Such economic matters joined terrorism, nuclear proliferation and computer-network vulnerabilities as top U.S. security threats described by National Director of Intelligence Michael McConnell in an annual assessment. McConnell said U.S. intelligence agencies had "concerns about the financial capabilities of Russia, China and OPEC countries and the potential use of their market access to exert financial leverage to political ends."

Russia, bolstered in part by oil revenues, was positioning itself to control an energy supply and transportation network from Europe to East Asia, and the Russian military had begun to reverse a long decline, he told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

China has pursued a policy of global engagement out of a desire to expand its growing economy and obtain access markets, resources, technology and expertise, McConnell said. It seeks a constructive relationship with the United States and other countries, but as its influence grows "Beijing probably will increasingly expect its interests to be respected by other countries," he said.

While rat has long been eaten in Thailand's poorer northern regions, a growing number of the country's roadside vendors are now serving it up. The rats are drowned and sold uncooked or ready to eat, with happy customers purchasing rat meat for as much as 150 baht ($4.82; £2.30) a kilogram. "It's better than chicken," one customer told the AP news agency.

Mr Prompim said he only used rats caught from rice fields, and not those found in towns or cities. "They are definitely clean," he said. The animals are killed by drowning, before being skinned ready for cooking - poached, fried, grilled or baked. Mr Prompim says he sells as much as 100kg of rat meat on some days.

"My cup is half full as opposed to half empty," said Archbishop of the West Indies Drexel Gomez, heading a group of clerics who hope they can end the bitter battle of words with a formula aimed at placating both sides. But he conceded that he did not expect 100 percent attendance at the Lambeth Conference -- the summit of Anglican leaders that is held every ten years in Britain.

The consecration of openly gay U.S. bishop Gene Robinson in 2003 has pushed liberals and traditionalists -- many in developing countries -- close to breaking point. Several Conservative U.S. parishes have switched loyalty to Third World Archbishops who, spearheaded by Nigeria's Peter Akinola, are to stage their own summit in Jerusalem in June, just six weeks before the Lambeth Conference. That could irretrievably fracture the 400-year-old church which, unlike the regimented hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, is run by broad consensus with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as first among equals.

Angeline Fuller was found hanged at her home in Commercial Street in the Nantymoel area of Bridgend by her boyfriend at about 1am on Monday. Her death comes just weeks after that of 17-year-old Natasha Randall, and follows the cases of 12 other young people in Bridgend county who have killed themselves since January 2007: Dale Crole, 18; David Dilling, 19; Thomas Davies, 20; Zachary Barnes, 17; Gareth Morgan, 27; James Knight, 26; Jason Williams, 21; Andrew O'Neill, 19; Leigh Jenkins, 22; Liam Clarke, 20; Alan Price, 21; and Luke Goodridge, 20.

Of those 13, seven were linked in some way, although they did not all know each other personally. They were also all thought to have used the social networking website Bebo - leading to fears their deaths were linked to an internet suicide pact. A task force has already been set up to tackle the spiralling rate of suicide in the area and some schools in Bridgend have offered pupils counselling after they approached teachers for help following the recent spate of hangings.

The situation will be discussed by MPs tomorrow after the MP for Bridgend, Madeleine Moon, secured a debate in Parliament. She said: "I am very concerned about the issue, especially given the figures. The suicide rate for young males in Wales is nearly 35 per cent higher than that compared to England, and there were 40 deaths in Bridgend since 2006 with open verdicts. It is vital therefore that this issue is now addressed and a successful holistic strategy needs to be developed."

The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average plunged 646.26 points, or 4.70 percent, from Tuesday to 13,099.24, extending its sharp losses for the second straight trading session. The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was down 57.07 points, or 4.21 percent, to 1,298.41. Stocks fell across all 33 sectors on the TSE.

Brokers said sentiment on the Tokyo market was badly bruised by an overnight equity plunge on Wall Street following the release of dismal January U.S. service industry data, which fueled speculation that Japan's key export market was sliding into a recession. Financial and insurance issues also plummeted under heavy selling pressure after Orix Corp., a leasing and financial services firm, slashed its net profit forecast Tuesday for fiscal year 2007 ending March by 16 percent to 170 billion yen, citing uncertainty over the U.S. subprime loan crisis.

The twisters that slammed Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky were part of a line of storms that raged across the nation's midsection at the end of a day of Super Tuesday primaries in several states. Candidates including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee even paused their victory speeches to remember the victims. At least six tornadoes touched down in the 100 miles between Oxford, Miss., and Jackson, Tenn., according to the National Weather Service in Memphis, where deaths and damage were also reported.

UPDATE:- NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Tennessee emergency officials report 11 more deaths, bringing the death toll from Southern storms to 57.

In a dramatic sequence of events even by Italian standards, Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned last month after coalition allies defected, attempts to set up an interim government failed and Berlusconi's calls for an immediate election prevailed.

Berlusconi, a 71-year-old billionaire who has been prime minister twice before, has a consistent lead in opinion polls, leading Prodi's fragmented centre left by as much as 16 points. His rival will be Rome's 52-year-old mayor Walter Veltroni, who had supported an interim government to change voting rules that were widely blamed for the fragility of Prodi's government, Italy's 61st since World War Two.

"The Federal Reserve is directly involved in manipulating the stock market," said economic analyst Mike Bolser in a telephone interview with WND yesterday. The New York Stock Exchange finished the day down 108.03 points, closing at 12,635.16, much as Bolser predicted, despite recent emergency Fed rate cuts of 1.25 percentage points aimed at stimulating the economy.

"Fed wants the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other financial indicators to descend in a managed way," Bolser said. "The Fed wants to drive the DJIA toward the 8,000 level, or below, in order to help create a deep recession which will have the effect of slowing consumption across the board, and dampening the otherwise harmful effects of inflation.

"A falling DOW is only one element of the recession effects of the excessive Fed-created housing and credit creation, whose bubbles are now bursting," he added. "Without this recession, we would be on a quick trip to hyper-inflation," Bolser, the author of an internationally followed newsletter published in conjunction with his InterventionalAnalysis.com website, said, "and the Fed wants to prevent this."

The Newcastle University team believe the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy. The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests. It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children.

However, the Newcastle work has attracted opposition. Josephine Quintavalle, of the pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said it was "risky, dangerous and a step towards designer babies. It is human beings they are experimenting with," she said. "We should not be messing around with the building blocks of life."

The vast expanse of debris - in effect the world's largest rubbish dump - is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from ABOUT 500 NAUTICAL MILES OFF THE CALIFORNIAN COAST, ACROSS THE NORTHERN PACIFIC, PAST HAWAII AND ALMOST AS FAR AS JAPAN.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that ABOUT 100 MILLION TONS OF FLOTSAM ARE CIRCULATING IN THE REGION. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said. ACCORDING TO THE UN ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME, PLASTIC DEBRIS CAUSES THE DEATHS OF MORE THAN A MILLION SEABIRDS EVERY YEAR, AS WELL AS MORE THAN 100,000 MARINE MAMMALS. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.

The Pentagon would receive a $36 billion, 8 percent boost for the 2009 budget year beginning Oct. 1, even as programs aimed at the poor would be cut back or eliminated. Half of domestic Cabinet departments would see their budgets cut outright. Slumping revenues and the cost of an economic rescue package will combine to produce a huge jump in the deficit to $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009, the White House says, just shy of the record $413 billion set four years ago.

But even those figures are optimistic since they depend on rosy economic forecasts and leave out the full costs of the war in Iraq. The White House predicts the economy will grow at a 2.7 percent clip this year, far higher than congressional and private economists expect, and the administration's $70 billion figure for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply a placeholder until the next president takes office. Bush's lame-duck budget plan is likely to be ignored by Congress, which is controlled by Democrats and already looking ahead to November elections. His long-term projections are mostly academic since he's leaving office next January.

WHEN HE TOOK OFFICE THE TOTAL FEDERAL DEBT HELD BY THE PUBLIC WAS $3.3 TRILLION, and some policymakers actually worried that investors might not be able to get their hands on enough federal bonds unless taxes were cut. Now, debt held by the public - including foreign governments - IS EXPECTED TO REACH $5.4 TRILLION THIS YEAR AND $5.9 TRILLION IN 2009, according to Bush's budget submission. Some $2.3 trillion is foreign held.

The illness is called Progressive Inflammatory Neuropathy (PIN) and its symptoms range from acute paralysis to gradual increase of weakness on both sides of the body, which in some cases happens over 8 days and in others over 213 days. The symptoms vary in severity from slight weakness and numbness to paralysis that affects mobility, mostly in the lower extremities.

The current thinking, which is yet to be proved, is that the meat workers are being exposed to splatter and aerosol droplets of pig brain tissue created by the compressed air blast, which liquefies the tissue before expelling it from the pig skull. Once inhaled, small particles of pig brain tissue are then attacked by the worker's immune system which uses antibodies that also attack the body's own almost identical human nerve tissue. Following the PIN outbreak in a Minnesota meat processing plant, the CDC launched a nationwide survey of large slaughterhouses and found two more meat plants that had used the compressed air system recently. One of the plants was also reporting cases of a neurologic illness among its meat processing workers.

A puzzling feature of this outbreak was raised by the plant owner at one of the affected plants, who started as a floor walker in 1970. He told the Washington Post that they had been "harvesting pig brains since 1998, using the same method and the same 70-pound pressure air hose." So why did the outbreak not take place ten years ago, when they started using the method?

At least 45 Egyptian policemen and 14 Palestinians were wounded in the clash at the Rafah border crossing, which Hamas Islamists blasted open on January 23 to let Gazans stock up on supplies in defiance of an Israeli-led blockade. The dead person was identified by local medical officials as a Palestinian civilian. Two Egyptians suffered gunshot wounds and one senior security official sustained fractures from stone throwing, security sources and medical officials said.

Hamas denied any role in the fighting, which began after Egyptian security men stopped the flow of people trying to go back home and the crowd responded with stone-throwing, drawing smoke grenades from the Egyptians, local residents said. The Egyptian government faces a difficult balancing act. It does not want to be seen as aiding the Israeli blockade, but is under U.S. and Israeli pressure to take control. It also fears the spread of Islamist influence and the effects of becoming home to so many undocumented Palestinians.

Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006. During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter. The downward trend accelerated despite a steady increase in the membership of the Catholic Church to more than 1.1bn.

The BBC's David Willey in the Italian capital says the accelerating downward trend must have caused concern to the Pope. The Roman Catholic Church has an aging and diminishing number of parish and diocesan clergy and this latest fall is quite dramatic, our correspondent says.

The Wellcome Trust is investing £4bn over the next five years to look into the genetic make-up of heart disease, cancer and other illnesses. The work will build on the information gleaned from the Human Genome Project. The trust believes the investment will speed up research, but that it is still unlikely there will be any quick fixes.

BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh said the sheer level of investment will make a big difference to the pace and direction of medical research. He said the research would investigate how some of the world's biggest killers destroy the human body, and that brain diseases and mental illness would also be a priority.

The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 by the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, who left the capital of his successful drug company to be used for on-going medical research.