from the court are classified.

Ed McFadden, a spokesman for Verizon, said on Wednesday the company had no comment.

The White House declined comment and referred questions to the NSA. The NSA had no immediate comment.But Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane said she had confirmed the NSA allegations with a senior administration official.

Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls.

The contents of the conversation itself are not covered, The Guardian said.

The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks was very controversial.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the UnitedStates and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including localtelephone calls", The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the USA Patriot Act.

Calling it a long night would be just a mild understatement.

What appeared to be a routine game at St. Louis on Thursday turned into something else thanks a marathon rain delay and a decision to wait it out.

The Royals wound up beating the Cardinals 4-2 in a game that ended well after 3 in the morning.

"It was interesting, but for us, it's good," said Francouer, the Royals' outfielder.

Interesting is one way to put it.

The Royals and Cardinals should have known something was up when the first pitch was delayed an hour by rain.

The game moved quickly after that right up until the top of the ninth inning, with the Royals leading and the rain back in force. Umpire crew chief Joe West had a decision to make.

With the game the last meeting between the two teams this season, a new rule added this year allowed West to call the game in a decision that would wipe out the top of the ninth and give the Cardinals a 2-1 win, based on the score from the previous completed inning.

West chose to wait out the rain. And wait. And wait some more.

After 4 1/2 miserable hours, the game resumed shortly after 3 a.m. CDT and the final out came at 3:14 a.m.

Kansas City left for a series in Texas and the Cardinals went home to sleep a bit before a home series against San Francisco.

The umpiring crew? They had a matinee in Chicago, with the first pitch scheduled just 10 hours after the final out in St. Louis.

"We worry about that game when we get to that one," West told a pool reporter after the game. "We had to worry about this game."

He declined comment on Friday

MLB spokesman Michael Teevan praised West and his crew for handling "a challenging situation very well."

"We appreciate the efforts of both clubs, the umpires and particularly the Cardinals' grounds crew, and we are glad that the game was played to completion," he added.

Chicago Cubs manager Dale Sveum shrugged off any concerns about sleep-deprived umpires calling Friday's game against Arizona.

The Cubs extended their winning streak to five games with a 7-2 win over Arizona on Friday afternoon.

"Sometimes we get in at 3:15 in the morning . they don't have to get to the park that early, so they get plenty of sleep," he said of the umpires. "That's not something that's going to dictate the game."

The near-capacity crowd of 43,916 in St. Louis was down to a couple hundred hardy souls when the game ended.

"Joe West did a tremendous job," said Royals manager Ned Yost, whose team snapped an eight-game skid with the victory.

"He was ready to wait as long as we could. He just felt that we were getting close to that point. He came into the office, Joe, we've got 15 minutes of rain left and it's gone. He goes, well, that's not what I heard. Look, let's go outside. And we went outside, and it stopped raining."

Cardinals manager Mike Matheny and general manager John Mozeliak lobbied during the delay for an eight-inning St. Louis win. West said the Cardinals did not express their frustrations to him directly, made no statement and did not lodge a protest.

Either way, Matheny seemed less than thrilled with the decision to wait out the rain.

"I'm not going to sit here and start bashing the league for what's going on," he said. "But we certainly ended up on the short end of that and we can be paying for it for a couple of days here. There must be a bigger reward out there that I don't see."

Mozeliak said he was concerned about players getting injured because of the delay and the wet conditions, although he praised the grounds crew and added it would have been a "PR nightmare" if they "had to revert back to the eighth inning."

"I did feel compelled that we try to get this game in because that would have been unfair to them had it just reverted back to the eighth," Mozeliak said.

For the Royals, the long night wasn't their first this week. They endured one getting to St. Louis after Tuesday's game against the Cardinals in Kansas City.

Problems with their plane forced them to take a bus across the state, and they didn't arrive until 5 a.m.

On Thursday, Royals catcher Adam Moore said no one took a nap during the long delay. Instead, they played cards.

"Until we saw that window come, and then they came in and gave us a head's up, that we may have a time frame to go back out there," he said. "We were just kind of hanging out in the clubhouse, trying to stay loose as best as we could."

___

AP Sports Writers Ronald Blum in New York and Stephen Hawkins in Arlington, Texas, and freelance writers Brian Sandalow in Chicago and Jason L. Young in St. Louis contributed to this report.

Sector analysts forecast potential peak annual sales of isavuconazole at 530-600 million Swiss francs ($623.47 million), of which Basilea could receive up to 25 percent in royalties.

Orphan status is granted to drugs that treat conditions or diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. The designation usually comes with a seven-year marketing exclusivity period if the drug is approved for sale.

"The granting of orphan designation for isavuconazole in the U.S. reflects the high medical need and is an important regulatory milestone for Basilea and our partner Astellas," chief Basilea medical officer Achim Kaufhold said in a statement.

Isavuconazole, which treats both mould and yeast infections such as candida infections, is being developed with Japan's Astellas.

Bank Sarasin called the drug backing a significant win for Basilea. The company's shares surged more than 6 percent in early trading. At 0731 GMT, the stock was 5.1 percent higher amid a 1 percent rise on the European healthcare sector.

The U.S. drug backing comes as Basel-based Basilea faces a year of waiting for regulatory approval on its main product, antibiotic drug ceftobiprole. The company is in the process of answering questions from European agencies on the drug and said any possible approval could come in the fourth quarter.

The firm has been hunting for a partner for ceftobiprole - which it hopes will make it to market to treat hospital and community-acquired pneumonia - for several years and said it was aiming for a partnership by the end of 2013.

The backing also follows a string of shake-ups at Basilea, including the departure of its chief financial officer just two months after that of the firm's founder and chief executive.

($1 = 0.9624 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Katharina Bart; editing by Patrick Graham)

For Nibali, an Italian with the Astana team, the title cemented his status in an elite group of current riders considered capable of winning Grand Tours, along with Alberto Contador, Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins.

Nibali took the overall leader's pink jersey after the seventh stage, never gave it up, and padded his lead by winning the final two mountain stages.

Rigoberto Uran of Colombia finished second overall and Cadel Evans of Australia, the 2011 Tour de France winner, was third, 4:43 and 5:52 behind Nibali, respectively.

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seemed like an intriguing topic for prolific documentarian Alex Gibney, but little did he know the rabbit hole of secrets, lies and hypocrisy he would find as he dug into his subject.

Gibney's latest work, "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks," about Assange and his "radical transparency," is a fascinating look at one of our era's most fascinating information rebels.

WaxWord caught up with Gibney ahead of the movie's May 24 release.

You've just produced an Eagles documentary, and last year you made "Mea Maxima Culpa" about the church and sexual abuse - and now this. You seem to be cranking out movies at incredible rate.

I have a disease. (Laughs.) I'm getting a chance to make movies that are so great, it's hard to turn them down. It feels like they are popping out so fast, but I worked on "WikiLeaks" for over two years, I've been working on more than one at a time.

This is a meaty topic. Assange starts off as a hero but ends up seeming like a fraud in some ways. He's a revolutionary for transparency who ends up becoming the opposite - that's a fantastic story. Is that what drew you?

I was drawn to story of a transparency radical. I thought it was a whole David and Goliath story. But in the face of so much hostility and danger and in the midst of accruing so much fame, something happened.

He became so convinced of his own goodness, his own nobility, that he began to believe the ends justified the means. That he could lie in service of the truth. That became very interesting to me. In that way, he became all too similar to the government, his very enemies.

How did you decide to do this?

It was an assignment. Universal came to me and said, "Would you do this?"

I thought it was about a leaking machine. The idea that there was an anonymous electronic dropbox, beyond national borders, eluding political traps. The balls of this guy - I thought, "Wow."

Assange is one-man wrecking crew in terms of fighting corruption and venality and abuses of power. For all those reasons, he seemed a hero for our age.

That's what attracted me initially. A classic internet hero: a man alone with a laptop, roaming the world, like the Scarlet Pimpernel. Who wouldn't want to do that story?

Are you a transparency radical?

No, I wouldn't call myself a transparency radical. I don't believe in releasing all information. But far too much is kept secret. We wouldn't know about WikiLeaks if it weren't for Bradley Manning and the Afghan, Iraqi war logs. But Julian wasn't the leaker; he was the publisher. But this leak - Bradley Manning - was a rough justice for the amount of material that is unnecessarily being kept secret.

Isn't that the impulse of most governments?

After 9/11 you saw a sea change. Obama has increased surveillance in many ways. But you're right - the executive branch can't help it.

So then where do you draw the line? Where is it too much transparency?

If you come across the recipe for some nerve gas, would you publish that? Knowing people could die as a result? Absolutely not.

Would Assange publish that?

He said that in the movie - an NPR reporter asks him. And sometimes sources need to be protected. You can't leak secrets that lead to people being physically hurt.

What about the State Department cables that were leaked? This particular leak acted as an important corrective. There was too much being kept secret. It was useful to pull back the curtain and see what was happening.

Assange feels the only way to hold people to account is to leak everything. That's his rough justice. And I don't necessarily believe that. With the State Department cables, in the beginning it felt like the sky was going to fall, but that's not the case at all. People were embarrassed. And sometimes rightfully so. But American national security was not damaged.

Now we have an absurd situation where Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, all because he won't go back to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault. You spoke to the victim. Is he making himself a Joan of Arc figure? It's about somebody who needed everybody to believe in a lie.

Yes. All of Julian's defenders will say the U.S. was coming back to get him and would have shipped him off to Guantanamo (if he went to Sweden). I don't find any proof of that whatsoever. Julian convinced himself he's the victim of a fiction that he invented.

You talk to one of the women who say that Assange failed to use a condom during consensual sex. How is this rape? We don't know what the charge would be. If the allegations were true - they had sex and he purposely tore the condom - if he had HIV...

I don't see how that rises to the level of rape or even sexual assault. What do you call it?

I consider it wrong. Do I consider it a crime? That depends on the law of that country. It would be a crime in Sweden and United Kingdom if it's proven. The purpose of my including this information was not to say he's guilty, it was simply to say that it's too easy. Julian was mocking the women.

The women didn't press charges. They went to the police to get him to take an AIDS test. The prosecutors decided these were potential crimes that should be investigated. It has to do with whether there was intent to deceive and convey disesase or genetic material.

What will be the end of Julian Assange? Or is this already the end?

This will not be the end of Julian Assange. He's still doing work. But it's the end of Julian Assange's role as a truth teller. We can no longer believe in him as a truth teller. But he did something terribly important. The legacy of WikiLeaks is still very important.

Federal Prison Service Director Victor Hortel said he died of natural causes in the Marcos Paz prison.

Videla ran one of the bloodiest military governments in an era of South American dictatorships, and sought to take full responsibility for kidnappings, tortures, deaths and disappearances when he was tried again and again for those crimes in recent years. He said he knew about everything that happened under his rule because "I was on top of everyone."

Videla had a low profile before the March 24, 1976, coup, but quickly became the architect of a repressive system that killed about 9,000 people according to an official accounting after democracy returned to Argentina in 1983. Human rights activists believe the real number was as high as 30,000.

This "dirty war" introduced two frightening terms to the global lexicon of terror: "disappeareds" people kidnapped and never seen or heard from again and "death flights," in which political prisoners were thrown, drugged but alive, from navy planes into the sea.

"The disappeareds aren't there, they don't exist," Videla told a news conference in 1977, when the complaints of families looking for their missing loved ones were raising concern internationally.

Videla's dictatorship also stood out from others in Latin America for its policy of holding pregnant prisoners until they gave birth, and then killing the women and arranging for illegal adoptions of their babies, usually by military or police families. This happened hundreds of times, and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo rights group has relentlessly sought to reunite these children, now in their 30s, with their biological families. Last year, Videla was convicted and sentenced again to life without parole for the thefts of these babies.