"The greatest moral issue of our time isn't abortion, it's robbing our next generation of opportunity," Coburn told reporters at a breakfast meeting Thursday at the National Press Club. "You're going to save a child from being aborted so they can be born into a debtor's prison?"

The state's governor has called on anyone who owns a seafaring vessel to help free the 300,000 people believed to be trapped in their homes. "We have lost 100% of our crops and 70% of the state is under water," he said.

Rescuers have also been using helicopters to try to reach people stranded on rooftops. The heavy rains began at the weekend, forcing rivers to burst their banks in the largely low-lying state. "We are just like New Orleans," Tabasco governor Andres Granier said. "All the water that comes in has to be pumped out."

Flooding has also affected the southern state of Chiapas, where several thousand people have been moved to safety, Mexico's El Universal newspaper reported.

The action comes one day after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and all but one of his central bank colleagues voted to slice a key interest rate for the second time in six weeks to protect the economy from the ill effects of collapse in the housing market, aggravated by the credit troubles.

The cash injection also came as Wall Street took a nosedive Thursday. The Dow Jones industrials were down more than 260 points in afternoon trading.

The Fed on Wednesday ordered its key rate, called the federal funds rate, to be lowered by one-quarter percentage point to 4.50 percent. That followed up on a bolder, half-percentage point cut in September. Those two rate reductions might be sufficient to help the economy make its way safely through trouble spots, Fed policymakers indicated.

Up to 10,000 hourly jobs will be cut next year while at least 1,000 salaried positions are also expected to be lost. The layoffs come on top of 13,000 jobs that Chrysler - bought by Cerberus in August - is already shedding.
Chrysler said market conditions had worsened since the buyout and it needed to reduce costs more aggressively.

The firm is scrapping all overtime for hourly and salaried workers while the number of contract workers will be reduced by more than a third. Chrysler said it expected sales this year to be "significantly lower" than previously thought and that this slump would continue in 2008.

Halloween is being forced underground because it "includes religious elements, the cult of death, the mockery of death," a spokesman for the city's education department Alexander Gavrilov said on Wednesday.
"It's not an attempt to block the celebration of this holiday completely, just in schools and colleges," he added.

Pumpkins and images of witches are widespread across Russia, with many bars organizing special fancy dress parties, despite the efforts of the Kremlin and especially the Russian Orthodox Church to curb enthusiasm for non-native festivities.

"This is destructive for the minds and the spiritual and moral health of pupils," said Gavrilov, saying the ban had been recommended by psychiatrists.

The World Cancer Research Fund says the evidence is now strong enough for it to recommend that people stop eating all processed meats, whether they have been smoked, cured, salted or preserved with chemicals. The report, which looks at thousands of scientific papers and has taken five years to compile, provides an exhaustive guide to trying to reduce your risks of getting cancer.

The report, Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer, says processed meats are a convincing cause of colorectal cancer and there is no level of intake that can "confidently" be shown not to raise the cancer risk. Processed meats are also thought to bring about an increased risk of cancers of the oesophagus, lung, stomach and prostate.

As well as bacon and ham, the report mentions pastrami, salami, sausages and hotdogs in its definition of processed meats.

Australia is in its sixth year of severe drought and most towns and cities have imposed strict limits on household water use, prompting a rise in suburban arguments and neighbors informing authorities about those who waste water.

In the latest incident, police said 66-year-old Ken Proctor was using a hose to water the front lawn of his suburban Sydney home when a man walking past made a remark about water waste. Proctor then turned the hose on the passer by, prompting a fight. He was knocked the ground and was punched and kicked. He was treated by ambulance officers, but died later in hospital.

Authorities said Proctor was not in breach of water restrictions, as he was using a hand-held hose and was watering his lawn on his allocated day. A 36-year-old man charged with Proctor's murder appeared briefly in a Sydney court on Thursday. He was denied bail and will remain in jail until his next court appearance on November 15.

Most of Australia, apart from parts of the island state of Tasmania and towns in the tropical north, have banned garden sprinklers, made it illegal to hose down cars and pavements, and allow gardens only to be watered on set days.

The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank. The result is that anyone looking in the direction of the vehicle only sees what is beyond it and not the tank itself.

A soldier, who was at the trials, said: "This technology is incredible. If I hadn't been present I wouldn't have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun."

With the U.S. Federal Reserve expected to deliver its second official interest rate cut in less than six weeks on Wednesday -- less than three months after it declared inflation to be its predominant concern -- financial markets are growing sceptical. And questions about how much sway the world's most influential central bank may be losing over its banking system are infecting its leading counterparts across the globe too.

Thomas Mayer, chief European economist at Deutsche Bank, says "Even if you believe the leading central banks are still in charge the dilemma they face is - THERE IS NO NICE, MIDDLE WAY." Central banks have to choose between tolerating higher inflation in return for helping debtor's honour nominal debts or forcing creditors into write-offs that would see asset prices slump and recession ensue. As they seem to be choosing the former, markets are wary.

Helping debtors repay is one thing, but if inflation erodes the value of those repayments, creditors will demand a price that will lead to higher borrowing costs. "If financial markets wake up to rising inflation -- then we have a problem," said Mayer.

However, the government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has said it would try to pass new legislation to allow a more limited mission. Japan has refuelled coalition warships in the Indian Ocean since 2001. "The government will make its utmost effort to resume an important mission in the Indian Ocean," chief Cabinet spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said.

The US ambassador to Japan, Thomas Schieffer, said a permanent withdrawal would send a very bad message to the international community and terrorists.

The ships involved - a destroyer and a refueller, with 340 troops - are to head for Japan later on Thursday. They last refuelled a ship on Monday. Japan's mission has been dogged by allegations that Japan supplied far more fuel to US forces than officially recorded - encouraging speculation that Tokyo might have helped supply the US war in Iraq, not just its operations in Afghanistan.

Japan's constitution forbids it from fighting other nations, but the government has recently tried to revise it to allow for a more robust defence policy.

Members of the church - based in Topeka, Kansas - have denounced homosexuality for years, initially targeting the funerals of Aids victims. But they later extended their pickets to the funerals of soldiers, who they say are being punished by God because of the US' tolerance of homosexuality .

US light crude rose as high as $96.24 in Asian trading on Thursday morning before falling back to $96.05. Traders were concerned by a second weekly fall in US crude stockpiles ahead of the intensive winter period. The US Federal Reserve's decision to cut interest rates to 4.5% also helped to drive prices higher.

An array of factors has been driving oil prices higher. Oil prices have risen as the sliding greenback makes oil, which is priced in dollars, cheaper to buy outside the US. The dollar hit its weakest levels against the pound since 1981 on Wednesday. At the same time, oil investors have been casting a nervous eye on Turkey's threats to carry out a major military incursion into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebels.

In past months, there have also been concerns about the stop-start violence in Nigeria's main oil producing region, the international community's unresolved nuclear dispute with Iran and heating supplies for the US winter. Mexico was forced to halt one-fifth of oil production at the start of the week by a tropical storm hitting its Caribbean coast, sparking further supply fears, but it now expects to resume full production by Wednesday. Some analysts expect crude prices to hit $100 a barrel before the end of the year.

The parties have agreed to settlement terms. Morgan Stanley will pay several million dollars and promises to revise their precious metals storage processes. However, there is no admission of any wrongdoing.

THE ISSUE SPECIFICALLY CONCERNS WHETHER MORGAN STANLEY AND MANY OTHER LARGE FINANCIAL ORGANIZATIONS WHO CLAIM TO HOLD AND STORE SILVER FOR THEIR CUSTOMERS, ACTUALLY POSSESS THE SILVER. By not actually buying and storing the real metal to back the customers' purchase, financial firms can greatly enhance their bottom line profits through the free use of the customers' funds.

I have long maintained and written that there are two types of silver when it comes to professional storage, real SILVER AND PAPER SILVER; cold hard metal versus imaginary or make-believe silver.

Most stored silver is in 1000-ounce bars, and they are always identified with SERIAL NUMBERS and a specific weight. If an investor was concerned, all he or she had to do was request the serial numbers and specific weights of the bars they owned.

A reader, who held silver in 1000 oz bars, requested Morgan Stanley provide him with the serial numbers and weights of his bars, on which he had paid storage and insurance fees for many years. He was given the run-around and not the serial numbers and weights. I am aware of this through e-mail exchanges with him. I told him that the only plausible reason they wouldn't give him the information was because the bars did not exist. He contacted a lawyer and that ultimately resulted in the class-action settlement, after years of legal wrangling.

I FOUND IT APPALLING THAT MORGAN STANLEY WOULD CLAIM TO STORE SILVER THAT DIDN'T EXIST AND EVEN HAVE THE CHUTZPAH TO CHARGE FOR THE STORAGE. THAT WOULD APPEAR TO BE A CLEAR CASE OF FRAUD. I am even more appalled that the judge in the case, or any government regulator, would look the other way.

Morgan Stanley's actions were not in any way unique in this practice. In fact, in the court documents summarizing the proposed settlement, one of Morgan Stanley's defenses was that they were not doing anything unusual by charging storage on metal that didn't exist, as THIS IS A WIDESPREAD INDUSTRY PRACTICE.

IF YOU OR I ARRANGED TO DO WHAT HUNDREDS OF WORLD FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS HAVE DONE, WE WOULD QUICKLY BE PUT IN JAIL, AS IT IS FRAUD, PURE AND SIMPLE.

They say that unless the technology advances much faster than the market is managing on its own, solar cells will play only a marginal role in limiting the buildup of "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

The greatest growth in emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas linked to recent global warming, is coming from China's rapidly growing use of coal to power the very industrial economy that is churning out the solar panels to sell overseas.

By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack -- the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water -- seems to be a more modest worry.

But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government's pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years.

Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. "There's a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster," Chu said, "and that's in the best scenario."