The retail data can be quirky but it fits in with everything else we know. The numbers of people on food stamps have reached 43.2 million, an all time-high of 14 per cent of the population. Recipients receive debit cards - not stamps - currently worth about $140 a month under President Obama's stimulus package. The US Conference of Mayors said visits to soup kitchens are up 24 per cent this year. There are 643,000 people needing shelter each night.

Jobs data released on Friday was again shocking. The only the reason that headline unemployment fell to 9.4 per cent was that so many people dropped out of the system altogether. The actual number of jobs contracted by 260,000 to 153,690,000. The "labour participation rate" for working-age men over 20 dropped to 73.6 per cent, the lowest the since the data series began in 1948. My guess is that this figure exceeds the average for the Great Depression

It is no surprise that America's armed dissident movement has resurfaced. For a glimpse into this sub-culture, read Time Magazine's "Locked and Loaded: The Secret World of Extreme Militias". Time's reporters went underground with the 300-strong 'Ohio Defence Force', an eclectic posse of citizens who spend weekends with M16 assault rifles and an M60 machine gun training to defend their constitutional rights by guerrilla warfare.

As it happens, I spent some time with militia groups across the US at the tail end of the recession in the early 1990s. While the rallying cry then was gun control and encroachments on freedom, the movement was at root a primordial scream by blue-collar Americans left behind in the new global dispensation. That grievance is surely worse today.

The long-term unemployed (more than six months) have reached 42 per cent of the total, twice the peak of the early 1990s. Nothing like this has been seen since World War Two.

Global food prices hit a record high last month, outstripping the levels that sparked riots in several countries in 2008, and key grains could rise further, the United Nations' food agency said this week. Policymakers are concerned that, if unchecked, rising food prices could stoke inflation, protectionism and unrest.

High food prices and unemployment were blamed for a second day of rioting in Algeria Friday with police deployed around mosques and authorities suspending football matches. Rhee Chang-yong, who represents South Korea at the G20, said working-group talks were under way aimed at improving global cooperation to resolve food security problems. "France is emphasizing food security. As a former host country of G20, we would like to deal with the price volatility problem thoroughly," Rhee said.

Last year, wheat futures prices rose 47 percent, buoyed by bad weather including drought in Russia and its Black Sea neighbors. US corn rose more than 50 percent and US soybeans jumped 34 percent. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report Wednesday that sugar and meat prices were at their highest since its records began in 1990. For wheat, rice, corn and other cereals, prices were at their highest since the 2008 crisis.

During that crisis, riots broke out in countries from Egypt to Haiti. Import prices jumped, forcing many countries' trade balances into a deep and costly deficit, and several governments in Asia imposed export restrictions on rice.

A row of ceremonial candles and a bag of potting soil lay nearby, photos reveal. Experts on Sunday said the elements are featured in the ceremonies of a number of occult groups. Investigators have focused on Loughner's online anti-government ramblings as the chief motivation for the shooting Saturday of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords (Democrat for Arizona).

The discovery of the shrine raises the possibility that Loughner, 22, may have been driven by other forces. Students and faculty at Pima Community College, which he attended until his suspension last summer, said Loughner was clearly at odds with the world.

"He was one of the last kids to come in, and he sat down and almost immediately started laughing to himself in a way that was just kind of creepy," a classmate, Alex Kotonias, 20, told USA Today.

"As soon as the teacher started going over the syllabus, he had this outburst out of nowhere, didn't even raise his hand, and started asking the teacher some sort of weird questions about whether he believed in mind control."

With a sense that the battles against destabilising capital inflows are here to stay has come a determination to set new rules of engagement on controlling them. But given the uncertainty and political explosiveness around the issue, any such venture faces a tough future.

The International Monetary Fund last week revealed an attempt to put itself at the centre of the debate, releasing a study arguing for global rules to constrain governments' use of capital controls. But observers doubt that it will broker a deal soon. "The IMF has made a pre-emptive grab for power without a clear idea of what it is asking for," says Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official now at Cornell University.

The IMF and many economists urge governments to try other means first, such as tighter fiscal policy and allowing the exchange rate to rise, before resorting to direct action. Even then, Professor Rogoff says, countries should choose more subtle interventions such as banking regulation rather than quantitative controls on outflows.

"Clearly capital flows can be used as an excuse, as they are in China and India, for financial repression - to protect domestic financial services sectors from competition and retard their development," he says. While the IMF may have brought the capital controls debate out into the open, it is unlikely to come to a neat and rapid conclusion.

He said his government would raise the issue at the World Trade Organization and the G20 group of rich and developing countries. Mr Mantega was speaking in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper. "This is a currency war which is turning into a trade war," Mr Mantega said in his first major interview since Dilma Rousseff took office as Brazil's new president on 1 January.

He said Brazil's trade with the US had slipped from an annual surplus of about $15 billion (9.6 billion pounds) to a deficit of $6 billion because of US efforts to revive its economy through loose monetary policy. "The exchange rate is one of the main drivers of economic policy, more so even than productivity," he said.

Mr Mantega added that China's "undervalued currency" was also distorting world trade. He has been finance minister since 2006. In September last year he accused some rich countries of deliberately devaluing their currencies to boost exports and make their economies more competitive.

The Brazilian real has increased by 39% against the US dollar in the last two years. Its value has been going up steadily as Brazil's economy has grown, making Brazilian exports less competitive. The International Monetary Fund warned in October that some countries appeared to be trying to use their currencies "as a weapon" and the issue of currency manipulation was discussed at the G20 summit in November.

In Britain the disease, officially known as phytophthora ramorum, spared oaks and jumped to rhododendrons and Japanese larch trees. In the last year it has taken hold along the west of the country in larch plantations, including more than 120 Forestry Commission sites, 20 National Trust properties and two Woodland Trust reserves. Already 4 million trees have been felled or marked for destruction.

More are expected to be chopped down in the coming years because the warmer, wetter conditions expected with climate change encourage the spread of the disease. In the latest cull, a landowner in the Quantock Hills in Somerset was forced to cut down 50,000 trees, while the National Trust chopped down 10,000 larch trees in the area. Landowners face crippling costs for felling sick trees, while walkers are urged to disinfect boots to stop P. ramorum, which is a fungal disease, spreading on their feet.

Philip Chambers, the owner of Milverton Sawmill, in Taunton, Somerset, said that landowners had been forced to pay to chop down larch trees even though the timber was worth very little because of oversupply. He compared the situation to the foot and mouth crisis when farmers were forced to cull their cows to stop the disease spreading. "It is for trees what foot and mouth was for cows, except there is no compensation for the landed gentry," he said.

Experts from the Forestry Commission are carrying out inspections across Britain and will order a cull wherever the disease is found.

It takes hold quickly, causing bleeding lesions, blackened or wilted leaves and, ultimately, death. It can also affect garden shrubs, such as rhododendron and camellia.

Among the organizations and persons Danon intends to invite to the committee, he lists:

• B'tselem - director, Jessica Montel

• The Center for Defense of the Individual - director, Dalia Kirstein

• Yesh Din - director, Roi Maor

• Ir Amim - director, Yehudit Oppenheimer

• The Public Committee against Torture in Israel - director, Yishai Blanc

• Adallah - director, Mahmoud Yazbek

• Peace Now - director, Yariv Oppenheimer

• Gisha - director, Kenneth Mann

• Association for Civil Rights ion Israel - President, Sami Michael

• Mousawa - Anwar Jamal, Tariq Bashir, Jafer Farah

• as well as: Breaking the Silence, Machsom Watch, The Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions and the Center for Alternative Information.

Danon said that "it is time to find out the sources of the monies for these groups that act without letup against the state of Israel." He added: "We will try to find out who are the ones who arrange the riots at the Bil'in checkpoint, who funded the legal motions in the matter of Highway 443. We will reveal the bodies that roam the Galilee and purchase private lands with Saudi money. The leftists seem afraid and they must have a reason for fearing this committee."

The committee does not have powers of subpoena and is no different from other Knesset committees as far as its powers. Danon is optimistic, however: "I hope we can stop these groups, which received 40 million shekels from the European Union in the last five years alone... We will try to discover the truth and in the end we will recommend changes in legislation as well."

A statement on the State Department website noted: "These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child's parents and in recognition of different types of families."

The State Department said the new passport applications, not yet available to the public, will be available online soon. Sprague said the decision to remove the traditional parenting names was not an act of political correctness. "We find that with changes in medical science and reproductive technology that we are confronting situations now that we would not have anticipated 10 or 15 years ago," she said.

Gay rights groups are applauding the decision. "Changing the term 'mother' and 'father' to the more global term of parent allows many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn't recognize their family," said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Equality Council. Her organization lobbied the government for several years to remove the words from passport applications.

Bank shares fell, weighing on broader stock indexes, on fears the decision could threaten lenders' ability to work through hundreds of thousands of pending foreclosures. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts' unanimous decision on Friday upheld a lower court ruling. It is among the earliest cases to address the validity of foreclosures done without proper documentation.

That issue, including the use of "robo-signers" who approved foreclosure documents without reviewing them, last year prompted an uproar that led lenders such as Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Ally Financial Inc to temporarily stop seizing homes. "A ruling like this will slow down the foreclosure process" for lenders, said Marty Mosby, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities in Memphis, Tennessee. "They're going to have to be really precise and get everything in order. It doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room."

Wells Fargo and US Bancorp lacked authority to foreclose after having "failed to make the required showing that they were the holders of the mortgages at the time of foreclosure," Justice Ralph Gants wrote for the Massachusetts court. In a concurring opinion, Justice Robert Cordy lambasted "the utter carelessness" that the banks demonstrated in documenting their right to own the properties. Courts in other US states are considering similar cases, and all 50 state attorneys general are examining whether lenders are forcing people out of their homes improperly.

Analysts said the decision may also raise the specter that loans transferred improperly will need to be bought back. "What they were doing was peddling these mortgages and leaving the paperwork behind," said Michael Pill, a real estate partner at Green, Miles, Lipton & Fitz-Gibbon LLP in Northampton, Massachusetts who is not involved in the case. The Massachusetts court rejected a request by the banks to apply the decision only in future cases, leaving homeowners already foreclosed upon without a remedy. Gants chided the banks for ignoring settled rules in their "rush" to sell mortgage-backed securities.

Glenn Russell, a lawyer for the LaRaces, said in an interview. "The fact the decision applies retroactively could mean thousands of homeowners can seek recovery for homes wrongfully foreclosed upon."

While the students insisted it was a joke, Sadler noted they were arrested on the same day a suspended 17-year-old student in Omaha, Nebraska, fatally shot an assistant principal and wounded his principal before fleeing the campus and taking his own life. "School shootings really happen. That's why we took it seriously," Sadler told The Associated Press on Friday. "It's not OK, and it's not funny in this day and age if you're going to make a threat against a teacher."

The 12- and 13-year-old students were arrested after allegedly posting threatening statements against six teachers at the two schools. One student used the word "die" before a teacher's name, while others wrote that they would "attack" certain teachers, Sadler said. "Even if the six girls meant it as a joke, there's no way to know if the other students who accepted the invitation weren't going to carry out the attacks in some fashion," Rivera said. "The school shooting in Nebraska is just another thing that shows us you can't take this kind of situation lightly."

Carson City Sheriff Ken Furlong said the case demonstrates the need for parents to monitor their children's online activities. "They made some pretty violent comments about some teachers, and this isn't even close to a joke," he said. "Children's stresses are so great that they can act out on their frustrations. Parents need to monitor what their kids are doing on communication devices."

Militant websites have posted a list of churches to be targeted. There are "how-to" manuals with tips on "destroying the cross". One site offered a reward to anyone who assassinated "a leading Church figure".

These incidents follow a recent trend of attacks on churches and Christians across the Middle East. In October in Baghdad nearly 60 people were killed when gunmen attacked the Syriac Catholic Cathedral. Only last week bombs were placed near the homes of 14 Christian families in the Iraqi capital.

Concern has been raised, but there has been an absence of international outrage. France is trying to change that. Its Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, wants a European response. She has written to the EU's foreign affairs czar, Catherine Ashton, asking for the union to draw up a plan of action in response to what is happening to Christians in the Middle East. She is putting the defence of Christians on the agenda and specifically wants Europe's foreign ministers to respond. She said we had moved beyond the situation of being "simply sad and disturbed".

Her intervention has been followed up by President Sarkozy. He said Christian minorities are victims of "religious cleansing" in the Middle East. "We cannot accept," said the French president, "and thereby facilitate, what looks more and more like a particularly wicked programme of cleansing in the Middle East - religious cleansing". Even in Europe churches are having to be protected. In France, 19 were cordoned off by police during this period. Similar measures were taken in Germany. There were threats against St Mark's Church in Frankfurt.

Many are looking to the European Union to play a leading role. Yesterday the leader of the Copts in the UK, Dr Ibrahim Habib, was interviewed by the BBC and said "the EU has a duty to protect Coptic Christians". Others are calling on the EU to "defend religious freedom". In the weeks ahead Europe will be asked to act in defence of the rights of Christians.

The incident is the latest mass animal death to hit the headlines in the last two weeks.

These include:

• 450 red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles and starlings found littering a highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

• 3,000 blackbirds on roofs and roads in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas

• Thousands of 'devil crabs' washed up along the Kent coast near Thanet

• Thousands of drum fish washed along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River

• Two million small fish in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland

• Thousands of dead fish found floating in warm Florida creek

• Hundreds of snapper fish found dead in New Zealand

• Scores of American Coots found dead on Texas highway bridge

Experts have speculated that New Year fireworks, thunderstorms, cold weather, parasites and even poisoning may be behind the deaths.

But conspiracy theorists have also speculated on the internet that secret government experiments could be behind them, with some even claiming it was a sign of a looming Armageddon at the end of the Mayan calendar next year.

"With the euro zone's three weakest issuers coming to market next week in the space of two days it ramps up the tension," said Orlando Green, strategist at Credit Agricole in London. "There has to be some repricing to get (the auctions) done, but will it be enough? That depends on investor appetite."

Greece and then Ireland were frozen out of debt markets and forced to seek bailouts from the European Union/IMF in 2010 as a result of large budget deficits and banking sector weakness. Consequently, debt supply from other struggling euro zone states is set to be a key driver of sentiment in the coming months, with Portugal seen as the next most likely to seek aid. "It's pretty concerning the way the periphery is trading at the moment, and we haven't even started supply yet... with Spain and Italy also selling (next week) it's going to be pretty difficult times," a trader said.

But the domino effect of the dispute - led by union firebrand 'Red' Len McCluskey - also threatens fuel supplies to industry, hospitals, schools and the homes of old and vulnerable people who use oil central heating. The strike action planned by Mr McCluskey's union Unite, Britain's biggest, is confirmed in internal documents seen by The Mail on Sunday.

Mr McCluskey, who likes quoting Communist guerilla leader Che Guevara, called out 'rubbish' when new Labour leader Ed Miliband condemned irresponsible industrial action in his speech to the party's conference last autumn. Soon after, Britain's most powerful union baron declared: 'There is no such thing as an irresponsible strike. Workers take strike action because they genuinely feel there is nothing else they can do.'

A ballot will take up to a month to conduct. The union must give seven days' notice of action. Unite's National Oil Trades Conference sub-group, which meets on Tuesday, is expected to agree to ballot for a strike. The union's larger National Oil Trades Conference is expected to rubber stamp the decision the next day.

Those named include Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and an Icelandic MP. The US is examining possible charges against Mr Assange over the leaking of 250,000 classified diplomatic cables. Reports indicate the Department of Justice may seek to indict him on charges of conspiring to steal documents with Private First Class Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst.

The subpoena requested the details of Mr Assange, Pfc Manning and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, as well as Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and US programmer Jacob Appelbaum, both of whom have previously worked with Wikileaks. The information sought includes mailing addresses and billing information, connection records and session times, IP addresses used to access Twitter, email accounts, as well as the "means and source of payment".

Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology correspondent, BBC News, comments: "As the Wikileaks saga has unfolded, Twitter has been one of the main forums where supporters and opponents of the whistle-blowing site have debated the issues. Now the social network has been dragged into the affair, as the US authorities pursue a case against Wikileaks."

"This leaves Twitter executives in a very difficult position. Like all social networks, they have been keen to stress that they comply with local laws, especially when it comes to tracking down criminals. But they have also been eager to promote Twitter's role as a forum for free expression in countries like Iran. If confidential details of overseas Twitter users are disclosed to the US authorities, how keen will an international audience be to trust this or other American social networks in future?"