And it is a scandal that goes back to 2006, when the Labour government stood idly by while a little-known, family-controlled Spanish construction group called Ferrovial was allowed to buy all of Britain's airports at the knockdown price of 10.3 billion pounds. What's more, the purchase was made despite the firm already having huge debts.

This was just the latest squalid example of a British government selling key parts of this country's infrastructure to foreign buyers. For example, control of our ports passed from one of the nation's great historic companies, P&O, into the hands of Dubai World; and most of our power utilities have been sold to continental giants EDF of France and E.ON of Germany.

The problem with our airports is that the Government is powerless to force the foreign owners to ensure there are the necessary systems to prevent flights being grounded in bad weather. While sensible investment is made in other countries' airports, ministers have been unable to get BAA to buy adequate snow-clearing and de-icing equipment.

Equally culpable is the regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, which has been supine in its refusal to raise any serious objections over Ferrovial's behaviour.

The truth is that the Spanish owners of BAA and its main asset, Heathrow (with annual passenger numbers of more than 66 million) had no experience of running airports, or indeed consumer-orientated businesses, and was only interested in taking advantage of easy credit conditions in order to make quick profits.

"We hope people are aware that interest rates at some point will go up again and that they will head back to a normalised position," he said. Confirming that "normalised" rates would be "around" 5 per cent, he added: "What we need to do is to trigger the mindset in people that that's where rates will eventually go back to."

Mr Fisher's warning follows a stark Bank research paper indicating that more than 7 million homeowners are at risk of rate rises. Two thirds of mortgage borrowers are currently on variable rates, it found, compared with roughly half in a typical year. On current wages, if rates were at 5 per cent, households would be spending more of their disposable income on debt interest than at any time in the past 20 years, the Bank's analysis showed.

According to separate Bank data, variable rate homeowners are paying interest of 3.28 per cent on average compared with 4.34 per cent for those on fixed rates - equating to a 1,600 pounds annual saving on a 150,000 pounds mortgage. Household debt in the UK is 1.45 trillion pounds, of which 1.2 trillion pounds is mortgage borrowing.

Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams said: 'I'm delighted Pope Benedict is sharing his Christmas message with the Radio 4 audience. It's significant that the Pope has chosen Thought For The Day to give his first personally scripted broadcast - and what better time to do so than on the eve of one of the biggest celebrations on the Christian calendar.' The Pope recorded his message at the Vatican today.

Thought For The Day traditionally aims to provide reflection from 'a faith perspective' on topical issues - but BBC insiders said that Friday's address will be a 'warm Christmas message of peace and goodwill'. Recent contributors include the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Director of the Network of Sikh Organisations Indarjit Singh and Professor of Islam Mona Siddiqui.

Despite praising Britain's 'firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society', the world's most powerful religious leader hit out at Harriet Harman's equality agenda, which many in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church say could force them to hire homosexuals or transsexuals. The Pope declared that such legislation has acted 'to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs'.

However, the BBC is attracting criticism for allowing Pope Benedict to 'lecture the nation about morality', particularly after he faced accusations of being personally linked to the continuing child abuse scandals involving Roman Catholic priests and bishops. Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: ' The Pope has a lot of questions to answer about the failings of his church and its guilt in covering up child abuse.'

But in the last few months it has been inundated by ET enthusiasts who believe the Pic de Bugarach, a 4,000ft mountain at whose base the village sits, is an 'alien garage'. According to some, aliens have been biding their time beneath the mountain waiting for end of the world, when they will leave taking some lucky humans with them.

The end date of the ancient Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012, is taken by many to refer to the date of Armageddon when human civilisation will cease to exist. People who have flocked to the French village believe Bugarach is one of several 'sacred mountains' which will be spared from destruction.

Jean-Pierre Delord told The Daily Telegraph: 'If tomorrow 10,000 people turn up, as a village of 200 people we will not be able to cope. I have informed the regional authorities of our concerns and want the army to be at hand if necessary come December 2012.' He added to RTL radio: 'There are already some websites in the US with some people selling tickets for trips to Bugarach.

Mr Delord said people had been coming to the village for the last 10 years after a UFO report by a local man. He said: 'He claimed he had seen aliens and heard the humming of their spacecraft under the mountain.' Nostradamus, the 16th century French apothecary known for apocalyptic prophecies, is believed to have stayed in the area and rumours of mysterious Nazi digs in the area have also surfaced.

DFID had even decided that the risk of money going astray was 'manageable' despite widespread fraud being detected in one educational programme in Kenya. MPs on the influential Public Accounts Committee have now given the department a year to reform. Labour committed the massive 1 billion pounds sum to boost primary education in Africa and Asia every year from 2010-11. The aid department lavished the money on a network of primary schools in 22 countries.

David Cameron's government has gone even further, controversially pledging to increase spending on foreign aid from 7.8 billion pounds per year to 11.5 billion pounds by 2014-15. DFID's newly appointed director of value for money, Liz Ditchburn, said that until new checks were in place, 'we can have little confidence that UK taxpayers' money is securing the fullest benefits for poor people overseas'.

Matthew Sinclair, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'With the Government planning massive rises in international development spending, while ordinary families here are facing tax hikes, it is extremely worrying that in so many instances taxpayers don't seem to be getting value for money. We need to see more of this kind of scrutiny and the Government needs to restrain aid spending so that British families get a better deal.'

North Korea responded to the show of military might by denouncing its richer neighbor as a warmonger, but stopped short of threatening a retaliatory strike as tensions simmered following the North's shelling of a southern island last month. "We had believed patience would ensure peace on this land, but that was not the case," Lee told troops at a forward army unit near the border.

South Korea held a major land drill in the Pocheon region, between Seoul and the heavily armed demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas. It also continued naval live-fire exercises 100 km (60 miles) south of the maritime border with North Korea. The drill, involving a larger scale of firepower and personnel than usual for an exercise at the army training ground, is an indication that Lee wants to show the public Seoul can stand up to the North.

A large contingent of mechanized units operating tanks, three dozen self-propelled artillery, fighter jets and multiple rocket launchers, took part in the live-fire drill just miles from the border with the North. About 800 local residents and children were invited to watch the drill from bleachers set up overlooking a wide valley where the troops aimed firearms.

The display has been opened to the public on previous drills and indicates Seoul's confidence that the North would not attempt to strike at the exercise. The drill ended just under an hour after it began and was described by a Defense Ministry official as intense.

At a time when the US national debt is closing in on 14 trillion dollars, government waste just seems more out of control than ever. The following are 20 of the craziest things that the US government is spending money on:

#1 A total of $3 million has been granted to researchers at the University of California at Irvine so that they can play video games such as World of Warcraft. The goal of this "video game research" is reportedly to study how "emerging forms of communication, including multiplayer computer games and online virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life can help organizations collaborate and compete more effectively in the global marketplace."

#2 The US Department of Agriculture gave the University of New Hampshire $700,000 this year to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#3 $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#4 A professor at Stanford University received $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love. So far one of the key findings of this "research" is that the Internet is a safer and more discreet way to find same-sex partners.

#5 The National Science Foundation spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians "gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions."

#6 The National Institutes of Health spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#7 Approximately $1 million of US taxpayer money was used to create poetry for the Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Chicago zoos. The goal of the "poetry" is to help raise awareness on environmental issues.

#8 The US Department of Veterans Affairs spent $175 million during 2010 to maintain hundreds of buildings that it does not even use. This includes a pink, octagonal monkey house in the city of Dayton, Ohio.

#9 $1.8 million of US taxpayer dollars went for a "museum of neon signs" in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#10 $35 million was reportedly paid out by Medicare to 118 "phantom" medical clinics that never even existed. Apparently these "phantom" medical clinics were established by a network of criminal gangs as a way to defraud the US government.

#11 The Conservation Commission of Monkton, Vermont got $150,000 from the federal government to construct a "critter crossing". Thanks to US government money, the lives of "thousands" of migrating salamanders are now being saved.

#12 In California, one park received $440,000 in federal funds to perform "green energy upgrades" on a building that has not been used for a decade.

#13 $440,955 was spent this past year on an office for former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert that he rarely even visits.

#14 One Tennessee library was given $5,000 in federal funds to host a series of video game parties.

#15 The US Census Bureau spent $2.5 million on a television commercial during the Super Bowl that was so poorly produced that virtually nobody understood what it was trying to say.

#16 A professor at Dartmouth University received $137,530 to create a "recession-themed" video game entitled "Layoff".

#17 The National Science Foundation gave the Minnesota Zoo over $600,000 so that they could develop an online video game called "Wolfquest".

#18 A pizzeria in Iowa was given $60,000 to renovate the pizzeria's facade and give it a more "inviting feel".

#19 The US Department of Agriculture gave one enterprising group of farmers $30,000 to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight "haycations". This one sounds like something that Dwight Schrute would have dreamed up.

#20 Almost unbelievably, the National Institute of Health was given $800,000 in "stimulus funds" to study the impact of a "genital-washing program" on men in South Africa.

Over the last 30 years, the US national debt has gotten 13 times larger. We have accumulated the largest debt in the history of the world and there is no end in sight. In fact, we are rapidly running out of people to borrow money from. According to the Wall Street Journal, in order to repay maturing bonds and finance the exploding budget deficit, the US government will have to borrow 4.2 trillion dollars in 2011. Eventually the rest of the world is going to lose confidence in the ability of the US government to repay all of this debt. Once confidence in US Treasuries is totally gone, and there are already signs this is starting to happen, the game will be over and the US financial system will collapse.

But the US Congress just continues to act like it is "business as usual" and the wasteful spending just continues to get worse. Someday historians will look back and think that we must have been a nation full of idiots and morons. It is almost as if some sort of collective insanity has overtaken most Americans. The path we are on inevitably leads to national bankruptcy and the destruction of our financial system, but only a small percentage of the population seems to care.

Well, in the end we will reap what we have sown. Unfortunately, the economic pain that is coming is going to be devastating for all of us - including those of us who are awake and are trying desperately to change things.

Even the debt of some of our biggest state governments, such as Illinois and California, is essentially considered to be "junk" at this point. There are literally hundreds of governmental financial implosions happening in slow motion from coast to coast, and up to this point not a lot of people in the mainstream media have been talking about it.

State and local governments across the United States are facing a complete and total financial nightmare. Unlike the federal government, state and local governments cannot just ask the Federal Reserve to print up endless amounts of cash. If state and local governments want to spend more than they bring in, they must borrow it from investors. If the municipal bond market crashes, and investors around the world are no longer willing to hand over gigantic sacks of cash to state and local governments in the United States, then the game is over. Either state and local governments will have to raise taxes or they will have to start spending within their means.

America used to be viewed as the land of great economic progress, but that is no longer the case. Sadly, all over the United States there are signs that we are actually going backwards as a country. All over the nation, asphalt roads are actually being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain. The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads. Just think about that - we are actually going back to gravel roads.

Many local governments are trying to raise funds any way that they can. For example, from now on if you are caught jaywalking in Los Angeles you will be slapped with a $191 fine. This kind of thing is happening all over America. Police departments are being turned into revenue raising operations. Police are so busy writing tickets that they barely have any time to investigate actual crimes anymore.

So if the municipal bond market does crash will the federal government step in and bail everyone out? Well, this upcoming spring the $160 billion in federal "stimulus money" runs out. At that point there will likely be a huge cry for even more "stimulus money" for state and local governments. Unfortunately, the federal government is also flat broke and swimming in an ocean of endless red ink. Congress could potentially step in and try to bail all the state and local governments out, but in the end it is the American people who are going to have to pay the bill.

We are on the verge of a horrific economic collapse which is going to change life in this country as we know it forever. All of this debt is absolutely going to swamp us. Our politicians can keep trying to kick the can down the road for as long as they can, but eventually the financial nightmare that so many of us have been dreading is going to overtake us.

"In recent days, I have become increasingly concerned about the problems relating to the infrastructure available to airlines - airports and ground handling - during this severe period of snow," Kallas said in a statement. "We need to ensure that, from infrastructure providers such as airports and rail infrastructure managers, there are appropriate service levels and minimum quality requirements that are followed and delivered," he said.

"If there is a need for support from the European Commission in terms of regulation on minimum service requirements for airports in this area, I am prepared to do that." BAA, which operates London's Heathrow airport and is owned by Spain's Ferrovial, said the world's busiest international airport hub would again operate at reduced capacity Tuesday.

Analysts believe the freezing conditions will hit the profit of British Airways by around 10 million pounds ($15.55 million) a day.

The basic problem is simple: As online video has grown in popularity, thanks to sites like YouTube and Hulu.com, Internet service providers (ISPs) complain that each consumer is more of a burden to service - that's you, me and your next-door neighbor, Phil. Today, Comcast, Time Warner, or whomever you pay monthly, charges you and Phil more or less the same amount. But Phil watches four hours of basketball online every night. Should he pay more for that? There's the neutrality part, the argument that you should pay one fee for access to the entire Internet, regardless of what type of content you watch or which sites you visit.

Well... that makes sense, right? If service providers could charge based on the type of content you watch, they could easily create a system like that of today's cable television market. Want HBO? It's an extra $5. Want our streaming video package, with YouTube, Hulu, TV.com, and more? That's $5 too. Don't pay and you can't watch. Period.

"Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it," worried Minnesota senator Al Franken in an editorial at the Huffington Post. ISPs argue - and the FCC just agreed - that they should be allowed to charge based on the amount of bandwidth they use. It remains to be seen whether the type of content will be protected, however. The more people speculate, the more the nightmarish scenarios quickly pile up.

"Nothing is broken that needs fixing," wrote Robert McDowell, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, in an opinion essay in the Wall Street Journal. "The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist."

The land drill, involving artillery, fighter jets and the largest number of personnel in a peace-time exercise, will take place on Thursday, after the South's live-fire artillery exercise on Monday on the island of Yeonpyeong, and is bound to infuriate the North. South Korea is also holding three days of live-firing drills off the peninsula's east coast starting on Wednesday, a media official at the Defence Ministry said.

He would not provide details. Yonhap news agency said the drills were taking place 60 miles south of the maritime border with North Korea and involved at least six naval boats. North Korea this week offered to re-admit UN inspectors concerned about its nuclear-weapon programme, leading to speculation of a resumption of six-party disarmament talks and a general sigh of relief around the world that the crisis had passed.

"Yes, it will be a show of force against that," an army officer said when asked if the shelling of Yeonpyeong island last month was a factor in the land drill's planning. He said similar drills had been staged previously on more than 50 occasions, but the scale this time was unprecedented. "The scale of mechanised assets taking place is enormous. When we would normally have 6 K-9 mechanised artillery, we'll have 36. We'll have the F-15 jets firing. We'll have choppers. You can say most of the mechanised assets taking part will be firing live ammunition."

It will take place in Pocheon region, less than 30 miles north of downtown Seoul.

More than 48 hours after Britain's last snowfall, some furious passengers with boarding passes for Monday flights were not even allowed into London's Heathrow Airport. Inside, piles of garbage grew and some people slept on terminal floors. Other travelers waited in the cold for up to six hours to get inside London's St Pancras train station, where they had to wait still longer for Eurostar trains to mainland Europe.

Chagrined British officials promised an inquiry into the failure to clear the remnants of a storm that dumped five inches over parts of England Saturday morning. Other European airports rebounded from weekend snowfall and resumed close to normal flight schedules by Monday. "It can't be beyond the wit of man surely to find the shovels, the diggers, the snowplows or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes, to get the planes moving and to have more than one runway going," London Mayor Boris Johnson said as British Airways canceled its Monday short-haul schedule from Heathrow.

At Heathrow's sprawling Terminal 5, tired and disgruntled passengers faced lengthy waits without much information as piles of garbage grew throughout the complex. "The whole situation is horrible," said teenager Sophiya Bolkova, as she clutched her ticket home to Moscow after three days' delay. "We are very angry. People were just mean, rude, sleeping on the floor, babies sleeping on the floor, no information, no help, no money for hotels."

The snow-related problems come near the end of a year filled with travel disruptions, including the April shutdown of much of Europe's airspace because of a plume of ash from a volcano eruption in Iceland.

The officials, who declined to be named, said Wang Qishan, a Chinese vice-premier, had given assurances that China would step up support for European stabilisation efforts "if necessary". Mr Wang made the pledge during the third annual China-EU High Level Economic and Trade Dialogue, held in Beijing on Tuesday. In comments reported by state media, Mr Wang said China supported measures taken by the EU and the International Monetary Fund to stabilise the eurozone, but gave little detail of what form such backing would take.

Beijing has emerged as one of the more enthusiastic backers of distressed European sovereign debt in recent months. During a trip to Portugal last month, Hu Jintao, China's president, said Beijing would take "concrete measures" to help the country, which officials signalled would include bond purchases. A month earlier, Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, said in Athens that Beijing would purchase Greek bonds and increase foreign investment in the country.

In addition, Klaus Regling, the head of the eurozone's 440 billion euros ($577 billion) bail-out fund, said China had shown enthusiasm for bonds issued by his agency, tasked with raising a sizeable chunk of the funding for the 85 billion euros Irish bail-out. The EU is China's biggest export market, with two-way trade valued at $434 billion in the first 11 months of this year, and Beijing has a strong interest in supporting regional stability

European officials said that although China had not explicitly linked its bond purchases to any specific issues, Beijing asked in the talks for the EU to grant it "market economy" status and lift a long-standing arms embargo. But Karel de Gucht, European trade commissioner, said that lifting the embargo required a unanimous vote from all EU member states, something analysts say is highly unlikely.

There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

For a man with such radical views, Mr McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence.

The Financial Report of the United States, which applies corporate-style accrual accounting methods to Washington, showed the government's liabilities exceeded assets by $13.473 trillion. That compared with a $11.456 trillion gap a year earlier. Unlike the normal measurement of government intake of receipts against cash outlays, accrual accounting measures costs such as interest on the debt and federal benefits payable when they are incurred, not when funds are actually disbursed.

The government's net operating cost, or deficit, in the report grew to $2.080 trillion for the year ended September 30 from $1.253 trillion the prior year as spending and liabilities increased for social programs. Actual and anticipated revenues were roughly unchanged. The latest Treasury report should fuel debate in Congress over spending cuts next year as a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives takes office.

The US Senate on Tuesday approved a compromise bill to fund the government until March 4, 2011. After that, Republicans will have the chance to push through dramatic budget cuts. The biggest increase in net liabilities in fiscal 2010 stemmed from a $1.477 trillion increase in federal debt repayment and interest obligations, largely to finance programs to stabilize the economy and pull it out of recession.