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The order affects thousands of herbal treatments, multi-vitamins and other products, most of them waiting for approval from Health Canada under a backlogged, five-year-old program to regulate natural-health goods.

The National Association of Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities (NAPRA) says pharmacists cannot be assured the products are safe until they are granted a government licence, and should not sell them in those circumstances. “Pharmacists are obliged to hold the health and safety of the public or patient as their first and foremost consideration,” said the association’s recently issued position statement.

Representatives of the natural health industry, however, have reacted angrily to the directive issued last month, predicting it will have little impact on patient safety, while triggering an economic “crisis” for their members.

“We are talking about job loss, we are talking about a lot of income loss, we are talking about product stuck in warehouses that cannot be sold,” Jean-Yves Dionne, a spokesman for the Canadian Health Food Association, said in an interview.

A statement issued by the association calls the directive self-serving and contrary to federal government policy.

“It has taken a sledge hammer to a finishing nail,” the group said. “It will create confusion for consumers. It is the wrong thing to do.”

NAPRA is comprised of representatives of the provincial colleges of pharmacy that regulate the profession. It is now up to the individual provinces to implement the statement. The Ontario and Quebec colleges have already done so, with Ontario pressing pharmacists to not buy or order any more of the affected products, and its neighbour pushing for druggists to also remove unlicensed product already on their shelves, Mr. Dionne said.

Pharmacies, as surprised by the directive as anyone, are caught in the middle, said Jeff Poston of the Canadian Pharmacists Association.

“One of the questions that everybody is asking in the pharmacy world is, ‘Why now?’ As far as people can determine, nothing has significantly changed.”

So when is a box-office record really a record? And should “Avatar,” like so many modern-day movies that have benefited from the steep rise in ticket prices, especially in the new 3-D era, carry an asterisk next to their name? After all, if we were writing about the all-time box-office champ in terms of actual ticket admissions, it would still be “Gone With the Wind,” David O. Selznick’s 1939 sweeping historical romance that has riveted moviegoers for generations. If you put together an all-time box-office chart, adjusted for inflation, “Gone With the Wind” remains the undefeated, unrivaled champion, having earned an astounding $1.45 billion in ticket sales over the years. As box-office guru, Hollywood.com’s Paul Dergarabedian, told me yesterday: “You never want to say never, but that’s a record that I don’t think will ever be broken.”

In an adjusted for inflation all-time box-office Top 10 (compiled by Dergarabedian), “Gone With the Wind” is the easy winner, with George Lucas’ 1977 “Star Wars” in the No. 2 slot, with $1.26 billion in grosses, followed by 1965’s “Sound of Music,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 1956’s “The Ten Commandments.”

Using off-the-shelf chemicals, Tarnovsky soaked chips in acid to dissolve their hard outer shells. Then he applied rust remover to help take off layers of mesh wiring, to expose the chips’ cores. From there, he had to find the right communication channels to tap into using a very small needle.

Even once he had done all that, he said he still had to crack the “huge problem” of figuring out how to avoid traps programmed into the chip’s software as an extra layer of defense.

“This chip is mean, man — it’s like a ticking time bomb if you don’t do something right,” Tarnovsky said.

Joe Grand, a hardware hacker and president of product- and security-research firm Grand Idea Studio Inc., saw Tarnovsky’s presentation and said it represented a huge advancement that chip companies should take seriously, because it shows that presumptions about security ought to be reconsidered.

China’s currency reserves grew by more than the gross domestic product of Norway in 2009. Its $2.4 trillion of reserves is a bubble all its own, one growing before our eyes with nary a peep out of those searching for the next big one.

The reserve bubble is actually an Asia-wide phenomenon. And we should stop viewing this monetary arms race as a source of strength. Here are three reasons why it’s fast becoming a bigger liability than policy makers say publicly.

One, it’s a massive and growing pyramid scheme. The issue has reached new levels of absurdity with traders buzzing about crisis-plagued Greece seeking a Chinese bailout. After all, if economies were for sale, China could use the $453 billion of reserves it amassed last year to buy Greece and Vietnam and have enough left over for Mongolia.

Mr Palmer says the $69 billion, 20-year offtake deal was signed last Friday with China Power International.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast yesterday whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

Geithner said investors around the world turn to U.S. Treasury securities and dollar-denominated assets whenever they are worried about global stability. That reflects “basic confidence” in the U.S. and its ability to bounce back from the global recession, he said.

Moody’s Investors Service Inc. last week said the U.S. government’s bond rating will come under pressure in the future unless additional measures are taken to reduce budget deficits projected for the next decade.

The U.S. plans to rein in the deficit once the labor market recovers, Geithner said. In the short run, that means focusing on ways to “make sure that this economy is growing again,” he said. The administration says the deficit will shrink over the next four years as more Americans find jobs and the economy accelerates.

An immigration judge in Nashville, Tennessee ruled that parents Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, and their five children, are free to stay in the US, where they have been since 2008, news agency AP reported late on Tuesday.

The parents, who came from the state of Baden-Württemberg, allege they were persecuted for their faith and defiance of Germany’s compulsory school attendance since those who do not comply face fines and jail time.

According to Uwe Romeike, his family was fined the equivalent of some $10,000 over two years, but could not afford to make payments after their court appeals failed.

“I think it’s important for parents to have the freedom to choose the way their children can be taught,” Romeike told AP, later adding that German curriculum was increasingly “against Christian values.”

In October 2006, police forcefully took the family’s children to school in their home town of Bietigheim-Bissingen when they refused to do so themselves. One year later, the country’s high court ruled that in some similar cases the state could take children from their parents.

“We knew we had to leave the country,” Romeike, whose case was represented by the Home School Legal Defense Association, told the news agency.