The annual contest encourages students to mix and match genetic parts in order to program spectacular results from run-of-the-mill organisms. In fact, students can order DNA pieces online from MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The chunks of DNA, called BioBricks, have been catalogued and their functions defined so that students can take this BioBrick and that BioBrick and build new little creatures for themselves.

Perhaps students are using harmless strains right now for this competition, but as the old adage says, familiarity breeds contempt. WILL THESE STUDENTS WORK CAREFULLY IN THEIR FUTURE RESEARCH, stepping lightly with awe and respect for the genetic code, or will they treat genetic engineering like a game – with potentially catastrophic results?

"I like messing with genes and genomes, throwing things in and out and manipulating all that stuff," said, Chris Von Dollen, a junior at Johns Hopkins University. "WE'VE ALREADY CONTROLLED SO MANY OTHER THINGS IN NATURE THAT IT'S BECOME UNNATURAL. To me, it's just one more step in the process."

No one knows exactly when a country tips into a debt compound trap. But Japan must be close, even allowing for the fact that liabilities of the state Loan Programme (FILP) have fallen by 40pc of GDP since 2000. "THE DEBT SITUATION IS IRRECOVERABLE," said Carl Weinberg from High Frequency Economics. "I don't see any orderly way out of this. They will not be able to fund their deficit. THERE WILL BE A FISCAL SHUTDOWN, A PENSION HAIRCUT, AND BANK FAILURES THAT WILL ROCK THE WORLD. It is criminally negligent that rating agencies are not blowing the whistle on this."

Japan's terrible errors are by now well known. It failed to jettison its mercantilist export model in time. It resisted the feminist revolution, leading to a baby strike by young women. It acquiesced in a mad investment bubble (like China now) in the 1980s, stealing growth from the future.

It wasted its immense fiscal firepower, scattering money for 20 years on half-baked spending projects to keep the economy afloat. QE was too little, too late, and this is the lesson for the West. We must cut borrowing drastically over the next decade, and offset this with ultra-easy monetary policy. Does Downing Street understand this? Does the White House? Does the European Central Bank? Clearly not.

Data on diet among 3,500 middle-aged civil servants was compared with depression five years later, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported. The team said the study was the first to look at the UK diet and depression.

Dr Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said: "This study adds to an existing body of solid research that shows the strong links between what we eat and our mental health. Major studies like this are crucial because they hold the key to us better understanding mental illness." He added people's diets were becoming increasingly unhealthy.

"The UK population is consuming less nutritious, fresh produce and more saturated fats and sugars. We are particularly concerned about those who cannot access fresh produce easily or live in areas where there are a high number of fast food restaurants and takeaways." Margaret Edwards, head of strategy at the mental health charity SANE, said: "PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH ARE CLOSELY RELATED, so we should not be too surprised by these results, but we hope there will be further research which may help us to understand more fully the relationship between diet and mental health."

The bankruptcy, ONE OF THE LARGEST IN US CORPORATE HISTORY, has been widely expected for months and is unlikely to provide a massive near-term shock to the financial system. But CIT's trouble could further weigh on the fragile US economy. The bankruptcy is also a blow for the US government, which invested $2.33 billion in CIT in December through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and will likely lose most of it.

"The bankruptcy filing is unlikely to crater financial markets," said Chip Hanlon, president of Delta Global Advisors in Huntington Beach, California, but he noted, "It's not a positive. If anything it may be psychological and weigh on people's mind about how things are overall. It adds to peoples' question marks about how healthy the economy is," Hanlon said.

CIT'S SHARES PEAKED ABOVE $60 APIECE IN 2007, BUT CLOSED ON FRIDAY AT 72 CENTS.

CIT, founded in 1908, has historically been one of the biggest lenders to small and mid-sized businesses, a sector that is starved for credit now. US President Barack Obama is offering taxpayer money to community banks in an effort to kickstart lending to these companies, WHICH EMPLOY ABOUT HALF OF THE US WORK FORCE.

Between the end of the Second World War and the erection of the Wall in 1961, 3.5million East Germans had fled west. The south side of Bernauer Strasse became part of the infamous 'death strip' – a no-go zone, up to 500 yards wide in places, cleared to provide an uninterrupted line of fire for East German border guards, who had orders to shoot on sight. In all, 239 people died trying to breach the Wall.

The strip was floodlit and overlooked by 116 watchtowers, 20 command centres and fierce guard dogs. It contained anti-vehicle obstacles and was lined with finely raked gravel, making it impossible to move quietly, while beds of nails lay beneath overhanging balconies.

After reunification, Berlin spent £50billion tearing down the Wall, erasing its traces and refurbishing the structures that communism had allowed to fall into ruin, with the death strip becoming the city's most sought-after and expensive real estate.

The closings boost the number of FAILED US BANKS THIS YEAR TO 115. The nine banks closed Friday were the most the agency has shut in one day since the financial crisis began taking down banks last year. In 1989, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis, the FDIC closed 534 banks, or about 10 a week.

Failures have been especially concentrated in California, Georgia and Illinois. While the pounding from losses on home mortgages may be nearing an end, DELINQUENCIES ON COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE LOANS REMAIN A HOT SPOT OF POTENTIAL TROUBLE, regulators say. If the recession deepens, defaults on the high-risk loans could spike. Many regional banks, especially, hold large concentrations of these loans.

Participants, who included members of THE KINGDOM'S PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS AND THE ISLAMIC ACTION FRONT, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, called for severing all ties with Israel and slammed the Wadi Araba peace treaty Jordan and Israel signed in 1994.

Abdullah Obeidat, chairman of the council of Jordan's professional associations, which called for the sit-in on the occasion of the 15th anniversary for signing the peace treaty, slammed the treaty and said the associations will continue placing pressure on the authorities to abolish it. Jordan's 14 professional associations have been spearheading efforts since 1994 to scrap the peace treaty and cut all types of normalization with Israel.

"Fifteen years have passed since the treaty was signed and it did not bring any good. The treaty was signed against the will of the public," said Islamist MP Hamzah Mansour, head of the Higher Executive Committee for Defending the Homeland and Confronting Normalization.

They expressed concerns during this week's European Union summit in Brussels after Mr Cameron wrote to Czech president Vaclav Klaus, who has so far refused to sign the treaty, according to The Guardian. The letter was sent earlier this month and outlined THE TORIES' COMMITMENT TO HOLD A REFERENDUM ON THE TREATY unless it had been ratified by all 27 member states before they won power.

With the Czech Republic the last EU nation needed to sign the treaty, Mr Cameron's initiative was seen as an attempt to embolden Mr Klaus to hold firm against ratification. Mr Sarkozy was also allegedly overheard telling Gordon Brown he was incensed by the letter. Mrs Merkel and Mr Zapataro apparently made similar remarks, also in private.

The Pope's condemnation follows on from similar criticism from Catholic bishops in Spain who earlier this week urged parents not to let their children dress up as ghosts and goblins. In an article entitled 'The Dangerous Messages of Halloween', the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano quoted liturgical expert Joan Maria Canals as saying: 'HALLOWEEN HAS AN UNDERCURRENT OF OCCULTISM AND IS ABSOLUTELY ANTI-CHRISTIAN'.

Father Canals urged parents 'to be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death.' L'Osservatore praised a church at Alcala de Henares which had decided to hold a prayer vigil on Saturday night, and the Paris archdiocese's idea of having kids play a lucky dip dubbed 'Holywins' instead.

It added that: 'These and similar initiatives in South America allow Catholic communities to have an alternative to the feast, to bear witness to their faith and Christian hope in the face of death.' The Catholic Church in Italy has taken a dim view of Halloween's growing popularity for years. Last year, the Italian bishops newspaper Avvenire appealed for a full-blown boycott, DESCRIBING HALLOWEEN AS A 'DANGEROUS CELEBRATION OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE'.

In fact, the date has been gaining in so much popularity in the UK that it is expected to be WORTH AN ESTIMATED £235M TO THE RETAIL SECTOR this year, according to independent retail analysts Planet Retail. The phenomenal growth in sales of fancy dress, treats, tricks and dressings for the home mean that the season now is third only to Christmas and Easter.

Yet the festivities in the UK are nowhere near the terrifying scale seen IN THE US. IN 2008, HALLOWEEN WAS WORTH A DIZZYING $55.7BN, according to the National Retail Federation, with the average American spending $66.45, up from $64.82 a year earlier.

A new database called ContactPoint is being set up to hold details on every child in the land, including "information as to the existence of any cause for concern in relation to them". As a parliamentary committee observed when the legislation was being debated, this is "an extremely subjective and open-ended phrase which is almost bound to include very sensitive information about a child".

Will it, for instance, include their "racist tendencies"? Yet again we are witnessing AN UTTERLY DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE TO A PERCEIVED PROBLEM, WHICH IS NOT REALLY A PROBLEM. More than that: since the information on ContactPoint is not erased until the age of 24, an accusation of racism could follow a person from the nursery into adulthood.

In an incident that has generated a storm of publicity in devout Poland, Professor Maria Sobaniec-Lotowaska, of the medical university in Bialystok, has dumbfounded sceptics by saying she considered the material found in the container as heart tissue.

Pawel Grzesiowskia, a leading biologist from the National Medical Institute, has attributed the miracle to nothing more than bacteria growing on the small piece of wafer, which fell into a water container during a mass in the eastern village of Sokolka.

But this has failed to quell many believing that something miraculous took place. The Catholic Church said it had already ruled out the possibility of a hoax, and local police have said that there is no evidence of fraud.

WHAT IT IS: Gross domestic product is the broadest measure of the nation's economy. GDP measures what individuals, businesses and the government spend as well as the net impact of the nation's imports and exports.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: Economists use GDP as one of several data points to determine whether the economy is in a period of recession or expansion. The 2008-2009 recession was one of the deepest ever - it was the first time in history in which the economy retreated for four straight quarters.

WHERE WE'RE HEADED: The economy returned to positive growth in the last three months after contracting by 3.7% since the recession began. But experts warn that government stimulus programs like Cash for Clunkers contributed strongly to the economic expansion and that THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY IS MORE FRAGILE THAN THE GDP NUMBERS MAY SUGGEST.

Mirinae, a category 2 typhoon with maximum center winds of 150 kph (93 mph) and gusts of up to 185 kph, was expected to make landfall on Saturday, dumping rains on major rice-producing provinces north of the capital. The same areas were submerged in floodwaters just a few weeks ago when Typhoon Parma hovered for a week over the north.

"The critical period is between LATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT AND EARLY ON SATURDAY MORNING (31st) because the typhoon is expected to pass through the... capital," Nathaniel Cruz, chief weather forecaster, told reporters. "We expect heavy rains that could bring floods and landslides in northern Luzon island," he said.

In late September, typhoon Ketsana dumped more than a month's worth of average rainfall on Manila and surrounding areas, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless and damaging more than 180,000 metric tons of paddy rice. About 80 percent of the capital was submerged by 2-3 meters of floodwaters. Nearly a month later, some areas remained flooded, causing a bacterial infection outbreak that has killed nearly 200 people.

Another typhoon, Parma, hit the country's northernmost tip early this month, taking the death toll from the two typhoons to more than 920 people. Damage to crops and infrastructure was estimated at nearly 38 billion pesos ($796 million).

And for those who cry "read the bill," beware. THERE ARE PLENTY OF PARAGRAPHS LIKE THIS ONE:-

"(a) Outpatient Hospitals – (1) In General – Section 1833(t)(3)(C)(iv) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395(t)(3)(C)(iv)) is amended – (A) in the first sentence – (i) by inserting "(which is subject to the productivity adjustment described in subclause (II) of such section)" after "1886(b)(3)(B)(iii); and (ii) by inserting "(but not below 0)" after "reduced"; and (B) in the second sentence, by inserting "and which is subject, beginning with 2010 to the productivity adjustment described in section 1886(b)(3)(B)(iii)(II)".

The section deals with "incorporating productivity improvements into market basket updates that do not already incorporate such improvements," if that helps.

Optimistic lawmakers say it could take a week just to get through the bill's text. "It's one thing to read it," said Representative Lee Terry (Republican for Nebraska), a lawyer who voted against the first version of the bill on its way through the Energy and Commerce Committee. "It's another thing to understand it when it's written in legalese." Republicans aide said a print-out of the bill weighs more than 19 pounds and stands nearly nine inches tall.