It was 7.45am on June 30 last year when the senior, longstanding broker for PVM Oil Futures was contacted by an admin clerk querying why he'd bought 7 million barrels of crude in the middle of the night. The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades.

By 10 am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a "drunken blackout". Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2 am - the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

By the time PVM realised the trades were not authorised and swiftly began to unwind the positions, losses of exactly $9,763,252 had stacked up. According to the regulator, Mr Perkins first started trading irregularly the day before the enormous price spike. He had been drinking heavily over the weekend at a PVM golf event and was returning to a day off work.

The investigation shows that he was able to trade huge volumes with very little cash up front and no position limit, exposing how it easy it was for a single British broker on a bender to cause chaos in the oil market.

Most economists believe the housing market will cool in the second half of this year as Britain's economy struggles to recover after an 18-month recession as the government tackles a record budget deficit of around 11 per cent of national output. The slowing of the property market, combined with signs of consumer retrenchment across the globe, have raised fears of a "double-dip" in the economy.

The FTSE yesterday dropped below the crucial 5,000 mark, hitting its lowest level in 10 months, on concerns the recovery may be faltering. However Martin Gahbauer, Nationwide's chief economist, said part of the housing slowdown could be due to an increase in the number of homes on the market, "perhaps in response to the abolition of HIPs in the opening days of the new coalition government".

"I'm not going to pretend a faith I don't feel," she said. Ms Gillard's views on religion are in stark contrast to those of Mr Rudd, who was a regular at Canberra church services, and those of her rival, Tony Abbott, who once trained as a priest and is known as a devout Catholic.

Since taking over from Mr Rudd and becoming the country's first female prime minister, Ms Gillard has presided over a lift in the polls for the Labour government. It has since been rumoured that Ms Gillard may consider calling an election within the next two months to capitalise on her early popularity.

Hurricane Alex is the first of the Atlantic season. It has strengthened to a category 1 hurricane and is expected to make landfall near the Texas-Mexico border late on Wednesday. Tens of thousands of barrels of oil have leaked every day since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank in April.

A containment cap placed over the leaking pipe is collecting up to 25,000 barrels a day and sending it to two surface ships. And a relief well being drilled to staunch the flow is on target to be finished by early August, a senior BP executive has said. Before it became a hurricane, ripple effects from what was Tropical Storm Alex created six-foot (1.8m) waves, according to the National Weather Service in New Orleans.

Skimming ships returned to shore in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama, as gusts and high waves made the procedure unsafe. Officials were also forced to move barges that had been preventing oil from reaching sensitive wetlands. The hurricane comes as US Vice-President Joe Biden is visiting Gulf coast officials and residents. Forecasters say Alex will bring six to 12 inches (15-30cm) of rain to northeastern Mexico and southern Texas.

The US state department has announced it has accepted additional offers of assistance from 12 countries and international organisations to help clean up and contain the spill.

More than 51 per cent of Germans want to axe the euro after widespread fury that Germany's taxpayers have been forced to come to the rescue of Greece and other high spending southern European countries. Only three in 10 people in Europe's largest economy now support the single currency, a flagship of EU integration and Germany's European policy.

The Ipsos opinion poll found that disenchantment was highest, 56 per cent, among Germans over 50, those old enough to remember repeated promises that Germany would never have to bail-out other countries as the price of the euro. Previous EU polls published before the Greek debt crisis showed two thirds of Germans in favour of the euro, with only 29 per cent against.

"At last the German people are waking up to the fact that they have been deceived on a massive scale by their own politicians and by the EU," said Lord Pearson, the leader of Ukip. "The speed of the change of opinion is remarkable but will be devastating to the political elite, both in Berlin and in Brussels."

Papandreou, whose union-backed Pasok party prevailed in elections last October, has reduced wages for state workers, trimmed some retirement benefits, and raised sales, fuel and alcohol taxes. The 58-year-old argues the measures, to tame a budget deficit of 13.6 percent of economic output, are needed to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts.

Greek pensioners on average live on 96 percent of the salary they had when they worked, more than twice the proportion of earnings as Germans, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based group called the system a "fiscal time bomb."

Companies are prevented from dismissing any more than 2 percent of their workforce in any given month, just as the Greek economy is mired in its first recession since 1993. "It's the usual routine," said Elina Zaroulia, 25, who does fashion public relations for Hugo Boss in Athens and didn't join strikers today. "Protesters, banners, slogans, but if you work in the private sector you go to work, it's the way it is and definitely now that it is a time of crisis."

The order that caused the slump, 8,820 shares of Citigroup that crossed for $3.3174 at 1:03:51 p..in New York, was cancelled, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The stock changed hands for $3.80 when trading resumed, compared with yesterday's close of $4, as US stocks posted the biggest losses in three weeks.

Regulators are seeking to prevent declines in one or more securities from causing volatility to snowball, prompting a cascade of losses across markets. During the May 6 rout that erased $862 billion in value from US equities in less than 20 minutes, ETFs and companies such as Accenture Plc fell as much as 99 percent. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission said the plunge may have been fueled by curbs that applied on some venues and not others.

"It's great that the circuit breaker picked it up and stopped everything, but how is an order that size allowed to print so far below where it's trading?" said Alec Levine, an options strategist at Wallachbeth Capital LLC in New York. "If you did that for every stock you could effectively shut down the stock market."

Investors shied away from riskier assets amid worries over faltering growth in China and a far worse than expected plunge in US consumer confidence during May. The Footsie was off 144.1 points at 4927.3 following the data - with every single blue-chip stock in the red - as Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average also plunged more than 2 per cent in early trading.

The effect of European austerity plans on economic growth added to the negative mix as the Dax in Germany and France's Cac 40 both fell more than 3 per cent.

The euro was also at a 19-month low against the pound, with sterling steady at 1.50 against the dollar.

As well as heavy falls for minors, under-pressure BP shares were back near last week's 14-year low after dropping 7.95p to 300.3p. Royal Dutch Shell dropped 58.5p to 1633p. Barclays was the leading top-flight faller with a 6 per cent or 18.1p slide to 267.3p as the stock continued to suffer following yesterday's rating downgrade from Nomura.

The Budget also tells us that, having not had a pay rise since 1990, the Queen cannot be given the additional 7 million pounds she desperately needs to cover her household's expenses. With Government debt still rising, according to the Taxpayers' Alliance, by 18.6 million pounds an hour, it takes only 22 minutes for it to exceed the 7 million pounds we cannot afford to give the Queen.

According to the Pink Book, we hand over 15 billion pounds yearly to the EU, so we are giving 7 million pounds to Brussels every four hours. In two years' time, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, the Queen's cash reserves, we are told, will run out - while the Government continues to receive 226 million pounds a year from the Royal Estates.

Half of the 440 chief executives and heads of banks questioned say there is a greater than 50 percent chance of one or more countries leaving the eurozone by 2013. More than a third (36 percent) see at least a 25 percent chance of a complete breakup over the same period. Germany is perceived as the fifth most likely country to pull out, which the article notes may reflect the respondents' concern that Berlin may lose confidence in monetary union if the crisis continues.

Saturday's Guardian reported that, in its first major test, Greece will next month launch its first debt sale since it was forced to accept a 110 billion euros (90 billion pounds) bailout in May.

In the FT Wolfgang Munchau argues that the "eurozone will need to commit itself to a full-blown fiscal union and proper political institutions that give binding macroeconomic instructions to member states for budgetary policy, financial policy and structural policies."

He said the European human rights judges who have repeatedly overturned laws set by Parliament would 'benefit' from understanding that legal rights can be achieved in different ways. The rebuke from Lord Neuberger, who is the leading civil law judge in England, is the second high-level judicial criticism of the Strasbourg court this year.

The head of the judiciary, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, said in April that the French-based rights body was threatening to 'assume an unspoken priority' over English common law. It indicates deepening unease among judges at the willingness of European judges to intrude into and overrule Parliamentary and British court decisions. Lord Neuberger rebuked Strasbourg in a lecture to lawyers about the 'incoming tide' of European law.

Lord Neuberger called for a 'dialogue' between Strasbourg and London which, he said, 'will require a more robust approach by our courts through their judgments to explain the common law position and exactly how and why it sets out a perfectly consistent means of facilitating the rule of law and protecting fundamental rights.'

George Osborne attempted to address the issue in last week's Budget, with plans to close the deficit - the shortfall between tax revenue and public spending - by 2014/2015. As a result, the volume of gilts to be issued this year has been reduced by 20 billion to 165 billion pounds, following last year's record 227 billion pounds.

Mr Moulton believes a sovereign debt crisis elsewhere would spill over to the UK as investors lose their appetite for government bonds. "There is so much sovereign debt out there that it's a real problem," he said. "It doesn't have to be a UK failure but one or two others would quickly infect the UK."

He described the global system as a "giant experiment". "Everyone is running deficits, everyone's debt is at high levels," he said. "There are lots of low probability events that add up to a decent probability in total... I reckon there's a one in three shot of a rate rise during the course of this year." Economists expect the Bank of England to start raising rates, currently at 0.5 per cent, at the end of this year and to stop at 2 per cent in late 2011. However, Bank policymaker Andrew Sentance has already called for a rate rise this month.

While it may seem far-fetched to worry about the future of one of the world's largest currencies, the wealthy speculator George Soros expressed doubts last week and several other commentators have done so earlier.

All euros are backed by the European Central Bank but the serial numbers prefixed with X may be regarded as most secure because they are issued by Germany. N is also a good prefix, because these come from Austria. P, L, U and Z prefixes may also be favoured because these are issued by the authorities in Holland, Finland, France and Belgium. If you share widespread fears that the euro cannot last in its present form, you might want to avoid notes with the prefixes F, G, M, S, T or Y. These are issued by Malta, Cyprus, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Greece.

Here and now, in a long-planned move to make life difficult for forgers, about 150 million British 20-pound-notes with a picture of Edward Elgar will be replaced as legal tender on Thursday, July 1, by notes with a picture of Adam Smith. When the change was first announced during the last Labour government, I noted how apt it was that Gordon Brown should replace a great English composer with a Scots tax collector - for that was Smith's day job before he became an economist.

The transition will no doubt be smooth and the Bank of England says it will continue to honour all the notes it has issued. Let's hope the same can be said of the European Central Bank and all its euros.

Over the past five years, it's averaged 6,000 square miles. The prediction comes from measurements of nutrient flows in the Mississippi River, which pours farm waste into the Gulf. Those nutrients stimulate excessive growth of algae that is broken down by oxygen-sucking bacteria.

University of Michigan ecologist Donald Scavia says the BP spill could make the dead zone larger because microbes gobble oxygen when consuming oil. But the effect could be offset if the oil limits algae growth.

"People from all walks of life - mostly young women - come here asking for prayers that can solve their problems," says YaAli sitting on a chair in a crumbly old alley in Tehran. Stroking his white beard, YaAli - a nickname he has been given by his customers - explains how each prayer must be used in its own specific way.

"There are lots of methods depending on the problems. Some prayers (written on a piece of paper) should be burned and some should be put in a bowl of water. You should follow the instructions." According to Islam, prayers have a divine source and make a spiritual connection between God and his servants. Those who have the right religious knowledge can write prayers for others to help them obtain better results.

Iran's clerics also believe in the power of prayer but they advise people against using prayers that lack a religious basis. Magic and superstition are both illegal under Islamic law. "Writing prayers quoting Shia's immaculate Imams and receiving money for that has no legal obstacle," said Grand Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpaygani when asked about the religious legitimacy of the prayer sellers.