Updated 4:45 p.m. ET:  Adding to the web of companies caught up in Europe's horse meat scandal, British grocery chain Tesco said Monday that samples of its frozen spaghetti meal contained more than 60 percent horse DNA.

Horsemeat is largely taboo in Britain and some other countries, though in France it is sold in specialty butcher shops and is prized by some connoisseurs. Authorities aren't worried about health effects, but it has unsettled consumers across Europe and raised questions about producers misleading the public.

As Britons choke on discovering they may have eaten horse that was imported as beef, and ministers blame an "international criminal conspiracy," this new scandal has exposed the sometimes murky labyrinth by which food reaches Europe's dinner tables.

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But as governments play down the health risks, a greater impact may stem from a shattering of public confidence in E.U. systems of labeling and quality control introduced after previous threats hit the human food chain.

As details emerge of a complex network of slaughterhouses and middlemen standing between the farm and the supermarkets across Europe, France and Britain have vowed to punish those found responsible for selling horse meat purported to be beef.

With DNA tests needed to tell the two kinds of flesh apart, retailers and makers of processed meals complain of being duped by suppliers; one French firm has pointed a finger at Romania.

"This is a conspiracy against the public," said British farm minister Owen Paterson. "I've got an increasing feeling that it is actually a case of an international criminal conspiracy."

Prime Minister David Cameron has called it "very shocking."

Adding to concerns are indications that some horse meat, perfectly edible in itself, may contain a drug known as bute — a common anti-inflammatory painkiller for sporting horses but banned for animals intended for eventual human consumption.

Britain's Food Standards Agency said it was checking whether horse carcasses exported from Britain contained phenylbutazone. It said five such animals were sold abroad last year and it had told foreign agencies. French media said the horses went there.

One firm hit by the British horse meat scandal, frozen foods group Findus, said it was recalling its beef lasagne product after discovering they included horse meat. Its French supplier, Comigel, said the questionable meat came from E.U. member Romania.

An E.U.-wide alert has been sent out and governments debated how to bring the increasingly complex industry under control.

Food experts say globalization has brought benefits to food supply, with exotic items now available from around the world all year round, but it has also created a system that is so complex it has increased the risks of adulteration, whether by design, to use cheaper inputs, or through neglect of standards.

The "mad cow" crisis, which saw British beef banned in the E.U. in the 1990s over fears of a degenerative brain disease, left a legacy of tight controls on the identity of European animals, intended to ensure the origins of fresh meat are traceable.

But in meat minced into processed product, while hygiene checks are the norm, testing for something as seemingly basic as which species it came from is complex and not widely undertaken.

Difficult to trace
Tracing processed meat back to its source is difficult in Europe's complex market, and the path from abattoirs where cows and horses are slaughtered and minced to people's dinner tables often meanders through a confusing chain of middle companies.

Last week's problems for Findus came less than a month after British supermarkets found horse meat in beef burgers from Ireland.

French officials tracing the contamination of the Findus beef lasagna said a Luxembourg factory had been supplied by the French firm Poujol, which had bought the meat frozen from a Cypriot trader, who in turn had subcontracted the order to a Dutch trader supplied by a Romanian abattoir. But others gave different stories.

France says that Romanian butchers and Dutch and Cypriot traders were part of a supply chain that resulted in horsemeat being labeled as beef before it was included in frozen dinners including lasagna, moussaka and the French equivalent of Shepherd's Pie. The affair started earlier this year with worries about horsemeat in burgers in Ireland and Britain.

Romania scrambled Monday to contain the damage from the fast-growing European horsemeat scandal, saying that two plants believed to be the source of mislabeled meat had declared it properly and any fraud was committed somewhere down the line.

Anne McIntosh, who chairs Britain's parliamentary food and environment committee, called for a temporary import ban on processed and frozen meats from the other 26 E.U. states.

"My concern is that consumer confidence will have collapsed across the European Union," McIntosh, from Cameron's Conservative party, told the BBC on Sunday.

"We seem to be no clearer as to what the source of this contamination is, or whether the supply was ever destined for human consumption. Is this a fraud of such a massive scale that it should never have entered the human food chains?"

Alison Mutler, The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related:

Hamburgers pulled from UK supermarket shelves after tests reveal horse meat

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LONDON - Britain's parliament voted heavily in favor of legalizing gay marriage on Tuesday, but Prime Minister David Cameron's authority in his own party took a blow as his Conservatives split in two over the measure he had championed.

In the first of several votes required for its passage, the lower house of parliament backed the legislation by 400-175, but more than half of Cameron's 303 lawmakers voted against or abstained, signaling deep unease with it and his leadership.

During a debate that lasted more than six hours, many Conservative MPs denounced the legislation, saying it was morally wrong, not a public priority, and unnecessarily divisive, threatening a corrosive legacy of bitterness.

Conservative lawmaker Gerald Howarth told parliament that the government had no mandate to push through a "massive social and cultural change."

"This is not evolution, it's revolution," added Edward Leigh, another Conservative member of parliament, saying marriage was "by its nature a heterosexual union."

Although the vote went Cameron's way, many analysts believe he will now have to address a deep seam of discontent running through his party.

He made a last minute televised statement ahead of the vote, arguing gay marriage would make society stronger.

"I'm a big believer in marriage. It helps people to commit to each other, and I think that's why gay people should be able to get married too," he said.

He later hailed the result of the vote as "a step forward for our country."

Cameron is trying to perform a tricky balancing act: to reconcile his desire to show his party is progressive, with the views of many in it who are uncomfortable with such a reform.

Amid talk of a possible leadership challenge to Cameron, many Conservative lawmakers say the prime minister is sacrificing core party values on the altar of populism.

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"He hasn't got a lot of political capital left in the bank," Stewart Jackson, a Conservative MP who opposes the gay marriage bill, told Reuters before the vote. "He has to deliver some authentic Conservative policies very soon."

Such talk is rife among some Conservative lawmakers and follows a spate of articles in the British press in which a handful of MPs raised the possibility of ousting Cameron, a prospect most commentators regard as far-fetched before the next election in 2015.

Grievances against Cameron
Conservative MPs' grievances are many: that Cameron is "arrogant," that he is too fond of the European Union, that the party's policies have been diluted by its coalition partner after Cameron failed to win the last election outright, and a nagging fear that he will not win the next one.

The gay marriage initiative has infuriated rank-and-file party activists and a protest letter signed by 25 past and present chairmen of local Conservative associations warned that members were starting to resign over the issue.

Justin Welby, the newly elected Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the world's 80 million Anglicans, used his first comments after being confirmed on Monday to reiterate his own opposition to gay marriage.

Faced with strong opposition from the Anglican and Catholic churches, the law would not force them to conduct gay marriages, but critics say gay people may launch legal challenges.

A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times on Sunday showed 55 percent favored legalizing gay marriage, while 36 percent opposed it. However, the same poll showed the issue was not one that concerned most voters.

The new law proposes legalizing same-sex marriage in 2014. It would also allow civil partners to convert their partnerships into marriages.

Gay marriage supporters say that while existing civil partnerships for same-sex couples afford the same legal rights as marriage, the distinction implies they are inferior.

In a sometimes emotional debate on Tuesday, several gay MPs from different parties took to their feet to commend the bill, describing the prejudice they had suffered growing up.

"Millions will be watching us today," said Nick Herbert, a gay Conservative MP. "Not just gay people but people who want to live in an equal society."

The vote was warmly welcomed by Cameron's junior coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, and by the opposition Labour party, while gay rights group Stonewall called the result "a truly historic step forward."

Tuesday's vote in the House of Commons was "free," meaning MPs were able to vote according to their conscience, rather than under party orders.

The bill is still many stages away from becoming law, and some of its opponents called on Cameron after the vote to consider amending it to appease their concerns, promising they would try to frustrate its progress through parliament.

Warning of divisions
Peter Kellner, president of pollster YouGov, said he felt the parliamentary rebellion would hurt the Conservative party.

"For Cameron, gay marriage is part of his attempt to persuade the voters that his party belongs to modern, 21st century Britain," he wrote on the pollster's site.

"But the divisions that the gay marriages bill has unleashed ... threaten to send an altogether different message: that the Tories are divided, out of touch and prone to quarrel over issues of little concern to most voters."

With the next election still two-and-a-half years distant, there is a risk that internal party splits over issues like gay marriage could fester and turn what for now is only talk of a possible leadership challenge into the real thing.

"David Cameron has split the Conservative Party in half on gay marriage and failed to win a majority of Tory MPs. Labour win," Jackson, the Conservative MP, wrote after the vote.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

LONDON -- A senior British counterterrorism police officer was jailed on Friday after becoming the first person to be convicted following a massive police investigation into alleged phone-hacking centered on Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers.

Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, 53, was jailed for 15 months for misconduct in a public office after she was found guilty last month of offering to sell details about the phone-hacking inquiry to Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

"It was ... a corrupt attempt to make money out of sensitive and potentially very damaging information," said Justice Adrian Fulford.

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Casburn called the News of the World on Sept. 11, 2010, when police were in the early stages of examining claims that journalists from the paper had illegally accessed the voicemails of mobile phones in a bid to find stories.

Prosecutors said she phoned asking for money in an attempt to undermine the investigation because of her perception that she had been wronged and sidelined by police colleagues.

She denied asking for payment and said her intention was to raise the alarm over what she viewed as a waste of counterterrorism resources on hacking, when they should have been concentrating on preventing attacks in the run-up to the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Casburn, head of a counterterrorism financial investigations unit at the time, testified that she had been incensed by the attitude of senior officers, who regarded the hacking probe as "a bit of a jolly" and a chance to interview celebrity hacking victims such as the actress Sienna Miller.

The judge, however, said her actions could not be described as those of a whistle-blower, adding that if she were not in the process of adopting a child, he would have jailed her for three years.

"If the News of the World had accepted her offer, it's clear, in my view, that Ms Casburn would have taken the money and, as a result, she posed a significant threat to the integrity of this important police investigation," Fulford said.

Detectives are now not only investigating these allegations, but also whether journalists paid cash to public officials, including police officers, for information.

Casburn is the first person to be convicted in a scandal that escalated into a much wider crisis embroiling the top echelons of the British establishment, media, and police, and led to Murdoch closing down the News of the World in July 2011.

Related:

Judgment day looms for Murdoch, Morgan, UK press

Murdoch papers, UK media condemned in report

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

LONDON — Burger King said on Thursday it had stopped using one of the firms caught up in the scandal of supplying British grocers with hamburger that contained horse meat.

The British food industry has been rocked by the revelation last week that retailers including market leader Tesco and smaller chains Aldi, Lidl and Iceland had sold beef products that contained horse meat.

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Food safety experts say horse meat poses no added health risks to consumers, but the discovery has raised concerns about the food supply chain and the ability to trace meat ingredients.

On its website, Burger King said it had decided to replace all Silvercrest products in Britain and Ireland with products from another approved Burger King supplier.

"This is a voluntary and precautionary measure," Burger King said. "We are working diligently to identify suppliers that can produce 100 percent pure Irish and British beef products that meet our high quality standards."

The company said last week it was "confident" its beef supplies had not been affected because its patties are made on a dedicated production line and, unlike products implicated in the horse meat scandal, do not contain meat from continental Europe.

The burger products from the grocers, which were revealed last week to have tested positive for horse DNA, were produced by Liffey Meats and Silvercrest Foods in Ireland and Dalepak Hambleton in Britain.

Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer, immediately withdrew from sale all products from its supplier, Silvercrest. The grocery chain said it was working with authorities and the supplier to urgently understand how horse meat came to be in the product.

ABP Food Group, which owns Silvercrest, said at the time that the source of the contamination was a beef-based product bought from two third-party suppliers outside of Ireland.

The discovery of horse meat could be both embarrassing and damaging for the retailers involved. The mass-selling Sun newspaper carried the Burger King announcement on its front page Thursday with the headline "Shergar King," in reference to a famous racehorse that was kidnapped and never seen again.

Related:

Hamburgers pulled from UK shelves after horse meat discovered

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LONDON — Former BBC star Jimmy Savile was one of Britain’s "most prolific" sex offenders, committing at least 214 sex crimes against victims aged as young as 8, police said Friday.

Investigators released a report cataloging more than 50 years of rapes and indecent assaults. It accused the late television and radio host of using his celebrity status to gain access to vulnerable children in hospitals, nightclubs and even a hospice for the terminally ill.

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Almost all the allegations have been made since Savile’s death in 2011, even though the offences date back as far as 1955.

The revelations have triggered a scandal in Britain and prompted a string of public inquiries into how some allegations were not properly investigated while Savile was alive.

"It is now clear that Savile was hiding in plain sight and using his celebrity status and fundraising activity to gain uncontrolled access to vulnerable people across six decades," the police-led report said. "For a variety of reasons the vast majority of his victims did not feel they could speak out and it’s apparent that some of the small number who did had their accounts dismissed by those in authority including parents and carers."

Savile, who raised an estimated $55 million for charity, achieved fame on BBC shows including "Top of the Pops" and "Jim'll Fix It." In 1990, he was given a knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth and received a Papal Knighthood at the Vatican.

The offences span 28 police forces across the U.K. and the scale of his abuse is so vast that the report included a map and an index of the alleged locations.

The number of people Savile victimized "simply beggars belief," Peter Watt, co-author of the report [PDF link] and director of children’s charity NSPCC told ITV News.

"He is without doubt one of the most prolific sex offenders we have ever come across and every number represents a victim that will never get justice now he is dead. But with this report we can at least show his victims that they have been taken seriously and their suffering has been recognized."

In total, more than 450 have people have come forward to police with allegations of abuse involving Savile. Most but not all victims have been interviewed and to date 214 criminal offences have been formally recorded. They included 34 rapes or serious sexual assaults, according to the report. The last incident recorded occurred in 2009. His victims ranged in age from 8 to 47.

The report concluded:

“The details provided by the victims of his abuse paint the picture of a mainly opportunistic individual who used his celebrity status as a powerful tool to coerce or control them, preying on the vulnerable or star-struck for his sexual gratification. Sadly, this type of behavior is not uncommon in any society - sexual abuse, whether in street gangs, though trafficking or within families and institutions, often involves the use of powerful coercion, intimidation and manipulation to exploit the vulnerable."

In a separate development, Britain’s most senior prosecutor apologized to some of the women abused by Savile, revealing that police missed three chances to take him to trial while he was alive.

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said police had been "unjustifiably cautious" investigation four allegations involving girls as young as 14 who said they were abused by Savile in the 1970s.

He said he hoped the organization’s internal review would prove to be a "watershed" moment in the handling of child abuse cases.

In a statement, he said:

"Many people feel that for sexual offences, where it is 'one person's word against another's' and there is no or little scientific or other evidence to support the allegation, no prosecution should be brought. But this is to ignore the reality of many sexual offences which, by their nature, do not usually take place in front of witnesses and result in no meaningful scientific evidence. Taking a cautious approach to all complainants, on the ground that some might be making a false allegation of a sexual offence, can have the consequence that a prosecution for a true complaint may not take place."

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Report: Pop star arrested in connection with Savile abuse case

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LONDON —Towering 800 feet above the U.K. capital, The View from The Shard provides a unique panoramic perspective of the city and — when the weather is clear – up to 40 miles beyond.

But getting a chance to witness the vista from The Shard, which last year became the tallest building in Western Europe, won't come cheap. When the public viewing gallery atop the London's newest landmark opens on Feb. 1, adult tickets will range from $40 to $160.

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So will anyone be prepared to pay that much for the privilege of looking down on Londoners?

Andy Nyberg, The View's no-nonsense CEO, thinks so. He says visitors are in for an impressive sight — a "tapestry of history" far below. Its first two days have already sold out.

"This is the only place you can see the whole of London at once and, as such, is a natural starting point for exploring the U.K.'s capital," he said. "If we've got the room and if you've got more money than sense – or time – for £100 ($160) you can turn up at the box office and go up immediately. But that's just a pressure valve for people who bang on the desk."

When it is fully fitted-out, the building will include a luxury hotel, restaurants, offices and private apartments totaling more than 31 acres. The architect, Renzo Piano, has described it as a "vertical city."

A pre-booked, timed-entry adult ticket costs £24.95 ($40), a price the operators believe compares favorably with other "fast-track" entrance fees around London.

In comparison, entry to the main observation deck of the Empire State Building, 1,050 feet up on the 86th floor, costs $25. Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower feels like a bargain at less than $18.50 — and its third level observation desk sits 905 feet above Paris.

But unlike the New York or Paris icons, The View from The Shard's operators say the "visitor experience" is more about the city than the building.

'Quirky'
In the entrance hall there was a humorous and irreverent montage of famous faces placed in London landmarks, as well as some of the city's less well-known neighborhoods. The lobby for the high-speed elevators, which whisk visitors skywards at nearly 20 feet per second, was awash with maps and quotations about the city.

"We've been allowed to be quirky by mixing fact and entertainment, but kept plenty of open space for people to enjoy, " Kevin Murphy, development director at Event Communications — the company responsible for bringing the concept to life — said as he looked around the vast viewing gallery on Level 69.

Apart from high-tech interactive telescopes dotted around its edge, the gallery is sparsely decorated, enabling the view to speak for itself.

"We could have three million people a year through here," Murphy added. "But we're not about treating visitors like animals and herding them through."

But although there was space to roam, the novelty of the viewpoint soon wore thin — at least on a cloudy January morning, with visibility limited to around four miles.

The London landmarks nearby, such as St Paul's Cathedral and Tower Bridge, were distinctive enough, and following the course of the River Thames as it weaved its way eastwards to the sea was intriguing. But after playing "Can I see your house from here?" and counting buses, there was little to hold the attention.

Even climbing up to Level 72, the partially open-air gallery at 800 feet, the narrowness of the city's streets kept many landmarks out of view. And when standing so close to the jagged pinnacle at the top of The Shard, the impression gained at a distance of broken glass simply disappeared.

There were two novelties that caught the eye at the summit: The highest — and probably smallest — gift shop in London; and the view from the restroom.

After all, who needs bathroom curtains 800 feet up?

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Europe's new tallest building: An 'iceberg' in heart of London or titanic $2.35B folly

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LONDON — A note written in code that was found on the skeleton of a carrier pigeon dating from World War II has been cracked, according to a Canadian history enthusiast.

Originally discovered in November, the message was enclosed in a red canister attached to the leg bone of the carrier pigeon. David Martin found the pigeon in the chimney of his home in Surrey, England.

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The U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), one of Britain’s three national intelligence agencies, said at the time that the handwritten message “cannot be decoded without access to the original cryptographic material.”

But Gordon Young, from Peterborough, Ontario, set his mind to deciphering the message using his great-uncle’s World War I code book.

"It follows same sort of code they used in the first war," Young told NBC News. "I’m not saying my note is perfect, but I am saying the code is crackable and this one is pretty close."

Experts: Unbreakable code message found on WWII carrier pigeon

It took Young, the editor of a local volunteer history group, 17 minutes to understand the message, which consists of 25 five-letter code groups.

He believes that the message was sent one afternoon in 1944, not long after the Allied landing at Normandy. It was written by an officer who was dropped behind enemy lines, confirming an earlier lunch-time note he sent giving the map coordinates of the Germans’ guns and tanks. It also confirmed that several units of American and British troops had finally met up.

In addition to using his uncle’s code book, Young double checked with infantry maps online to confirm his hypotheses.

Retirement home bands together to bring WWII stories to life

"To really understand the exact circumstances of the note, we would need access to British and American war diaries from the time," he said.

'Impossible to verify'
Despite Young’s translation, the GCHQ still maintains that without the original codebooks the note is indecipherable.

“We stand by our press notice of 22 November 2012 in that without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, the message will remain impossible to decrypt,” a spokesman for the GCHQ told NBC News in an emailed statement. “Similarly it is also impossible to verify any proposed solutions, but those put forward without reference to the original cryptographic material are unlikely to be correct.”

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The pigeon is thought to have been part of a flock of 250,000 that were used to carry messages between the European front and Britain during World War II.

"I am hoping that this will stir up some interest in the bravery of the men who were dropped on the battlefield," said Young.

"Imagine a guy dropping down behind enemy lines with crates of pigeons and a couple of bags of feed. How they didn’t get caught is amazing. It wasn't like today where there are unmanned drones. These guys were risking their lives," he added.

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