Referring to the former US vice president, who attended Davos this year, he added: "I'm very sorry that some people like Al Gore are not ready to listen to the competing theories. I do listen to them. Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. Al Gore is an important person in this movement."

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, he said that he was more worried about the reaction to the perceived dangers than the consequences. "I'M AFRAID THAT THE CURRENT CRISIS WILL BE MISUSED FOR RADICALLY CONSTRAINING THE FUNCTIONING OF THE MARKETS AND MARKET ECONOMY ALL AROUND THE WORLD," he said. "I'm more afraid of the consequences of the crisis than the crisis itself."

Thousands of people in ice-caked Kentucky awoke in motels and shelters, asked to leave their homes by authorities who said emergency teams in some areas were too strapped to reach everyone in need of food, water and warmth. A 20-degree temperature boost was forecast across much of the region, a boon to the power crews but one that carried with it the threat of flooding.

Dozens of deaths have been reported and many people are pleading for a faster response to the power outages. About 536,000 homes and businesses across Kentucky were without power, down from more than 600,000 the largest outage in state history, surpassing the damage last year from the remnants of Hurricane Ike.

The outages disabled water systems in much of the western part of the state, where some in rural areas resorted to dipping buckets in a creek. Authorities warned it could be days or weeks before power was restored in the most remote spots.

Netanyahu, the current opposition leader and head of the hardline Likud party, called Iran the greatest danger to Israel and to all humanity. When asked if stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions included a military strike, he replied: "It includes everything that is necessary to make this statement come true."

Iran has denied it is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and says it is pursuing nuclear power for peaceful uses. It also denies it is engaged in terrorism, instead accusing Israel of terrorist policies against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which were occupied by Israel after the 1967 Mideast War.

Livni, the foreign minister, said if Hamas "hasn't gotten the message yet" Israel would strike it again. Regardless, she said Hamas could not be negotiated with and called on the people of Gaza to overthrow their regime. "I DO NOT INTEND TO REACH ANY AGREEMENTS WITH HAMAS. Agreements I make with people who accept my existence," she said. "They do not recognize Israel and do not renounce violence and terrorism. They will not be a party to an agreement and therefore the people of Gaza have to expel the Hamas from within them."

For five days, more than 2,000 business and political leaders discussed what some here called the "crisis of capitalism". HOWEVER, MOST DISCUSSIONS DESCRIBED THE PROBLEMS, NOT SOLUTIONS. The forum's official theme this year had been "shaping the post-crisis world", but that turned out to be premature. Rather, the debates proved the widespread uncertainty amongst both politicians and corporate bosses, as they tried to gauge the depth of the economic crisis and explore ways how to get out of it.

Nobody in Davos tried to refute the prediction that the global economy is heading into a deep and long recession. One top money market manager said: "If you believe that the world economy will turn the corner at the end of this year, or in [the first quarter] of 2010, I tell you we have not turned the corner, we can't see the corner, we don't even know where the corner is." Another participant summed up the state of the discussion as "we don't know what to do, only that we need to do something and we need to do it fast".

Probably the biggest worry, apart from getting the world economy "out of intensive care", was THE THREAT OF PROTECTIONISM. Raising trade barriers now, politicians, business leaders and campaigners agreed, would have a devastating impact, for starters on the economies of rich countries, but even more so on the poorest people in the world.

Recent reports suggest that the incident was not accurately portrayed by senior U.N. officials. John Ging, the director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, spoke to the Toronto Globe and Mail last week and agreed that NO SHELL HAD ACTUALLY STRUCK THE SCHOOL BUILDING. Ging said he had never claimed that the school itself was hit, and he blamed Israel for confusion over where the strike took place.

Shortly after the alleged attack, Ging harshly criticized Israel for firing near the school, saying he had given the exact coordinates of the compound to the IDF. He charged that the IDF had failed to avoid hitting the building. While admitting that Israeli fire had not hit the school compound, Ging insisted it made little difference. "Forty-one innocent people were killed in the street… The State of Israel still has to answer for that," he said.

While many Israel news outlets reported that the strike had taken place near the school, several international media networks reported that the U.N. school building itself was hit. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs may have added to the confusion by releasing a report stating that Israeli fire "directly hit two UNRWA schools." The IDF responded to criticism over the attack by explaining that soldiers were simply responding to terrorist fire and did not mean to hit a civilian area.

It is being brought on behalf of Charles F. Kerchner Jr., Lowell T. Patterson, Darrell James Lenormand and Donald H. Nelson Jr. and names as defendants Barack Hussein Obama II, the U.S., Congress, the Senate, House of Representatives and former Vice President Dick Cheney along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

As WND has reported, dozens of lawsuits have been filed over Obama's eligibility to assume the office of the president. Many have been dismissed while others remain pending. The cases, in various ways, have alleged Obama does not meet the "natural born citizen" clause of the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, which reads, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

PERHAPS THE MOST PERPLEXING DETAIL, HOWEVER, HAS BEEN OBAMA'S REFUSAL TO ALLOW THE PUBLIC RELEASE OF A SIGNED "VAULT" COPY OF HIS ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE. The new case was launched in New Jersey, and focuses on the alleged failure in Congress to follow the Constitution. That document, the lawsuit states, "provides that Congress must fully qualify the candidate 'elected' by the Electoral College Electors." Several of the cases not scheduled for hearings at the Supreme Court still remain active at lower court levels, from which emergency requests to the high court were launched.

"I know that Mr. Obama is not a constitutionally qualified natural born citizen and is ineligible to assume the office of president of the United States," Berg said in a statement on his ObamaCrimes.com website. "Obama knows he is not 'natural born' as he knows where he was born and he knows he was adopted in Indonesia; Obama is an attorney, Harvard Law grad who taught Constitutional law; Obama knows his candidacy is the largest 'hoax' attempted on the citizens of the United States in over 200 years; Obama places our Constitution in a 'crisis' situation; and Obama is in a situation where he can be blackmailed by leaders around the world who know Obama is not qualified," Berg's statement continued.

The survey, by respected polling firm ComRes, will fuel the debate around evolution and creationism ahead of next week's 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, said THE FINDINGS REVEALED A WORRYING LEVEL OF SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE AMONG BRITONS.

In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that "evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages" The suggestion that a designer's input is needed reflects the "intelligent design" theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. Paul Woolley, the director of Theos said: "Darwin is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution."

The Church of England last year issued a statement conceding it had been over-defensive in dismissing Darwin's ideas in the past. The Church launched a website promoting the naturalist's evolutionary views on which it said: "Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still."

But then this week new U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear their attitudes and compensation have to change at a time when they are being bailed out with many billions of dollars of taxpayers' money and the rest of the country is suffering from mass layoffs and declining retirement accounts. "That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful," Obama said on Thursday, responding to NEWS THAT WALL STREET PAID OUT $18.4 BILLION IN BONUSES FOR 2008.

In the previous few days, Obama and his spokesman had weighed in against Citigroup's decision to buy a $50 million corporate jet ordered in 2005, prompting the bank to cancel the contract, and attacked former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain for spending $1.2 million on renovating his office. One Democratic senator on Friday even proposed a law that would prevent bank executives from making more than $400,000 a year while they receive government financial support.

Add it all up, and Wall Street has little choice but to make changes big and small, veteran bankers and compensation experts said.

Mr Brown warned about the rising threat of protectionism and said that global co-operation was the only way forward. "This is not like the 1930s. The world can come together," the prime minister said. He told reporters: "This is the first financial crisis of the global age. And there is no clear map that has been set out from past experience to deal with it."

"We're learning all the time about how to deal with what are real problems for which we have no historical analogies to fall back on, because when the 1930s problems hit them, they did not have the global financial markets that we have today."

He called for co-operation and the rebuilding of "out-of-date" institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. "This is a global banking crisis and you've got to deal with it for what it is, a global banking crisis," he said.

In an essay to be published this week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis. "The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their faith in the corrective powers of the market.

"Neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as LITTLE MORE THAN PERSONAL GREED DRESSED UP AS AN ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY. And, ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."

Mr Rudd writes in The Monthly that just as Franklin Roosevelt rebuilt US capitalism after the Great Depression, modern-day "social democrats" such as himself and the US President, Barack Obama, must do the same again. But he argues that "minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do" and advocates a new system that reaches beyond the 70-year-old interventionist principles of John Maynard Keynes.

He mocks neo-liberals "who now find themselves tied in ideological knots in being forced to rely on the state they fundamentally despise to save financial markets from collapse".

The biggest demonstration took place in the eastern city of Vladivostok, where protesters demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In the capital Moscow, police arrested a number of people at an unauthorised gathering by a radical party.

ANTI-GOVERNMENT PROTESTS WERE UNTHINKABLE JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO as the economy boomed with record high oil prices and as the Kremlin tightened its grip over almost all aspects of society, the BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow says. But now with the economy in deep trouble, THERE IS REAL FEAR AMONGST ORDINARY PEOPLE ABOUT WHAT THE FUTURE WILL HOLD, he says. He adds that unemployment is rising rapidly, as are the prices of basic food and utilities.

Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said the economic crisis had exposed the bankruptcy of Mr Putin's policies.

The S&P 500-stock index lost 2.28% Friday to end at 825.88, for cumulative losses in January of 8.57%. Until Friday, its worst January from 1929 onward occurred in 1970, when it lost 7.65%. Both stock-market indexes are off by more than 40% from their 2007 highs. Back in May 2008, the Dow hit the 13,000 mark. A slew of layoff announcements, skepticism of the Obama stimulus plan, and a series of bleak earnings reports all crunched U.S. stock markets over the course of the week. Those developments left investors who exited stocks last year with little desire to put their money to work in the markets, limiting any stock rallies.

"We're at month-end, the Dow is down, and there's no ray of sunshine," said Mr. Cheslock, managing director at Cohen Capital Group LLC. "We need to get expectations down - it's good for the market over the long term. Last quarter was horrible, this quarter will probably be horrible."

Gold and the U.S. dollar were among Friday's few silver linings. The dollar rose 1.23% against the euro. February gold gained 2.5%, ending at $927.30.

The plan will involve an overhaul of the troubled asset relief programme – the $700bn bail-out fund – including strict curbs on compensation at banks receiving public aid. The Tarp overhaul is intended to restore public confidence in what is a deeply unpopular programme and ensure THAT TAXPAYER MONEY IS NOT USED TO FUND EXCESSIVE PAY, BONUSES AND DIVIDENDS TO SHAREHOLDERS. "There will definitely be a cap of some sort on bonuses," said a Wall Street executive who has taken part in talks with the authorities. "THE POLITICAL CLIMATE IS SUCH THAT THERE IS A NEED TO PUNISH WALL STREET."

The announcement will follow Friday's news that the US economy contracted at an annualised rate of 3.8 per cent in last year's final quarter – less than analysts were expecting, but still the worst quarter since 1982. The fall was cushioned by ballooning inventories, which suggest the economy could shrink faster than expected in the first quarter.

The "big bang" approach reflects the belief of Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, and Lawrence Summers, National Economic Council director, that the Bush administration was wrong to dribble out policy initiatives. Mr Geithner intends to present a "comprehensive" plan that policymakers hope will command market confidence. Details of the financial overhaul are being finalised and have yet to be approved by President Barack Obama, but it may include both the purchase of toxic assets by a "bad bank" and insurance-style guarantees for problem assets remaining on bank balance sheets.

Most of them were elderly people who had been struggling in the heat. The heatwave has also caused power outages in Melbourne, Australia's second biggest city. Extreme temperatures of more than 40C (104F) have hit the south-eastern states of Victoria and South Australia in the past three days. If the high temperatures continue into Sunday, it will equal the worst heatwave that south-eastern Australia has witnessed in 100 years. ALREADY, IT HAS CAUSED DISRUPTION, DESTRUCTION AND DEATH.

In Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, health officials reported more than 20 sudden deaths, most of them elderly people overcome by the baking temperatures of over 40C who had suffered strokes and heart attacks. Raging wildfires have ripped through the Gippsland region of neighbouring Victoria, and at least 10 homes have been destroyed near the rural town of Boolarra.

In Melbourne, the state capital, the heatwave has meant disruption to transportation services and power outages. Trains have been cancelled because the RAIL LINES HAVE BUCKLED in the heat. An explosion at an electrical substation left over 300,000 homes without power.

President Barack Obama's advisers spent days puzzling over the question of who to send to represent America's new administration at the three-day MUNICH CONFERENCE ON SECURITY POLICY, which begins on Friday of next week. The closely watched and prestigious conference is a place where the Americans could, for example, enjoy an informal chat with the Iranians - the kind of dialogue which Obama recently, and perhaps not entirely coincidentally, said he was willing to have.

And a lot is in fact possible in Munich. When it goes well, the conference is a no-nonsense event where decision-makers can talk frankly about current international hot spots. This year 73 big-name delegates have been announced, including prime ministers and presidents, foreign and defense ministers, ambassadors and members of parliament. A summit in its own right, which resembles the G-20 more than the G-8, this year's Munich security conference is overshadowing its competitor in Davos, which is focusing on the global economic crisis.

Our current, terribly interesting, times ensure that this year's Munich conference will attract unprecedented international attention. It will provide pointers as to what will be possible during Obama's first year in office - and what won't.