The Obama administration also plans to spend a further 3.1 billion pounds over the next five years on nuclear security. The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the 'greatest danger' to US people during his State of the Union address on Wednesday.

And it flies in the face of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for 'his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples'. The Nobel committee was attacked at the time for bestowing the accolade on a new president whose initiatives are yet to bear fruit - which included reducing the world stock of nuclear arms.

The budget is higher than that allocated by George Bush - who was seen by many as a warmongering president in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003 - during his premiership. During his 70-minute State of the Union speech on Wednesday, which marked his first year in office, Obama said: 'I have embraced the vision of John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them.'

The Russians made a "top-level approach" to the Chinese "that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings to force the US to use its emergency authorities to prop up these companies," Paulson said, referring to the acronym for government sponsored entities. The Chinese declined, he said.

Russia's five-day war with US ally Georgia started on August 8, the same day as the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told US President George W Bush during those ceremonies that "war has started," according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman. "The report was deeply troubling - heavy selling could create a sudden loss of confidence in the GSEs and shake the capital markets," Paulson wrote. "I waited till I was back home and in a secure environment to inform the president."

Russia sold all of its Fannie and Freddie debt in 2008, after holding $65.6 billion of the notes at the start of that year, according to central bank data. Fannie and Freddie were seized by regulators on September 6, 2008, amid the worst US housing slump since the Great Depression.

MEND has demanded that residents be given a greater share in profits from oil resources and land. It warned oil companies to prepare for what it called an all-out onslaught against installations and personnel.

In a statement announcing the end of the ceasefire, Mend said that the decision had been taken "after careful consideration and extensive consultation. All companies related to the oil industry in the Niger Delta should prepare for an all-out onslaught," it went on. "Nothing will be spared," it added. Militants have carried out a series of attacks which have cost Nigeria millions in lost revenue over the years.

Ties are already strained by rows over trade and internet censorship. Taiwan and China have been ruled by separate governments since the end of a civil war in 1949. Beijing has hundreds of missiles pointed at the island and has threatened to use force to bring it under its control if Taiwan moved towards formal independence.

Mr He said the arms deal would have "repercussions that neither side wishes to see". "The United States' announcement of the planned weapons sales to Taiwan will have a seriously negative impact on many important areas of exchanges and co-operation between the two countries," Mr He said in a statement published on the foreign ministry website. The statement came after China summoned US Ambassador Jon Huntsman to give a warning about the consequences of the deal and to urge its immediate cancellation.

The Pentagon earlier notified the US Congress of the proposed arms sale, which forms part of a package first pledged by the Bush administration. Friday's notification to Congress by the Defense Security Co-operation Agency (DSCA) was required by law. It does not mean the sale has been concluded. US lawmakers have 30 days to comment on the proposed sale, Associated Press reported. If there are no objections, it would proceed.

Beijing has previously warned the US not to go ahead with arms sales to Taiwan. Ties between China and the US are already strained by rows over trade and internet censorship. The US is the leading arms supplier to Taiwan, despite switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. Washington regards it as an obligation to provide Taiwan with defensive arms.

Toyota is now witnessing the realization of those fears, caught in a mushrooming recall debacle affecting as many as 8 million cars - a development many say underscores the difficulty of maintaining top-notch quality in a hasty expansion. It may also be the manifestation of the "big-company disease" that Toyota President Akio Toyoda has vowed to quash since taking the helm last June, aiming to restore the company's solid foundation that he said was lost during a decade of rapid global growth.

Toyoda has not commented publicly on the faulty accelerators and floor mats since expressing regret for the deaths of four people in a crash linked to the problems in August last year. "Toyota is the new GM in terms of experiencing quality glitches, over-expansion and the proliferation of new product models," said Dennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group. "Toyota has been too aggressive and perhaps complacent in terms of focus on quality. They can't concentrate on the details with so many models."

The level of attention on Toyota's woes - from consumer groups, media and the government - is also the manifestation of another major fear that Toyota has harbored: that public opinion could be unkind to those at the top. In addition to the recall, Toyota has shut down sales of its best-selling vehicles in North America under pressure from the Obama administration to address the product safety issue, in an almost unheard-of intervention.

"It's quite clear that economic policies are not just a matter of national concern but European concern," Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, told reporters in Brussels. According to high-level EU officials, Greece would in the last resort receive emergency support in an operation involving eurozone governments and the Commission but not the International Monetary Fund.

Eurozone countries and EU authorities are reluctant to spell out how they would assist Greece, for fear that it would relax pressure on Athens to attack its problems and unsettle rattled financial markets. The immediate priority is for Athens to demonstrate that it is serious about cutting public expenditure, improving tax collection, publishing reliable financial statistics and tackling corruption, the officials said. "Greece has to sort this out itself. That is the issue," a French official said.

His message was echoed by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister, who said: "The euro club is a strong club with strong ties and reciprocal support. Let no one be mistaken about that."

Heavy debts will weigh on governments and households in the US and Europe for some time, while hopes for global growth will continue to rest on fast-developing countries such as India and China, predicted participants at the meeting's opening debate on the economy.

As many expected, the debate on regulating big banks also stoked passions. The push for more stringent regulation has accelerated in Europe and around the world since last week, when US President Barack Obama's administration proposed a plan to tax and curb activities of big banks.

The annual gathering of much of the world financial elite in Davos offers a chance to gauge the mood of business, regulators and analysts about the year ahead. Wednesday's debate suggested that while the global economy is growing again, it isn't out of the woods yet.

The world faces a long, slow recovery "ending in subpar growth," with the risk of a renewed recession along the way, said Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University who accurately predicted the financial crisis in Davos three years ago.

He suggested the nation could once again face north-south conflict and said other areas like Darfur would try to follow the south to independence. Southern Sudanese are due to vote in an independence referendum next year. The vote was agreed as part of a 2005 peace deal which ended a 22-year war between north and south. The BBC's James Copnall, in Khartoum, says it is rare for such a senior official to be so outspoken.

Although the war between north and south ended officially in 2005, tensions and mistrust continue. Some 2,000 people died in ethnic clashes in the south last year - more than in Darfur's low-level conflict. The civil war between the mainly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south claimed the lives of some 1.5 million people.

In the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), issued in 2007 by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists wrote that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest in South America was endangered by global warming.

But that assertion was discredited this week when it emerged that the findings were based on numbers from a study by the World Wildlife Federation that had nothing to do with the issue of global warming - and that was written by a freelance journalist and green activist.

How convenient. That means the former head of the CDC was very likely cultivating a relationship with Merck all these years, and now comes the big payoff: Heading up a $5 billion division that sells cervical cancer vaccines (like Gardasil), chickenpox vaccines and of course H1N1 swine flu vaccines, too.

So what's the problem with all this? The problem is that private industry and government health offices such as the CDC or FDA should never be so cozy. When they are, it creates an environment of collusion between Big Government and Big Pharma. We've already seen this with the government-led push for swine flu vaccines that are manufactured (and sold) by drug companies like Merck.

You might even say that the CDC already functions as the marketing division of the pharmaceutical industry. It was the CDC that pushed so hard for swine flu vaccines, even amid the obvious realization that swine flu was no more dangerous than seasonal flu. To this day, the CDC still hasn't bothered to recommend vitamin D for the prevention of either seasonal flu or swine flu. It remains heavily invested in the lucrative vaccine approach - an approach that just happens to financially benefit the very corporations that are hiring ex-CDC employees like Dr Gerberding.

A parliamentary panel convened six months ago by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday issued a much-anticipated, 200-page report recommending that women be banned from wearing the full-face veil in public office buildings, schools, hospitals and while using mass transit. The full-face veil is viewed by many in France as a sign of extremism and a threat to gender equality and secularism.

Sarkozy began the debate in June when he said that the full-face veil was "not welcome" in France, currently home to more than 5 million Muslims, the largest such population in Europe. At present, fewer than 2,000 Muslim women wear the full-face veil in France, according to Interior Ministry statistics.

Mohammed Moussaoui, leader of the government-sponsored Muslim Religion Council, has said that while Islam does not require women to wear full-face veils, banning them would "stigmatize" Muslim women, as he claims they were by a 2004 law forbidding headscarves and other expressions of religious allegiance in French public schools. "It's not good because it will provoke Muslims not only here in France but in the world."

In an interview with me this morning, he warned that growth prospects for the UK and US were poor - because households and governments in both countries had borrowed far too much and would have to repay their debts in coming years. Soros said that the prospects for the UK were worse than the US, because the British government is approaching the limits of what it can comfortably borrow from investors to finance public spending.

He added - which will not come as a surprise to readers of this column - that the sources of the UK's financial weakness were excessive borrowing by individuals for house purchases and a financial sector that had also borrowed and lent too much. Mr Soros - who was one of the few financiers to predict the 2008 financial crash - says that the UK and the US face many years of low growth.

One woman came to him in tears, asking him to help a cousin who had lost his leg. Another woman told him she lost 36 family members to the earthquake. "And what do you say to that?" Thevenin asked. "At times there is no way to help a person cope. Even the death of one loved one, one person traumatizes you, but to imagine five, 10, 36 all at once."

After last week's disaster, many of New York's Haitians are turning to religion for answers. But spiritual leaders have few to offer in the aftermath of a tragedy so overwhelming and incomprehensible. They can do little more than pray, hold memorial services and reaffirm the resilience of the Haitian people and their faith.

In Haiti, 80 percent of the population belongs to the Roman Catholic Church and 16 percent to various Protestant churches. Many Haitians practice voodoo along with Christianity - roughly half, according to the CIA World Factbook, and far more, according to some Haitians. "It's a symbiosis, it's parallel," said Nicole Miller, a voodoo priestess or mambo of the Temple of Yehwe, in Plainview, New York "As they say in Haiti, it's 100 percent Catholic and 90 percent voodoo."

The conference is expected to agree a $500 million (310 million pounds), five-year fund for President Karzai to "buy off" insurgents who are not ideologically committed to destroying the West. Downing Street confirmed that Britain will make a contribution of a "few million". Germany has agreed to $70 million over five years and the bulk of the money will come from the Japanese aid budget to Afghanistan, diplomats suggested.

In return, the Afghan leader will have to agree to international monitors to strengthen an anti-corruption campaign in his Government.

President Karzai, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, flew in yesterday for the talks, which will be chaired by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary. Before he arrived, Mr Karzai insisted that Afghanistan wanted to take responsibility for its affairs as soon as possible. "Afghanistan does not want to be a burden on the shoulder of our allies and friends," he said.

Nevertheless, foreign money and experience will be needed for the delicate reintegration programme, which is being co-ordinated by American and British officers.

Still, that doesn't seem to deter anyone. We are only half a day into this year's meeting and already there have been any number of stabs at predicting where the next big flash point is. Lord Levene, chairman of Lloyd's of London, reckons the biggest danger is from oppressive regulation, which he thinks will provoke a crisis of stagnation. For Joseph Frenkel, chairman of JP Morgan Chase International, it's protectionism. Once fiscal and monetary policy fail in fighting the present crisis, he reckons, the temptation for the politicians to try protectionism may prove too much to resist.

Rather more plausible is Kenneth Rogoff's prediction that the banking crisis is about to morph into a fully blown sovereign debt and fiscal crisis. According to the Harvard University economics professor, this nearly always happens after a financial crisis. There are any number of historical precedents for it. The idea that the US can grow it's way out of trouble, as it did in the aftermath of the second world war, is in his view just "voodoo economics". He didn't think there would be default in the US or Britain, but there would be fiscal crisis, and for some smaller, periferal economies, outright default should not be ruled out.

But as I say, the Davos record on this kind of prediction is not exactly great. When the next crisis comes, ten to one on everyone will be looking in the other direction again. A lot of people claim to have seen this latest crisis coming, or at least to have recognised the dangers of an unsafe banking system, but the global consensus certainly didn't. Somewhere, the seeds of the next crisis will already be germinating, but few know where they are or yet realise the dangers.