Wong, currently legal director at Twitter, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The new adviser will work with federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, and will join the White House as Obama focuses more attention and resources on fighting hackers.

Congress and the White House have been arguing about how best to address cyber security for more than a year.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed a new cyber security bill which will next be considered by the Senate. It is designed to help companies and the government share information on cyber threats, though concerns linger about the amount of protection it offers for private information.

Wong has testified before Congress about her concerns about Internet censorship in countries around the world.

In 2010, when she was Google's vice-president and deputy general counsel, Wong told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the U.S. government should make Internet freedom a key part of foreign policy.

At Google, Wong was nicknamed "the Decider," author and law professor Jeffrey Rosen has written, because part of her job was deciding whether to remove content from YouTube and links from Google that governments objected to.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by David Brunnstrom)

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences LLC said Thursday they reached a new licensing agreement to collaborate on biotech-engineered corn that is resistant to herbicide and insects.

Under the agreement, Monsanto will license Dow's new Enlist weed control technology, which allows corn to tolerate weed-killing chemicals. Dow will license the upcoming version of Monsanto's Corn Rootworm technology, which kills tiny insects that feed on corn roots. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The agreement builds on previous collaborations between the two agriculture giants, including the currently marketed SmartStax corn, which includes technology developed by both Monsanto and Dow.

Dow AgroSciences is a unit of Midland, Mich.-based Dow Chemical Company.

Last month Monsanto and rival DuPont reached a deal to dismiss pending patent lawsuits against one another over technology used in genetically modified soybean and corn seeds.

Shares of Monsanto rose $1.20 to $106.85 in afternoon trading.

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) -- The image was chilling: Snowmobile rider Caleb Moore, launched over his handlebars on a backflip gone wrong, rolled down the landing hill with his 450-pound machine somersaulting behind him.

Run over by his sled, Moore lay on the snow for several minutes before being helped off the course. As of Wednesday, he was hospitalized in critical condition because of bleeding around his heart and a complication involving his brain.

Moore's was the worst accident at the Winter X Games, which wrapped up Sunday night after four days of competition, but it wasn't the only harrowing moment. The wipeouts included a runaway snowmobile that sent spectators scrambling.

Even the highlights were hardly tame. Snowboarding star Shaun White soared a competition record 24 feet into the air during the superpipe competition, and fellow boarder Elena Hight showed off a difficult trick called a"double alley-oop backside rodeo" that involved a couple of backflips and a 180-degree rotation. It had never been seen in a competition.

All that, plus Moore's crash, has some wondering whether dialing up the difficulty each year improves action sports or has simply made them too dangerous.

"Should we be asking these questions? We absolutely should be," said Dan Lebowitz, the executive director of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, which examines the role of sports to promote healthy development and social responsibility.

The people performing these superhuman feats "really are just human," he said. "How do we maintain safety in that progression when that progression sometimes pushes every envelope to some amazingly extreme point?"

Moore's injuries underscore the dangers at Winter X, which was filled with numerous cover-your-eyes crashes.

Halldor Helgason of Iceland over-rotated on a flip in the snowboard big air competition and had to be taken off on a sled with a concussion. Rose Battersby of New Zealand sustained a lumbar spine fracture in a wipeout during practice before the skiing slopestyle competition, which will be an Olympic sport next winter at the Sochi Games.

Then there was this: Summer X Games motocross champion turned snowmobile newcomer Jackson Strong tumbled off his machine during the best trick competition, the throttle sticking and the sled swerving toward fans as they scurried away. The machine came to a rest when it got tangled in some netting and no one was seriously hurt.

Such a scenario had already crossed the mind of Levi LaVallee, a snowmobiler who captured two gold medals only to be sidelined for the final two competitions after tearing a muscle in his back.

"I've always thought about, 'What happens if the thing tips over and the throttle sticks?'" LaVallee said. "It was good, though, because it showed that X Games has a good setup with the fencing."

Whether action sports are too dangerous is an issue that's been raised before.

When freestyle skier Sarah Burke died in a training accident a little more than a year ago in Park City, Utah, there were questions about the halfpipe. Before that, the sport was examined when snowboarder Kevin Pearce suffered a severe brain injury in a fall in the same pipe as Burke two years earlier. Pearce has recovered and served as an analyst at Winter X.

But in general, the athletes accept the risks and defend their disciplines.

"To lose Sarah was such a blow to this entire industry," said snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler, who didn't compete this year as she recovers from a serious eye injury she suffered in training. "This sport brings so much joy, happiness and balance to my life and that far outweighs what could happen. You can't ever live your life with what could happen."

In a statement, X Games officials said they've paid close attention to safety issues over the event's 18-year history: "We've worked closely with athletes, risk management specialists, sport organizers and event managers to present the best possible experience for athletes and spectators. Further measures are constantly being evaluated."

Athletes say they prepare as best they can by trying out new tricks into foam pits and air bags set up at the bottom of courses. But even all the caution in the world can't prevent the fact that sometimes well-practiced maneuvers can go wrong in the air.

"You don't want to live your life in fear because of a situation," LaVallee said. "Look, I'm driving down the road right now and the worst-case scenario is a car could swerve over into my lane and run over me there it is, end of the road.

"That's kind of the same thing we think when we're competing. Hopefully, the preparation and countless hours of training and practicing will prevent the worst-case scenario from happening."

Tucker Hibbert the Shaun White of snowmobiling after winning his sixth straight SnoCross title just hopes casual fans understand that what they see on television is not true snowmobiling.

"You're seeing the most extreme side of what we do," Hibbert said. "That's a lot different than what the average person does on a snowmobile."

Hibbert doesn't participate in events such as best trick because, "I just wasn't born with those skills. I sit back and watch those guys, enjoy what they do."

He paused.

"You just hate to see anyone crash, anyone get hurt," Hibbert said.

Moore was in the middle of an impressive run in the freestyle event when he caught the top of the hill that was serving as a landing area. He initially walked away with help and went to a hospital with a concussion.

Moore later developed bleeding around his heart and had surgery. His family said that Moore, of Krum, Texas, also had a complication involving his brain.

Colten Moore, Caleb's younger brother and defending champion in the event, separated his pelvis in a crash later that same night.

LaVallee is no stranger to horrific wipeouts.

While training for the "Red Bull: New Year. No Limits" daredevil series two years ago in Southern California, LaVallee lost control of his snowmobile high in the air and landed violently on his side, bouncing down the landing ramp. He broke ribs, cracked his pelvis, collapsed one lung and punctured the other.

But he returned the next year and jumped a record 412 feet, 6 inches.

"We're passionate about the sport that we're in," LaVallee said.

"Anyone who competes has that drive to succeed, to go bigger than the next person or be the first one to do it."

The mentality is similar throughout action sports, even if the bar keeps getting raised.

"There are going to be benchmarks set and people trying to exceed that benchmark," Lebowitz said. "That's just the essence of our society and our social culture."

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In the past twelve months, Zynga Inc has struggled with a contracting player base, a deflated stock price and waves of layoffs. Now it is coming to terms with downsized ambitions.

As Chief Executive Mark Pincus, 47, leads the online games developer he founded in 2007 through perhaps the most crucial year of his tenure, he is pushing to restore revenues by doubling down on "FarmVille," the franchise that took Facebook users by storm four years ago and launched Zynga to stardom.

Though some industry observers had declared farm simulation games a fad and predicted FarmVille 2's early demise, the sequel to Zynga's best-known title has defied expectations at its San Francisco headquarters, Pincus said in an interview. FarmVille 2 has clung to its perch near the top of Facebook charts and the number of people who play the game each day still hovers near all-time highs of 8 million, even six months after launch.

Given a glaring weakness in mobile games, however, one of Zynga's current priorities is porting FarmVille 2 to mobile devices so players can move from PCs to smartphones and back without losing their data. That presented technical challenges that the company is ironing out, Pincus said.

"The ideal is to make that one seamless experience between Web and mobile so you can take your farming experience from work to home," Pincus said. "We're having to retool and reinvent around our process and technology."

Pincus badly needs a reliable hit franchise. In the past nine months, Zynga has shuttered 20 titles and closed offices in Baltimore, Boston and Tokyo. It has trimmed 5 percent of its workforce, though its headcount of nearly 3,000 still dwarfs that of fierce rivals like Supercell, a Finnish company with 100 people that claims an equivalent amount of revenue, or the 600-strong Rovio, the publisher behind the "Angry Birds" games.

Gone is the swagger that defined the early years, when Zynga's army of developers flooded the market with dozens of new titles from cooking games to bingo variations, its dealmakers splashed money to snap up smaller rivals, and its managers opened studios in cities around the world.

Wall Street is viewing Pincus' shift with cautious approval, having been singed by Zynga's abysmal stock performance an 80 percent decline over the past year that began around the time it invested $180 million in then-promising game studio OMGPOP.

"Certainly their shareholder base wants to see more discipline," said Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham and Co. "When you have limited resources, it makes sense to start with a proven winner, then expand that franchise. But it needs to be a blend of sticking with the proven brands and realizing when people might say: 'FarmVille 4? No, I'm done with that.'"

Investors place much stock on Zynga's future prospects in Internet gambling, because of its massive poker-playing community and existing game software. But with meaningful income from real-money casino efforts likely to be months, if not years, away, it may have to risk "sequelitis" for now.

TABLES TURNED

Almost 18 months after going public, Zynga is staving off fierce competition from newer or nimbler rivals that mimic its games.

Supercell, founded in 2010, has scored with "Hay Day," an iPad game that contains elements resembling FarmVille. With just one other game under its belt, Supercell says it is on track to make more than $800 million in revenue this year, roughly equal to the $860 million that Wall Street expects from Zynga in 2013.

Veteran video games publisher Electronic Arts Inc, one of Zynga's earliest rivals, in recent weeks said it would lay off an undisclosed number of employees and focus on core franchises like Battlefield and sports titles.

Activision Blizzard Inc, another publishing heavyweight, has fared better thanks to the strength of series like "Call of Duty," which has brought in more than $8 billion in cumulative sales since the first title launched in 2003. Yet even Activision is struggling to sustain revenue growth.

Zynga's bottom-line could be shored up through a more streamlined pipeline, Pincus argued. Since FarmVille first launched, it has gradually honed its development process to reduce the resources and development costs required for each significant update by more than 80 percent, he said.

"As long as our players are interested in farming, we'll offer a Farmville," Pincus said. "It could be the Seinfeld of our era in gaming, a multi-season show that has a quality and a consistency that you can rely on."

Zynga declined to address its game pipeline. Bing Gordon, an investor at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a Zynga board member, said he has repeatedly nudged the company to develop FarmVille 3.

"Coca Cola has learned not to change their formula," said Gordon, a game industry veteran who formerly served as chief creative officer at Electronic Arts. "If you've got something people want, keep doing it."

BOLD BEATS

Even as Zynga seeks greater efficiency, it acknowledges it has been pressed to invest more to stay competitive.

At the heart of the company's strategy has been its "bold beat" schedule, a roadmap first laid out by Pincus in 2009 to release significant upgrades and new features to games every quarter to keep players hooked.

Once criticized in the industry for low-quality graphics and rudimentary gameplay, the company's latest launches and "bold beats" have placed a greater emphasis on elements like visuals that were once considered superfluous, game designers said.

"Player expectations are higher than they used to be," said Zynga Senior Vice President Todd Arnold, who overseas FarmVille and FarmVille 2. "You're not able to launch a minimalist product as we used to be able to."

For its leading franchises, the company is also investing more in quantitative and analytical tools. Every week, it shuttles players into a room deep inside its offices, where they are shown minute new design features. Their reactions are recorded by video cameras as well as a team of game designers sitting behind a two-way mirror in an adjacent room.

The company also holds periodic panel discussions with its most loyal fans to solicit suggestions for new features.

Linda Zoccolli, a retired daycare business owner in Moraga, California, suggested at a session in March that water was too scarce a commodity in FarmVille 2. Weeks later, she noticed the game began to feature periodic rainfall.

She has spent three hours almost daily for the past eight months tending her plot but hasn't found it repetitive.

"As long as they come out with new quests, new items, it keeps it interesting," she said.

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Edwin Chan, Jonathan Weber and Chris Reese)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng called on the United States on Friday to ensure his family in China would be treated fairly, saying his imprisoned nephew was not receiving proper medical care from Chinese authorities, whom he accused of "hooligan tactics."

Chen, who made international headlines last year when he escaped house arrest and spent 20 hours on the run before finding refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, said his nephew was suffering from appendicitis and being treated only by a fellow inmate who had received some medical training.

"He's not being given proper medical treatment or being taken to a medical facility outside the jail," Chen told Reuters in an interview, speaking through an interpreter.

Chen, who was born blind and taught himself law, said China was using "ruffian, hooligan tactics to try and scare me into silence."

He said his relatives had been increasingly harassed by Chinese authorities since mid-April, around the anniversary of his escape from 19 months of harsh house arrest in eastern Shandong province.

He said he was "extremely happy and very grateful" to learn of the State Department's announcement on Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry would raise the case of his nephew, Chen Kegui, with China. He said he had not been contacted by anyone at the department about the plan.

Kerry tried calling Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to discuss Chen's imprisoned nephew, but Wang was not available, the State Department said on Friday.

Chen's nephew was charged after using knives to fend off local officials who burst into his home the day after Chen's escape was discovered. He was sentenced to more than three years in jail in November after a trial Washington described as "deeply flawed."

Chen said, "There's not enough power behind closed-door diplomacy," and that the United States needed "to strengthen their criticism of the Chinese government,"

"What I mean is at the moment the methods that the U.S. government may be using to bring up these matters with the Chinese government is clearly not enough, it's too weak. What they need to do is strengthen their criticism of the Chinese government."

Chen came to prominence by campaigning for farmers and disabled citizens and exposing forced abortions before he was placed under house arrest.

Chen's older brother, Chen Guangfu, said this week that local authorities had harassed him repeatedly since mid-April by throwing rocks, bottles and dead poultry at his home in a village in Shandong province in retaliation for what they believed were Chen's plans to visit Taiwan and Tibet.

Chen said on Friday he planned to visit supporters in Taiwan next month but had no plans to visit Tibet. He spoke with Reuters after giving a speech at the launch of a report into Chinese censorship by PEN International, an association of writers that advocates for freedom of expression.

Chen, who lives in New York with his wife and is studying law at New York University, said he hoped to return to China.

"Part of the issue is, if I go back, will I be able to leave at any time?" he said.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Peter Cooney)

RELATED:

Currently, social networks either don't have the technology to conduct extensive surveillance on their users, or they have been able to avoid cooperating with officials. So, no, Facebook is not spying on the wall posts of people on watch lists. But that's mostly because the government's ability to link up with major communications companies (under a 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) has not kept up with its escalation in secret wiretapping legalese (famously build ). Now the FBI would like to change that, because of what they call periods of "," during which the intelligence community doesn't have the means to gather "valuable evidence" from Internet communications.

RELATED:

Some tech leaders are already playing along: Skype, for example, , making it possible for law enforcement officials to access the credit card information and addresses of video-chatters under suspicion. But the FBI's latest push, stemming from an , is to get more mainstream — and more social — Internet companies onboard. Google has , but mostly for YouTube and defamation complaints. Its chatting and email software, on the other hand, has end-to-end encryption, making it more technically difficult for the feds to monitor on the fly without help from the inside. The new FBI legislative proposal, which the Obama administration has yet to sing off on, hopes fines of tens of thousands of dollars and up will pressure Google and other key communications companies to change their infrastructure when intelligence gathering needs to get personal — and fast.

RELATED:

To be sure, there are possibilities: As revealing as  profiles of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have been — and however useless his newly discovered  may turn out — imagine what the FBI could have learned from Gchat or Facebook message communications. (Already a phone call between the Tsarnaev mother, Zubeidat, and one of the sons, , is beingas a possible intelligence failure in the Boston bombings.) Or imagine what U.S. intelligence officials could have done with Tamerlan Tsarnaev's YouTube favorites. In fact, if you look atwith that latter account, you have to look at the downsides, too.

RELATED:

While authorities claim they aren't expanding powers to encroach on civil liberties — the FBI is merely making sure the "existing authorities can be applied across the full range of communications technologies," a Justice Department official told the Post — that hasn't stopped privacy advocates from harping on the proposal. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has beforethat requiring these "technical back doors," as they're called, is "ineffective, cause security vulnerabilities, and hurt American business." Whether they can help catch American terrorists — well, that's the question any new law would hinge upon.

Called the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the program encompasses a series of monitoring stations that will measure the health of ecosystems by taking snapshots from strategically chosen locations across the country analogous to the way an EKG monitors the health of the heart, said Lily Whiteman, a spokeswoman for the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds NEON.

Scientists say the monitoring effort is essential because so many factors are influencing Earth's ecosystems. To truly understand the impact of these factors, researchers need a way to watch these effects over time. Understanding the impacts will help inform policies dealing with issues ranging from global warming to urban planning.

"Earth's living systems are experiencing the greatest rates of change in history, due to land-use changes,and climate change," said Elizabeth Blood, the NSF program director for NEON, during a teleconference on April 19. "Many of these changes will be abrupt and unpredictable."

NEON will help understand these changes, and avoid negative effects on species as much as possible, she said. "Our understanding of life's living systems doesn't match that of the [Earth and its geology] or the atmosphere."

NEON is beginning to come online and will begin providing data later this year, Blood said. The network will be fully operational by 2017 and is expected to continue its research for 30 years, giving scientists a vital long-term data set to understand how humans are impacting the environment, Blood said.

The program will record data from 106 different spots throughout the country 60 on land and 46 at sea, Blood said. Each site will be outfitted with various sensors to record data, as well as stations where scientists can identify and quantify species, and conduct other types of research.

The project also includes an aircraft with a variety of instruments to measure what types of plants are present and what land-use changes (like development or agricultural activities) have occurred since the last time the area was examined.

The aircraft, which will travel among the various sites in the network, has already begun to examine the effects of the , a huge blaze that occurred last summer near Fort Collins, Colo. Its baseline readings will help understand how much erosion the fire created, and how quickly forests can come back from such events, Tom Kampe, a researcher with NEON, said during the teleconference.

Researchers say it is important to fund this project because ecology underlies many aspects of the economy: The food we eat, for example, depends on good growing conditions just one small way humans are affected by the environment.

"A number of the questions [NEON seeks to answer] are significant as significant as many of the economic issues we face," Blood said. "It's designed to study majorand fires, in which we need basic science information to better understand how to manage them, both before and after."

Email or follow him . Follow us, or . Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration on Wednesday notified Congress it will start free-trade talks with Japan, bringing the world's third-largest economy into U.S.-led negotiations on a regional free-trade pact.

"The participation of Japan, a major U.S. trading partner as well as close ally, further increases the economic significance of a TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Agreement," acting U.S. Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis said in a letter to congressional leaders.

The 90-day notification was expected after U.S. and Japanese negotiators reached a deal on April 12 on the terms of Japan's entry into the TPP talks, which are now in their fourth year. It could clear the way for Japan to participate in the July round of TPP talks.

The United States and the 10 other countries already involved in the TPP talks on Saturday formally approved Japan's entry into the negotiations at a meeting of regional trade ministers in Indonesia.

Marantis sought to reassure lawmakers that Japan's participation would not slow down the TPP negotiations, which are slated for conclusion by the end of the year, and that Japan would not refuse to negotiate in sensitive agricultural and manufacturing sectors of interest to U.S. exporters.

"Japan has confirmed it will participate positively and constructively in the negotiations. Japan also confirmed that it will subject all goods to negotiations - both agricultural and manufactured goods - and will join with the other TPP countries to achieve a high-standard and comprehensive agreement this year," Marantis said.

The White House sees the TPP pact as part of its economic rebalancing toward Asia. It also plans to launch free-trade talks with the 27-nation European Union in coming months.

Countries around the world are moving increasingly toward regional free-trade agreements in the absence of any progress toward a comprehensive world trade deal.

Detroit-based auto makers, particularly Ford Motor Co, have lobbied against Japan joining the TPP talks.

They say the agreement will open the door for more imports from Japan, without tearing down barriers that they say keep U.S. autos out of Japan's market.

In addition to the United States and Japan, TPP countries include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

The 17th round of TPP talks is scheduled for May 15-24 in Lima, Peru. It is expected to be followed by an 18th round sometime in July that could be the first time that Japan participates in the negotiations.

(Reporting by Doug Palmer; Editing by Sandra Maler and Mohammad Zargham)

Freddie Mac said Thursday the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage fell to 3.89 percent. That's below the previous record of 3.91 percent reached three weeks ago.

Records for mortgage rates date back to the 1950s.

The average on the 15-year fixed mortgage ticked down to 3.16 percent. That's down from a record 3.21 percent three weeks ago.

Mortgage rates are lower because they track the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which fell below 2 percent. They could fall even lower this year if the Fed launches another round of bond purchases, as some economists expect.

Average fixed mortgage rates hovered around 4 percent at the end of 2011. Yet many Americans either can't take advantage of the rates or have already done so.

High unemployment and scant wage gains have made it harder for many people to qualify for loans. Many don't want to sink money into a home that they fear could lose value over the next few years.

Mortgage applications have fallen slightly on a seasonally adjusted basis over the past four weeks, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac's chief economist, said that until hiring picks up and unemployment drops significantly, the impact of lower mortgage rates will remain muted.

Previously occupied homes are selling just slightly ahead of 2010's dismal pace. New-home sales in 2011 will likely be the worst year on records going back half a century.

Builders hope that the low rates could boost sales next year. Low mortgage rates were cited as a key reason the National Association of Home Builders survey of builder sentiment rose in December to its highest level in more than a year.

But so far, they have had little impact on the depressed housing market.

To calculate the average rates, Freddie Mac surveys lenders across the country Monday through Wednesday of each week. The average rates don't include extra fees, known as points, which most borrowers must pay to get the lowest rates. One point equals 1 percent of the loan amount.

The average fee for the 30-year loan fell to 0.7 from 0.8; the average on the 15-year fixed mortgage was unchanged at 0.8.

For the five-year adjustable loan, the average rate declined to 2.82 percent from 2.86 percent. The average on the one-year adjustable loan fell to 2.76 percent from 2.80 percent.

The average fee on the five-year adjustable loan rose was unchanged at 0.7; the average on the one-year adjustable-rate loan was unchanged at 0.6.

Related:

A lot has changed since those days, including the amount of coverage the event gets. This year it wont just be C-SPAN covering the Hollywood-meets-The Beltway nerdfest. CNN said today that like it will cover OBrien and President Obamas remarks at the dinner live during the 10 PM ET hour. The cable news network will also offer coverage of red-carpet arrivals from 6-7 PM ET and a best-of past WHCDs in the 9 PM hour. That joins MSNBCs coverage, which is set to start at 9:30 PM ET, and E!s live-stream of the red-carpet arrivals. Fox News Channel also plans coverage, though it hasnt offered specifics yet.

Get more from Deadline.com: Follow us on , ,