There were only 145 cases in the first six years of the warrant system. This means that one in four Britons sent overseas to face criminal charges since 2004 went last year. Serious concerns have emerged that the warrants are being used to extradite individuals accused of minor offences; Polish authorities have used them to pursue suspects accused of exceeding their overdraft limit or not paying for dessert.

The statistics on their use emerged ahead of a key Commons vote on Britain's lopsided extradition arrangements. Some 1,173 people, including both Britons and Europeans, were sent from the UK for trial last year compared with 699 in 2009/10, and just 178 in 2006/7. Tory MP Dominic Raab said last night: 'We've seen too many innocent British citizens go through the ordeal of extradition, not to mention appalling prison conditions, just to duck this issue. We need reform, and that includes re-negotiation of the European Arrest Warrant.'

The 24-hour walkout by two million workers is being staged amid union fury over plans to reform pensions which will involve members working longer and having to pay more. It is the biggest strike for over 30 years, with schools, hospitals, courts, transport and government all set to be hit by the walkout. But Mr Cameron told the House of Commons: 'So far the evidence would suggest that 40 per cent of schools are open.' He also said the country had full ambulance service cover and that just 18 out of 900 job centres were closed.

Making a Commons statement on the latest effects of today's action, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said that, as of 11am, 135,000 civil servants - less than a third - were on strike. He added: 'Most civil servants are going to work today as normal. We put in place rigorous contingency plans to ensure that, so far as possible, essential public services are maintained during such periods of industrial action. Only 16 of the 930 job centres are closed to the public.'

The euro and European shares surged on the news, which came after euro zone finance ministers agreed to ramp up the firepower of their bailout fund but acknowledged they may have to turn to the International Monetary Fund for more help. In a related move, Italy's central bank started emergency cash tenders for banks which have been squeezed particularly hard in recent weeks as Rome's borrowing costs have soared towards 8 percent, a level seen as unaffordable in the long term.

"We are now entering the critical period of 10 days to complete and conclude the crisis response of the European Union," Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said as EU finance ministers met.

Preparations have already been made for Ernst Uhrlau's retirement party next Wednesday when he steps down from his post as the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, on his 65th birthday. The office of the chancellor has selected a posh location in Berlin for his farewell party and Angela Merkel herself is expected to attend. Uhrlau, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), will be turning over his post to Gerhard Schindler, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party.

At events like this, the successes of the person retiring are usually celebrated. In Uhrlau's case, topping the list are his efforts to review the problematic history of the BND's creation after World War II. It has long been known that around 10 percent of the employees at the BND and its predecessor organization once served under SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany. In 2011, Uhrlau appointed an independent commission of historians to research the agency's Nazi roots.

Now, only one week before Uhrlau's retirement, the commission has uncovered what is a true historical scandal. The researchers have found that the BND destroyed the personnel files of around 250 BND officials in 2007. The agency has confirmed that this happened. The commission claims that the destroyed documents include papers on people who were "in significant intelligence positions in the SS, the SD (the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party) or the Gestapo." They added that some of the individuals had even been investigated after 1945 for possible war crimes. Historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke, spokesman for the commission, told Spiegel Online he was "somewhat stunned" by the occurrence.

The UK is also being "closely" consulted on the matter, the article said. The Sunday edition of the paper had reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are involved in secret talks on creating a tighter fiscal union with the euro-area, a club of the 'super-Europeans' willing to abide by the strict budget discipline proscribed by Berlin. An intergovernmental treaty, modelled on the one for the border-free Schengen area, would be signed by those willing to partake in this kind of set-up, not necessarily all 17 euro-states.

In what looks like a major shift by Merkel, the plans suggest that the European Central Bank would have a stronger role in rescuing countries. The Welt am Sonntag's report suggests the chancellor is willing to soften its position on ECB lending after Berlin last week was unable to auction a third of its long-term bonds, suggesting Germany is also at risk of being sucked into the crisis.

Another possible plan would see a speeding up of the creation of the eurozone's permanent bail-out fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), currently planned for mid-2013. The ECB could lend to the ESM, which in turn would prop up troubled countries and circumvent Germany's concerns about the central bank's independence.

Downgrades can increase banks' borrowing costs and put further pressure on their shaky finances. However, it upgraded ratings on two Chinese banks, Bank of China Ltd and China Construction Bank Corp. S&P said its move reflects new criteria for banks, based on changes in market trends and government support. Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup had long-term ratings downgraded to A- from A.

Morgan Stanley, Barclays, HSBC, Commerzbank, and UBS also had ratings cut by one notch, according to S&P's statement. S&P's move hit the shares of US banks in after-hours trading on Wall Street, with Goldman Sachs down 1% Morgan Stanley down 1.7%. Ratings for several big European banks, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche, ING and Societe Generale were unchanged.

Unions object to government plans to make their members pay more and work longer to earn their pensions. Speaking from Brussels, Chancellor George Osborne told BBC Breakfast: "The strike is not going to achieve anything, it's not going to change anything. It is only going to make our economy weaker and potentially cost jobs. So let's get back round the negotiating table, let's get a pension deal that is fair to the public sector, that gives decent pensions for many, many decades to come but which this county can also afford and our taxpayers can afford".

"That is what we should be doing today, not seeing these strikes." He added that without making difficult choices about dealing with the UK's debts the country "would be bankrupt". Shadow chancellor Ed Balls told BBC Breakfast the pensions row should have been resolved by the government. "They didn't and that is why we are in this situation," he said.

On Tuesday night, shadow chief secretary of the treasury, Rachel Reeves, told BBC's Newsnight that Labour did not support the industrial action. "We do not support the strike because a strike is a sign of failure," she said. Earlier on Tuesday, union leaders reacted angrily to Mr Osborne's Autumn Statement announcements of a public sector pay cap of 1% for two years, as well as bringing forward to 2026 the rise in the state pension age to 67. The strike was "irresponsible and reckless", said John Longworth, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce. He added: "Trade unions are living in a bubble and ignoring the fact that Britain has to make its way in a competitive world."

The warning signs are mounting, and fresh news is adding to the gloom every day. Britain's financial watchdog has instructed banks to brace for a possible break-up of the euro zone. British currency trader CLS Bank is reportedly conducting stress tests to prepare for this worst-case scenario. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski made a dramatic appeal to Germany on Monday to prevent a collapse of the currency union, saying: "We are standing on the edge of a precipice."

German investors are jettisoning derivatives on a large scale because they have lost confidence in the instruments. For the first time, it appears, people across Europe regard the downfall of the euro as a real possibility. Is it really for the first time, though? In fact, scenarios for the euro's breakup are older than the currency itself. At the end of 1998, Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott published a paper called "When the Euro Falls Apart." He put the chances of the euro failing at around 10 percent.

Today, that's a real prospect. According to Mark Cliffe, the chief economist of ING Bank, "even the most ardent euro admirer must concede that the probability of countries leaving or the breakup of the euro zone is no longer zero."

He made clear, however, that he believes the current policy stance is appropriate. With its usual economic lever of interest rates already pressed close to zero and its balance sheet triple the size of its pre-crisis norm, the central bank has been considering how it can better use communications as a policy tool. The Fed has been debating for months ways to provide more clarity on when it might eventually tighten monetary policy, although officials have differed on how best to proceed.

Yellen said turmoil in financial markets stemming from both Europe's banking crisis and general uncertainty about the outlook had increased the risks to the global economy, and that the Fed could offer additional support to US growth. "The scope remains to provide additional accommodation through enhanced guidance on the path of the federal funds rate or through additional purchases of long-term financial assets," she told a conference sponsored by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.

The NATO airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers over the weekend in an apparent case of mistaken identity, the Associated Press has learned. A joint US-Afghan patrol was attacked by the Taliban early Saturday morning. While pursuing the enemy in the poorly marked border area, the patrol seems to have mistaken one of the Pakistan troop outposts for a militant encampment and called in a NATO gunship and attack helicopters to open fire.

US officials say the reports suggest the Taliban may have deliberately tried to provoke a cross-border firefight that would set back fragile partnerships between the US and NATO forces and Pakistani soldiers at the ill-defined border. Officials described the records on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters. The incident has sent the perpetually difficult US-Pakistan relationship into a tailspin.

Among the previously taboo ideas being mentioned today are: countries ceding fiscal sovereignty to a central authority; some sort of elite group of euro nations that would guarantee one another's loans but require strong fiscal discipline from anyone seeking membership. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her support today for changes to Europe's current treaties in order to create a fiscal union. "Our priority is to have the whole of the euro zone to be placed on a stronger treaty basis," Merkel said today in Berlin. "This is what we have devoted all of our efforts to; this is what I'm concentrating on in all of the talks with my counterparts."

Merkel acknowledged that changing the treaties won't be an easy task, as not all of the European Union's 27 member states "are enthusiastic about it." However, she dismissed reports that said the 17-nation single-currency bloc might go it alone with a swifter treaty between governments.

With the entire global community relying upon Europe's survival, aggressive action has become a matter of extreme urgency, as euro zone governments have 638 billion euros in past debts coming due in 2012, of which 40% needs to be refinanced in the first four months of the year, according to Barclays Capital. Recent debt auctions have seen yields climbing in some of the euro zone's largest economies, including Italy, where yields shot up Tuesday to above 7%, an unsustainable level on par with rates that forced Greece, Portugal, and Ireland to seek bailouts.

But activists such as Oxford Professor Baroness Greenfield have often presented little science to back up their allegations. However, extensive research into the subject has now provided worrying results that support her claims. 'Screen technologies cause high arousal which in turn activates the brain system's underlying addiction,' the neurologist said last month in an attack that accused games of causing 'dementia' in children.

'This results in the attraction of yet more screen-based activity.' And now the first genuinely scientific attempt to analyse the emotive subject has thrown up astonishing results that suggest she is right. Differences in brain activity between young men who played violent games and ones who didn't were visible in a randomly assigned sample in just one week.

A presentation at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America told how MRI scans were used to analyse the effects of playing violent videogames on brain activity. After one week, the 'gamers' showed less activity in certain regions of the brain when they were scanned.'

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that 21.6 million of the 44.9 million adults who live in England and Wales are married - 48.4 per cent of the population. The number of those who have never tied the knot has doubled since the 1970s. The statistics also highlight the rise of the so-called freemale, revealing that almost one in three women have never wed.

Nearly eight million women live the single life or opt for informal cohabiting relationships rather than have a husband and family. The ONS said many of the freemales were women in their 20s and 30s, who have achieved a better standard of education than boys and have gone on in ever greater numbers to pursue careers.

Cohabitation is fuelling the destruction of the family while separations and divorces have brought suffering and loneliness, the Vatican said yesterday. It declared that Catholic couples should not set up home together before marriage.

British diplomatic staff ran for safety and locked themselves in their offices and homes, with one group of about a dozen pinned down by the crowd while others were jostled, although there were no serious injuries. The crowd ripped the gilded UK crest off the embassy, pulled down the union flag and replaced it with the Iranian one, and threw satellite dishes off the roofs of embassy buildings. They also smashed windows and scattered thousands of papers in the street in front of the embassy, where British, US and Israeli flags were set alight.

At the Qolhak compound, a crowd roamed the wooded site where embassy staff live in flats and bungalows set among the trees, complicating the Foreign Office's efforts to confirm their safety.

Speculation about AMR's financial position surfaced in recent weeks after cost-cutting negotiations failed. AMR said agreements with its workforce forced it to spend $600 million (384 million pounds) more than other airlines on staff costs. The airline employs 78,000 staff worldwide and operates out of five major US hubs. Chapter 11 refers to a section of the US Bankruptcy Code. It protects a company from its creditors, giving it time to reorganise its debts or sell parts of the business.

American Airlines was the only one of the major US airlines operating international routes not to file for bankruptcy after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Its competitors have successfully used bankruptcy to restructure their labour contracts and cut costs. Mr Horton said the board had unanimously decided to file for bankruptcy on Monday night. He announced that American would be looking to change its employees' terms and conditions. "We plan to initiate further negotiations with all of our unions to reduce our labour costs to competitive levels," he said.

David Bates, president of the Allied Pilots Association conceded that employment terms would change. "The 18-month timeline allotted for restructuring will almost certainly involve significant changes to the airline's business plan and to our contract." American Airlines was the world's biggest airline three years ago but has since fallen behind Delta and United after they bought out other airlines. Delta filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and United was one of the first to do so in 2002. Unlike other major US airlines, AA has not returned to profit in the last two years.