Most of those profits came from the Fed's aggressive program of buying bonds so it could push down interest rates and stimulate growth. By the end of 2009, the Fed owned $1.8 trillion in US government debt and mortgage-related securities. In 2008 that figure was just $497 billion.

Also, the Fed loaned $2.14 trillion to financial institutions and other companies by using a secret loan facility that's been in existence since the Great Depression but hadn't been used to provide direct loans to nonbank companies since the 1930s. These loans now support credit cards, auto loans, and other consumer and business lending. We don't know the details of who got how much because the Fed has refused to release them.

Even though 2009 was a great year for the Fed - and US taxpayers will see a profit - the risks of losses are still enormous. The biggest risk concerns whether the Fed can properly time its exit from the stimulus programs. If the price of Treasury bonds, or mortgage-related securities that the Fed bought from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, fall in value when the Fed wants to sell them, that's a problem. The Fed could also lose money if companies default on those secret loans.

What enraged the Turks was the setting. Ayalon and two other Israeli officials occupied chairs while an uncomfortable Turkish ambassador was made to sit on a lower couch. On the coffee table between the two men was only the Israeli flag, not the Turkish flag, as would be customary.

"We expect an explanation and apologies from Israeli authorities for the attitude against our Tel Aviv ambassador, [Ahmet] Oguz Celikkol, and the way this attitude was reflected," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement. Ayalon responded sharply in an interview with Israel's army radio. "In terms of the diplomatic tactics available, this was the minimum that was warranted given the repeated provocations by political and other players in Turkey," he said.

Since the 1990s, Israel and Turkey have been close military allies, as well as two of Washington's best friends on the Mediterranean Sea. Israel has sold advance weapons systems to Turkey and the two countries share intelligence. Israel has seen Turkey, which is Muslim but not Arab, as a possible bridge to the wider Arab world.

Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Port-au-Prince, told US colleagues before phone service failed that "there must be thousands of people dead," according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo. "He reported that it was just total disaster and chaos, that there were clouds of dust surrounding Port-au-Prince," Fajardo said from the group's offices in Maryland.

Alain Le Roy, the UN peacekeeping chief in New York, said late Tuesday that the headquarters of the 9,000-member Haiti peacekeeping mission and other UN installations were seriously damaged. "Contacts with the UN on the ground have been severely hampered," Le Roy said in a statement, adding: "For the moment, a large number of personnel remain unaccounted for."

The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of 5 miles, the US Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti. In 1946, a magnitude 8.1 quake struck the Dominican Republic and also shook Haiti, producing a tsunami that killed 1,790 people.

The temblor appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, said earthquake expert Tom Jordan at the University of Southern California. The earthquake's size and proximity to populated Port-au-Prince likely caused widespread casualties and structural damage, he said. "It's going to be a real killer," he said. "Whenever something like this happens, you just hope for the best."

He has just left the house on his way to work when the remote-controlled explosion went off. Websites linked to the country's clerical leadership blamed the killing on an armed Iranian opposition group under the direction of Israeli agents. But Massoud Ali Mohammadi was a vocal supporter of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi after the disputed presidential election result last June.

The blast shattered the windows of Mohammadi's home in northern Tehran's Qeytariyeh neighborhood and left the pavement outside smeared with blood and strewn with debris. It is unclear whether the 50-year-old was actively involved in the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, which controls the country's nuclear programme. 'Signs of the triangle of wickedness by the Zionist regime (Israel), America and their hired agents, are visible in the terrorist act,' the Foreign Ministry said. A US government spokesman described the accusations as 'absurd'.

Another Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, disappeared in June while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Amiri's disappearance raised questions about whether he defected and gave the West information on Iran's nuclear program, but Iran's foreign minister accused the US of helping to kidnap him and asked for his return.

An AFP correspondent in the nearby town of Petionville said one three-storey building had been toppled, and a tractor was already at the scene trying to dig out victims as people fled onto the streets in panic.

A hospital collapsed near the epicentre, and cries of people within the structure were reported by witnesses. The quake prompted a tsunami watch for Haiti, Cuba, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, the Pacific Tsunami Center said. A major earthquake, of magnitude 7 or higher, is capable of causing widespread and heavy damage. There was no immediate report of casualties. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

But Marine Corps Air Station Futenma has become the first test of Japan's intent to forge a new relationship with America and the world. It is the key issue as Japan's Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada meets US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hawaii. Okinawa is home to most of the 47,000 American troops based in Japan.

In the elections in August the voters gave a landslide victory to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. The new government believes Japan has been too subservient towards the United States in the past. It still values the alliance but wants it on more equal terms. During the election campaign there was talk by the DPJ of moving the Futenma base off Okinawa, some even said it could be moved out of Japan altogether.

The spat with the Americans will have to be resolved because Japan's new government has wider ambitions. Yukio Hatoyama has been making efforts to get closer to China. Last month he was even willing to break with usual Imperial Household Agency protocol to insist on an audience with the Emperor was granted at short notice to visiting Chinese Vice President Xin Jinping. Mr Hatoyama has spoken of creating an East Asian Community, even of a common currency along the lines of the Euro.

Baroness Ashton said she would work closely with MEPs in setting up the EU's new diplomatic service. "We need the best and brightest working for it," she said. Baroness Ashton was formerly EU trade commissioner, so her foreign policy experience is under scrutiny.

As the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs she is to control the planned new EU diplomatic service, which will have a staff of up to 5,000. The Lisbon Treaty has provided a "once in a generation opportunity" to create "one coherent strategy" for EU foreign policy, she said.

MEPs have the power to veto the whole Commission. The vote is on 26 January. The European Parliament is the EU's only directly elected institution and has gained greater legislative powers under the Lisbon Treaty. The commissioners lead the powerful EU civil service for five-year terms. They have the job of drafting new legislation and ensuring compliance with existing legislation, as well as acting as guardians of the EU treaty obligations.

China Merchants Bank, China Citic, ICBC and China Construction Bank lead the table, followed by Itau Unibanco of Brazil, all with a price-to-book multiple of more than three. Over the past six years, the average price-to-book value of the biggest 50 banks has halved from two to one. This means that investors believe the average bank is worth no more than the value of its balance sheet. Most western banks are trading at well below their book value.

But investors are attaching a growing premium to emerging markets banks, led by China Merchants, the most highly rated of the biggest 50 banks by market capitalisation, on a multiple of 4.3, according to Bloomberg data. At the start of the last decade, the US dominated the rankings. The top five were Bank of New York Mellon , Lloyds of the UK, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Only last year US Bancorp topped the table and Wells Fargo was in the top 10.

China's vehicle sales have surged since 1999 as economic growth averaging more than 9 percent a year has helped automakers including General Motors and Volkswagen AG compensate for slumping demand in the US and Europe. The market will likely remain the world's largest, even as sales slow this year on a reduction in tax cuts, according to Booz & Co.

"China is becoming the center stage of development for the 21st century global auto industry," said Bill Russo, a Beijing based senior adviser at Booz & Co, which advises automakers. "Economic growth has directly translated into growth in automobile sales." December sales of passenger cars, trucks and buses rose 92 percent to 1.4 million. For the whole of 2009, passenger-car sales rose 53 percent to 10.3 million.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring 'enormous gains', while countries, including the UK, 'squandered' their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease. A resolution proposed by Dr Wodarg calling for an investigation into the role of drug firms has been passed by the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based 'senate' responsible for the European Court of Human Rights. An emergency debate on the issue will be held later this month.

Dr Wodarg said: 'In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight healthcare resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.'

Total 2009 exports were more than $1.2 trillion, China's customs agency said Sunday. That was ahead of the 816 billion euros ($1.17 trillion) forecast for Germany by its foreign trade organization, BGA. China's new status is mostly symbolic but highlights its growing presence as an industrial power, major buyer of oil, iron ore and other commodities and, increasingly, as an investor and key voice in managing the global economy.

Its ability to unseat longtime export leader Germany reflects the ability of agile, low-cost Chinese manufacturers to keep selling abroad even as other exporters have been hammered by a slump in global demand. China overtook Germany in 2007 as the third-largest economy and is expected to unseat Japan as number 2 behind the United States as early as this year. Its trade boom has helped Beijing pile up the world's biggest foreign currency reserves at more than $2 trillion.

Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret agreements. The findings, due out this month, are part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's wide-ranging campaign to wrest power from the bureaucracy and make government more open than under the conservatives, who ruled Japan for most of the past 50 years.

They also could intensify public debate about the future of Japan's long-standing security alliance with the US, which has bases here. Hatoyama, a liberal who took office in September, has called for making the relationship more balanced, starting with efforts to evict an unpopular US base from the island of Okinawa.

That Japan agreed to let nuclear-armed ships enter its ports and waters ceased to be a secret some years ago with the declassification of American documents. Such ships had routinely docked in various Japanese ports since the 1960s, sometimes setting off protests.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 - and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this. The scientists' predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a 'warm mode' as opposed to the present 'cold mode'. This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming 'deniers' or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement. "If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's." He said the collection of workers' tombs, some of which were found in the 1990s, were among the most significant finds in the 20th and 21st centuries. They belonged to workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.

Hawass had earlier found graffiti on the walls from workers calling themselves "friends of Khufu" - another sign that they were not slaves. The tombs, on the Giza plateau on the western edge of Cairo, are 4,510 years old and lie at the entrance of a one kilometer (half mile) long necropolis.

Hawass said evidence had been found showing that farmers in the Delta and Upper Egypt had sent 21 buffalo and 23 sheep to the plateau every day to feed the builders, believed to number around 10,000 - or about a tenth of Greek historian Herodotus's estimate of 100,000.

These farmers were exempted from paying taxes to the government of ancient Egypt - evidence that he said underscored the fact they were participating in a national project.

It devalues the currency to 4.3 and 2.6 against the dollar, from a rate of 2.15 per dollar in place since 2005, giving the better rate for basic goods in an attempt to limit the impact of the measure on consumer prices. The opposition seized on fears that prices for imported goods will double as shoppers formed lines of more than a hundred people outside some stores in the capital Caracas.

The new two-tiered exchange system offers the 2.6/dollar rate for goods deemed essential including food, medicine and industrial machinery. Other products, including cars and telephones, will be imported at the higher 4.3 rate. Economist Pavel Gomez of the IESA economic school said the new system will increase opportunities for graft in a country that already is corruption-ridden. "Multiple exchange schemes are incentives for corruption, more so if they are applied in the Venezuela way," he said. "Those who have good contacts can buy at 2.6 and sell at 4.3."