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A survey of emergency contraceptives in Lima, Peru, turned up worrying results: More than a quarter were either counterfeit or defective.

Some of the morning-after pills tested contained too little of the active ingredient, or none at all. Other pills contained another drug altogether, researchers reported Friday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Swallowing these fakes can result in dangerous side effects, not to mention unwanted pregnancies.

"The biggest implication is the quality of emergency contraceptives in developing countries cannot be taken for granted," says Facundo Fernandez, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who contributed to the study.

Shots - Health News

Poll: Americans Favor Age Restrictions On Morning-After Pill

"Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?" former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden asked Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

"We don't have a mass system of such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist," the Russian leader responded.

Well, as NPR's Tom Gjelten tweets, the bipartisan Center for Strategic & International Studies has now provided "an actual answer" to Snowden's query.

Here are some excerpts from what the center posted today:

"Three programs, SORM-1, SORM-2, and SORM-3, provide the foundation of Russian mass communications surveillance. Russian law gives Russia's security service, the FSB, the authority to use SORM ('System for Operative Investigative Activities') to collect, analyze and store all data that [are] transmitted or received on Russian networks, including calls, email, website visits and credit card transactions. ...

"Russian law requires all Internet service providers to install an FSB monitoring device (called 'Punkt Upravlenia') on their networks that allows the direct collection of traffic without the knowledge or cooperation of the service provider. ...

"Collection requires a court order, but these are secret and not shown to the service provider. According to the data published by Russia's Supreme Court, almost 540,000 intercepts of phone and internet traffic were authorized in 2012. ...

"SORM is routinely used against political opponents and human rights activists to monitor them and to collect information to use against them in 'dirty tricks' campaigns. Russian courts have upheld the FSB's authority to surveil political opponents even if they have committed no crime. ..."

Unbridled industrialization with almost no environmental regulation has resulted in the toxic contamination of one-fifth of China's farmland, the Communist Party has acknowledged for the first time.

The report, issued by the ministries of Environmental Protection and Land and Resources, says 16.1 percent of the country's soil in general and 19.4 percent of its farmland is polluted with toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, nickel and arsenic. It was based on a soil survey of more than 2.4 million square miles of land across China, spanning a period from April 2005 until December 2013. It excluded special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau.

In a dire assessment, the report declares: "The overall condition of the Chinese soil allows no optimism."

The Associated Press writes that the report was "previously deemed so sensitive [that] it was classified as a state secret." The official Xinhua news agency blames "irrigation by polluted water, the improper use of fertilizers and pesticides and the development of livestock breeding."

Xinhua says: "In breakdown, 11.2 percent of the country's surveyed land suffers slight pollution, while 1.1 percent is severely polluted." (Update at 12:06 p.m. ET. Earlier, we were citing numbers from The Guardian, but these figures from Chinese state media are being more widely cited.)

Most of the contaminated farm land is on the highly developed and industrialized east coast, but heavy metal pollution was especially bad in the country's southwest, according to The Guardian.

The newspaper says:

"In January, an agriculture official admitted that millions of hectares of farmland could be withdrawn from production because of severe pollution by heavy metals. And last December the vice minister of land and resources estimated that 3.3 million hectares of land is polluted, mostly in gain producing regions."

A survey of emergency contraceptives in Lima, Peru, turned up worrying results: More than a quarter were either counterfeit or defective.

Some of the morning-after pills tested contained too little of the active ingredient, or none at all. Other pills contained another drug altogether, researchers reported Friday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Swallowing these fakes can result in dangerous side effects, not to mention unwanted pregnancies.

"The biggest implication is the quality of emergency contraceptives in developing countries cannot be taken for granted," says Facundo Fernandez, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who contributed to the study.

Shots - Health News

Poll: Americans Favor Age Restrictions On Morning-After Pill