PRIVACY — THE ONLINE GENERATION WANTS IT

CHICAGO (AP) -- Amid the debate over government surveillance, there's been an assumption: Young people don't care about privacy.

Turns out, the generation that puts much of the "social" in social networking is much more complex when determining what personal information they want to share.

Sure, they're as likely as ever to post photos of themselves online, as well as their location and even phone numbers, say those who track their high-tech habits. But as they approach adulthood, they're also getting more adept at hiding and pruning their online lives.

Despite their propensity for sharing, many young adults also are surprisingly big advocates for privacy - in some cases, more than their elders.

That attitude showed up most recently in a poll done over the weekend for the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and The Washington Post. The poll, tied to the disclosure of broad federal surveillance, found that young adults were much more divided than older generations when asked if the government should tread on their privacy to thwart terrorism.

Fifty-one percent of young adults, ages 18 to 29, said it was "more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy."

But 45 percent said personal privacy was more important, even if it limited the ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

In contrast, less than a third of adults, age 30 and older, told pollsters that preserving personal privacy was more important, while about two-thirds placed higher value on permitting terror investigations, regardless of privacy infringement.

"The big insight here is that younger adults are not indifferent to privacy, as many seem to believe," says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which is affiliated with Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

UN SAYS NEARLY 93,000 KILLED IN SYRIAN CIVIL WAR

BEIRUT (AP) -- Syrians are being killed at an average rate of 5,000 per month, the U.N. said Thursday as it raised the overall death toll in the civil war to nearly 93,000, with civilians bearing the brunt of the attacks.

The grim estimate reflects the growing sectarian nature of the bloodshed as the regime of President Bashar Assad scores a series of battlefield successes against the rebels.

The toll also is a reminder of the international community's helplessness in the face of a conflict that has displaced several million people and spilled over into neighboring countries with alarming frequency.

In the latest violence, a mortar round slammed into an area near the runway at Damascus International Airport, briefly disrupting flights to and from the Syrian capital, officials said. The attack Thursday came a few weeks after the government announced it had secured the airport road that had been targeted by rebels in the past.

It was the first known attack to hit inside the airport, located south of the capital, and highlighted the difficulty Assad faces in maintaining security even in areas firmly under his control.

In Geneva, the U.N. human rights office said it had documented 92,901 killings in Syria between March 2011 and the end of April 2013. But the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said it was impossible to provide an exact number, which could be far higher.

COURT SAYS HUMAN GENES CANNOT BE PATENTED

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that companies cannot patent parts of naturally-occurring human genes, a decision with the potential to profoundly affect the emerging and lucrative medical and biotechnology industries.

The high court's unanimous judgment reverses three decades of patent awards by government officials. It throws out patents held by Salt Lake City-based Myriad Genetics Inc. on an increasingly popular breast cancer test brought into the public eye recently by actress Angelina Jolie's revelation that she had a double mastectomy because of one of the genes involved in this case.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the court's decision, said that Myriad's assertion - that the DNA it isolated from the body for its proprietary breast and ovarian cancer tests were patentable - had to be dismissed because it violates patent rules. The court has said that laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable.

"We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated," Thomas said.

However, the court gave Myriad a partial victory, ruling that while naturally-occurring DNA was not patentable, synthetically-created DNA could be patented. The court said that synthetically created DNA, known as cDNA, can be patented "because it is not naturally occurring," Thomas said.

Patents are the legal protection that gives inventors the right to prevent others from making, using or selling a novel device, process or application. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been awarding patents on human genes for almost 30 years, but opponents of Myriad Genetics Inc.'s patents on the two genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer say such protection should not be given to something that can be found inside the human body.

The company has used its patent to come up with its BRACAnalysis test, which looks for mutations on the breast cancer predisposition gene, or BRCA. Those mutations are associated with much greater risks of breast and ovarian cancer. Women with a faulty gene have a three to seven times greater risk of developing breast cancer and also have a higher risk of ovarian cancer.