The state has been paying bills with unfunded vouchers since October. A fifth of buses have stopped. Libraries, owed $400 million (263 million pounds), are closing one day a week. Schools are owed $725 million. Unable to pay teachers, they are preparing mass lay-offs. "It's a catastrophe", said the Schools Superintendent.

In Alexander County, the sheriff's patrol cars have been repossessed; three-quarters of his officers are laid off; the local prison has refused to take county inmates until debts are paid. Florida, Arizona, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York are all facing crises. California has cut teachers salaries by 5pc, and imposed a 5pc levy on pension fees. The Economic Policy Institute says states face a shortfall of $156 billion in fiscal 2010. Most are banned by law from running deficits, so they must retrench. Washington has provided $68 billion in federal aid, but that depletes the Obama stimulus package.

This is not to pick on America. Belt-tightening is the oppressive fact of 2010-2012 for half the world. Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltics and the Balkans are already under the knife. Latvia's economy may contract by 30pc from peak to trough as it carries out an "internal devaluation", ie wage cuts, to hold its euro peg. The eurozone's fiscal squeeze is well advanced in Ireland. Brussels has told Greece to cut by 10pc of GDP in three years, Spain by 8pc, Portugal by 6pc. Britain must slash soon, or face a gilts strike.

Don't go wobbly on us now, Ben. If the governments of America, Europe, and Japan are to retrench - as they must - their central banks must stay super-loose to cushion the blow. Otherwise we will all sink into deflationary quicksand.

The call for China to abandon modesty about its global goals and "sprint to become world number one" comes from a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Senior Colonel, Liu Mingfu, who warns that his nation's ascent will alarm Washington, risking war despite Beijing's hopes for a "peaceful rise. China's big goal in the 21st century is to become world number one, the top power," Liu writes in his newly published Chinese-language book, "The China Dream".

"If China in the 21st century cannot become world number one, cannot become the top power, then inevitably it will become a straggler that is cast aside," writes Liu, a professor at the elite National Defence University, which trains rising officers. His 303-page book stands out for its boldness even in a recent chorus of strident Chinese voices demanding a hard shove back against Washington over trade, Tibet, human rights, and arms sales to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own.

"As long as China seeks to rise to become world number one ... then even if China is even more capitalist than the US, the US will still be determined to contain it," writes Liu. Rivalry between the two powers is a "competition to be the leading country, a conflict over who rises and falls to dominate the world," says Liu. "To save itself, to save the world, China must prepare to become the (world's) helmsman."

Tensions have been high in recent days following the Israeli government's announcement that two West Bank shrines would be added to Israel's list of national heritage sites. Palestinians denounced the move as a provocation, and President Mahmoud Abbas has warned the incident could spark a "religious war."

Israel has controlled the compound since capturing east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and insists it will retain it forever, though it has left day-to-day administration to a Muslim clerical body. That body, the Waqf, said young men rushed to the compound after hearing a rumor that hardline religious Jews intended to storm the area.

Hamas' minister of religious affairs, Taleb Abu Shaar, called on Palestinians to rise up violently against Israel and "protect our Islamic holy places from the risk of Judaization." He called on the United Nations to impose sanctions on Israel "because of its crimes."

Speaking in the Hague, he insisted the Serbs were only acting in self-defence. He insists he is innocent of all 11 charges from the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including genocide and war crimes. The trial had been adjourned since November and the judge rejected a new request for a further postponement.

Mr Karadzic suspended his boycott and appeared in court along with his lawyer on Monday as the trial resumed. "I will defend that nation of ours and their cause that is just and holy," Mr Karadzic said in translated comments at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. "We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof."

Prosecutors say he orchestrated a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims and Croats in eastern Bosnia to create an ethnically pure Serbian state. In his opening statement last October, prosecutor Alan Tieger said Mr Karadzic "harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to pursue his vision of an ethnically segregated Bosnia".

Jim Fitzpatrick, the Labour MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had already started to turn its attention to the bigger prize of Labour. Odd things started happening, he said. "People were being signed up to be members, and told to turn up to the meetings where candidates were being selected with a list of those who they should be voting for," he said.

"We had never seen them before, and have never seen them afterwards. And that was corrupting our politics."

Some of the new members told The Sunday Telegraph they were signed up en bloc by Lutfur Rahman, the man accused of rising to the council leadership with the IFE's help.

A senior person in the London Labour Party described how the IFE called Muslim activists and councillors it deemed promising into its headquarters. "They have you up to the secure floor of the mosque," he said. "One guy I know was shown a room with maps with pins of contacts in it, across London and Britain. The pitch to him was: we control party members and votes in all these places. Join us, and you will never be short of manpower to back you up."

"The IFE have a foot in every political camp," he said. "I think that is somewhat dishonest. If they put up under their own name, they would get less than five per cent of the vote."

The Yorkshire pigs were developed by researchers in Ontario at the University of Guelph, who spliced in genes from mice to decrease the amount of phosphorus produced in the pigs' dung, the report said. The genetic modification means the new strain of pigs produce 30 to 65 percent less phosphorus in their waste, which has been problematic in surface and groundwater around large livestock operations, Canwest said.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so. The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth's crust dives under another. It's part of the active "Ring of Fire," a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

The Ryukyu Islands of Japan were hit with a 7.0 magnitude quake on Friday night. News of that tremor, the Haiti quake and now Chile may make it seem as if Earth is becoming ever more active. However, "relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years," said Stephen S Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. "We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth's lithosphere" (the lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth).

Britain in recent years has consitituted a legal threat to Israeli officials who are being accused of harming PA Arabs. An arrest warrant issued in December against opposition leader Tzipi Livni is just one instance of an aggressive stance toward the Jewish State.

In 2005, General Doron Almog was informed by Israel's ambassador to Britain that he may be arrested if he exited his plane in London. He chose to stay aboard and return to Israel after having traveled to England to raise money for a charity.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center report shows that these incidents are not accidental, but rather concentrated political activity by the Hamas terror organization. The findings say London has become the epicenter of Hamas' political, legal, and propaganda campaigns in Europe. Hamas operatives note that they have been particularly successful, with the assistance of the Muslim Brotherhood, in controlling the discourse regarding Arabs in Israel, and initiating widespread anti-Zionism throughout the country.

It talks as, inter alia, does Dave Cameron - of green jobs and green investment and the marvellous benefits which will accrue from the brave new green economy. For the most part it's vague, but in places the mask slips and the true horror reveals itself. "Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity TO RE-EXAMINE NATIONAL AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities."

Bye bye democracy, in other words. Oh, and bye bye your job, your money and your children's economic future too.

The discussion paper, published - but not distributed - on December 14, 2009, assumes that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will require a staggering $45 trillion dollar to accomplish - much of it in transfers from rich nations to poorer ones.

The paper, however, paints that as a bargain - "an average yearly investment of just over $1 trillion." About half of that would go for "replacing conventional technologies with low-carbon, environmentally sound alternatives." These people talk about trillions as if it's handy small change. Remembering all the while that THE CRISIS WHICH IT IS DESIGNED TO ALLEVIATE EXISTS ONLY IN THE IMAGINATION OF YOUR NEW WORLD GOVERNORS.

Winds of up to 140km/h (87mph) caused chaos as they moved from Portugal up through the Bay of Biscay. The storm system is moving north-eastwards and areas of France bordering Belgium and Germany are on alert for heavy rain and high winds.

Worst affected have been the Vendee and Charente-Maritime regions on the western coast of France. Huge waves and strong gusts battered many coastal towns, spreading floods inland and destroying buildings. Residents took to their roofs in the Vendee region and police helicopters were in action attempting to locate and rescue them. At least a dozen people are said to be missing in France and 59 others injured.

More than a million homes in France have lost electricity, from the Brittany peninsula in the west to the highlands of the Massif Central in the centre of the country. President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his condolences to relatives of victims, and said that he would visit the stricken area on Monday. The storm system, named Xynthia, has put five of the 95 French departments on red alert - only the second such warning since a new emergency system was introduced in 2001.

Rail services were severely affected in northern Spain and a number of trains in western France were delayed because of flooded tracks. Air France said 100 of its flights had been cancelled from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Wind speeds hit 175km/h at the top of the Eiffel Tower, French radio reported.

A Labour minister says his party has been infiltrated by a fundamentalist Muslim group that wants to create an "Islamic social and political order" in Britain. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister, said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties.

"They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it's at local government level or national level," he said. "They are completely at odds with Labour's programme, with our support for secularism."

Mr Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had infiltrated and "corrupted" his party in east London in the same way that the far-Left Militant Tendency did in the 1980s. IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already "consolidated ... a lot of influence and power" over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a 1 billion pounds budget. We have established that the group and its allies were awarded more than 10 million pounds of taxpayers' money, much of it from government funds designed to "prevent violent extremism".

Moderate Muslims in London told how the IFE and its allies were enforcing their hardline views on the rest of the local community, curbing behaviour they deemed "un-Islamic". The owner of a dating agency received a threatening email from an IFE activist, warning her to close it.

The IFE has particularly close links to Tower Hamlets council. Seven serving and former councillors said Lutfur Rahman, the current council leader, gained his post with the group's help. This was despite a chequered employment record, a misleading CV and a negative report from the headhunters appointed to consider the candidates. The council's white chief executive was subsequently forced from his post.

Since Mr Rahman became leader, more council grants have been paid to a number of organisations which our investigation established are closely linked to the IFE. Schools in Tower Hamlets are told by the council they should close for the Muslim festival of Eid, even where most of their pupils are not Muslim. The group insisted it was not a fundamentalist or extremist organisation and did not support violence.

The 1,300-year-old fragments, which are among only a handful of Hebrew biblical manuscripts known to have survived the era in which they were written, existed separately and with their relationship unknown, until a news photograph of one's public unveiling in 2007 caught the attention of the scholars who would eventually link them.

Together, they make up the text of the Song of the Sea, sung by jubilant Israelites after fleeing slavery in Egypt and witnessing the destruction of the pharaoh's armies in the Red Sea."The enemy said: 'I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. My lust shall be satisfied upon them, I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them,'" reads the song, which appears in the Book of Exodus. "Thou didst blow thy wind, the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters."

An exhibit at Israel's national museum dedicated to the Song of the Sea is now bringing together the two long-separated pieces. One page of the song, known as the Ashkar manuscript, was previously housed in a rare books library at Duke University in North Carolina and was first displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2007. That's when a photograph of the manuscript in a local newspaper caught the eye of two Israeli paleographers, Mordechay Mishor and Edna Engel, who noticed it resembled a different page of Hebrew writing known as the London manuscript, presently part of the private collection of Stephan Loewentheil of New York.

The museum arranged to have the London manuscript brought to Jerusalem. The new exhibit chronicles how the Song of the Sea was written through various ancient manuscripts, from the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls to the manuscript known as the Aleppo Codex, written nearly a millennium later.

The reunification of the two pieces adds an important link in the chain, showing how the writing of the Hebrew Bible evolved through the so-called "silent" period - between the third and 10th centuries - from which nearly no Biblical texts survived. While in the Dead Sea Scrolls the song is arranged like prose, for example, in the newly reunited manuscript it is written like a poem, the same way it appears in the Hebrew Bible today. The manuscripts are "filling the gap," said Israel Museum curator Adolfo Roitman. "We can see we are dealing with a tradition that is still alive."

While the Church's 10-page document, offering advice to the country's four million Catholics, is not explicitly partisan, it will be seen as critical of Labour and as supportive of the Tories who have put marriage at the centre of their campaigning.

In the report, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, the bishops argue for a "revitalising of politics", warn that religion should not be "reduced to devotional acts" and stress the need to protect the freedom to express belief.

It follows a series of high-profile clashes between Catholic leaders and the Government over the promotion of laws which critics say have threatened religious liberty in Britain. The paper's emphasis on marriage will echo David Cameron's expressed support for married couples and is in contrast to Labour's claims that parents need not be wed to create happy families.

A church source said last night: "The document is very much in line with Tory policy and it will be open to that interpretation, although it is not intended to be explicitly political in either direction." The advice could influence the outcome of the election in key marginal seats, particularly in north-west England where the Catholic Church is particularly strong.

On Tuesday, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe - a prominent skeptic of global warming theory and the Republican leader of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee - issued a request for Gore to come testify on global warming. In an interview with FoxNews.com, Inhofe said he wants Gore to appear because "it will be interesting to ask him on what science he based his movie," a film the senator considers "science fiction."

The media, meanwhile, have started to ask why the world's most famous advocate of all things green remains mute on the growing chorus of opposition. "The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels - this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up," the editors of Investors Business Daily wrote on Tuesday. "We've not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses."

Inhofe says it's important that Gore testify before the Congress and tell the full story. "First Climate-gate happened, before Copenhagen, and everything unraveled on the global warming front," the senator said. "It appears that the scientific community has been deliberately falsifying science for years, whether it's the melting of the Himalayas or the melting of the polar ice. All of that was in his movie. So we tried to reach him. When his movie came out," Inhofe added, "parents of small children told me their kids had to go to the psychiatrist over bad dreams about global warming. We owe it to the public to find out where the science came from. This is the greatest scientific scandal of our generation."

Mr Dimon told investors at the Wall Street bank's annual meeting that "there could be contagion" if a state the size of California, the biggest of the United States, had problems making debt repayments. "Greece itself would not be an issue for this company, nor would any other country," said Mr Dimon. "We don't really foresee the European Union coming apart." The senior banker said that JP Morgan Chase and other US rivals are largely immune from the European debt crisis, as the risks have largely been hedged.

California however poses more of a risk, given the state's $20 billion (13.1 billion pounds) budget deficit, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is desperately trying to reduce.

Earlier this week, the state's legislature passed bills that will cut the deficit by $2.8 billion through budget cuts and other measures. However the former Hollywood film star turned politician is looking for $8.9 billion of cuts over the next 16 months, and is also hoping for as much as $7 billion of handouts from the federal government.