Village after village, families have fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds. The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds. But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many farmers have found there is a terrible price to be paid. FAR FROM BEING 'MAGIC SEEDS', GM PEST-PROOF 'BREEDS' OF COTTON HAVE BEEN DEVASTATED BY BOLLWORMS, a voracious parasite.

NOR WERE THE FARMERS TOLD THAT THESE SEEDS REQUIRE DOUBLE THE AMOUNT OF WATER. This has proved a matter of life and death. With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.

Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis. When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. THAT'S BECAUSE GM SEEDS CONTAIN SO- CALLED 'TERMINATOR TECHNOLOGY', meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own. AS A RESULT, FARMERS HAVE TO BUY NEW SEEDS EACH YEAR AT THE SAME PUNITIVE PRICES. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

No matter that statist policies were responsible for this global crisis in the first place. IT WAS WESTERN GOVERNMENTS THAT SET INTEREST RATES TOO LOW FOR TOO LONG, ENCOURAGING US ALL TO ABUSE CREDIT. It was Eastern governments that held down their currencies to pursue mercantilist trade advantage, thereby accumulating vast foreign reserves that had to be recycled. Hence the bond bubble.
This is the deformed creature known as Bretton Woods II. Protectionist Democrats are right to complain that the game is rigged. Free trade? Laugh on. But at this point I have given up hoping that we will draw the right conclusions from this crisis. THE UNIVERSAL VERDICT IS THAT CAPITALISM HAS RUN AMOK.

"THIS IS THE DRAMATIC EQUIVALENT OF THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION: we now know that an era has ended," said Mr Hobsbawm, still lucid at 91. "It is certainly the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s. As Marx and Schumpeter foresaw, globalization not only destroys heritage, but is incredibly unstable. It operates through a series of crises. There'll be a much greater role for the state, one way or another. We've already got the state as lender of last resort, we might well return to idea of the state as employer of last resort, which is what it was under FDR. It'll be something which orients, and even directs the private economy," he said.

"The rule of the radical market ideology that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan has ended with a loud bang," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor next year. "WE NEED A COMPREHENSIVE NEW START, SO WE CAN RE-ESTABLISH OUR SOCIETY ON FRESH FOUNDATIONS. People create value, not locusts," he said.

EUROPEAN AND UK BANKS ARE FIVE TIMES MORE EXPOSED TO EMERGING MARKETS THAN US BANKS. They alone hold the collective time-bomb of $1.6 trillion (£990bn) in hard currency loans to Eastern Europe – now starting to detonate in Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, and even Russia. At some point, Europe's political class will face the awful truth that their own credit bubbles are just as bad – and perhaps worse – than the excesses of US sub-prime property. AS THAT OCCURS, THE SHOCK WILL MOVE BY DEGREES FROM REVULSION TO POLITICAL RAGE.

Professor Hobsbawm, who spent his youth watching Hitler's rise in Berlin, has a warning for those who think this will help the Left in any recognizable form. "IN THE 1930S, THE NET POLITICAL EFFECT OF THE DEPRESSION WAS TO ENORMOUSLY STRENGTHEN THE RIGHT," he said.

"Thus, nuclear transfer techniques could be used to 'resurrect' animals or maintain valuable genomic stocks from tissues frozen for prolonged periods without any cryopreservation," they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wakayama's team used the classic nuclear transfer technique to make their mouse clones. This involves taking the nucleus out of an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of an ordinary cell from the animal to be cloned.

When done with the right chemical or electric trigger, this starts the egg dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm. "Cloning animals by nuclear transfer provides an opportunity to preserve endangered mammalian species," they wrote. "However, it has been suggested that the 'resurrection' of frozen extinct species (such as the woolly mammoth) is impracticable, as no live cells are available, and the genomic material that remains is inevitably degraded," they said.

In July 2007 Russian scientists discovered the body of a baby mammoth frozen in the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region for as long as 40,000 years. "It remains to be shown whether nuclei can be collected from whole bodies frozen without cryoprotectants and whether they will be viable for use in generating offspring following nuclear transfer," Wakayama's team wrote.

The number of children who take pills for type 2 diabetes — the kind that's closely linked to obesity — more than doubled from 2002 to 2005, to a rate of six out of 10,000 children. That suggests that at least 23,000 privately insured children in the USA are now taking diabetes medications, according to authors of the new study in today's Pediatrics.

Doctors also saw big increases in prescriptions for high cholesterol, asthma and attention deficit and hyperactivity. There was smaller growth for drugs for depression and high blood pressure. "WE'VE GOT A LOT OF SICK CHILDREN," says author Emily Cox, senior director of research with Express Scripts, which administers drug benefit programs for private insurance plans. "What we've been seeing in adults, we're also now seeing in kids."

Unless these children make major changes — such as eating healthier and exercising more — they could be facing a lifetime of illness, Cox says. "These are not antibiotics that they take for seven to 10 days," Cox says. "THESE ARE DRUGS THAT MANY ARE TAKING FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES."

THE CATHOLIC AID AGENCY HAS GIVEN MORE THAN $7.3 MILLION TO ACORN over the past decade for about 320 projects, according to the Catholic News Service. In June, the Catholic Church froze a $1.2 million grant for 38 ACORN chapters after the community-organizing group was accused of voter fraud in 15 states.

State elections officials and the FBI are questioning ACORN workers who submitted voter registration forms signed by Mickey Mouse and members of the Dallas Cowboys football team in their efforts to register voters in low-income neighborhoods, many of whom tend to favor Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama. Mr. Obama once worked with ACORN as a community organizer and lawyer in Chicago.

"While there is value in registering low-income voters, I am concerned that the whole ban on partisanship has been violated," Ralph McCloud, the new executive director for the CCHD, said Monday. Mr. McCloud said he could not reassure Catholics that the funds donated before 2008 were not used in voter fraud. "There is no way we can tell," he said. "All our applications go through a rigorous screening, and we ask each organization to commit to being nonpartisan. The overwhelming reality is most of the groups we fund do tremendous work."

On Tuesday, a high-ranking delegation is beginning a rare visit to Rome in an effort TO PERSUADE THE POPE TO ENDORSE WHAT THEY SAY ARE THE SHARED ORIGINS AND VALUES OF THE WORLD'S TWO BIGGEST RELIGIONS. Their letter, A Common Word, cited passages from the Koran which the scholars said showed that Christianity and Islam worship the same God, and require their respective followers to show each other particular friendship.

The document examined fundamental doctrine and stressed what it said were key similarities - SUCH AS THE BELIEF IN ONE GOD AND THE REQUIREMENT FOR BELIEVERS TO "LOVE THEIR NEIGHBOURS AS THEMSELVES". Significantly the letter acknowledged that the Prophet Muhammad was told only the same truths that had already been revealed to Jewish and Christian prophets, including Jesus himself.

After a year using the Islamic principle of seeking consensus, the letter has developed into a "manifesto" and is backed by almost 300 leaders from Sunni, Shi'ite, Sufi and other Muslim traditions.

These "mark to market" rules, introduced last January via the International Accountancy Standards Board, AT THE BEHEST OF THE EU, forced banks to report their assets daily, at "fire-sale" values. IN A FALLING MARKET THEY WERE DRAMATICALLY UNDERVALUED and this, as much as anything, froze interbank lending and forced banks such as Lehman Brothers to close their doors.

After a panicky EU had pleaded with the IASB to relax the rules, Brussels rushed through a change on October 15. As a result Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, could last week revalue its assets upwards by 630 million euros, saving it from an appeal for government aid.

Without those rules, (REQUESTED BY THE EU) however, much of the disaster which has put so many famous names out of business might never have happened.

In advance of the election, some of Washington's most influential national security thinkers have argued for a dramatic shift in U.S. policy, TO ACTIVELY PURSUE THE EVENTUAL ELIMINATION OF ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS FROM THE EARTH. Many dismiss this goal as a dream, given the lack of trust among the nuclear weapons powers and the entrenched role that atomic weapons have in the global balance of power.

But Democratic front-runner Obama, who is leading in polls before Tuesday's election, endorsed it and his Republican rival John McCain said he hopes to move to "the lowest possible number" of U.S. nuclear weapons. "I will not authorize the development of new nuclear weapons," Obama said in September. "And I will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of U.S. nuclear policy."

It was Pope John XXIII, fondly known as the Good Pope, who phased out clocking machines in the early 1960s. Now the Vatican has brought back a high-tech version involving electronic swipe cards for 2,000 employees. Lay and ecclesiastical staff working in the tiny city state, are now using the swipe cards.

The cards have been issued to everyone from the lowest office staff to the heads of departments, even if they are priests and archbishops, though there has been no mention if Pope Benedict XVI carries one. According to reports some elder clerics in the Vatican have complained that clocking in and out is a headache, especially when they have to leave on pastoral duty. It is all part of a drive to increase efficiency and to make the Vatican more meritocratic.

Next year there are plans to introduce performance-related pay.

MK Tzvi Hendel announced the decision at a press conference, heralding the new party as one that will put education first during a "crisis of values in politics and in every field in this country. The public understands that education is the foundation of everything," Hendel said.

"Anyone who identifies with our path can join and decide who our leader will be," Hendel said, adding that "EVERYONE IS INVITED TO THE PARTY EXCEPT FOR THE EXTREMISTS WHO ARE HAPPY WHEN THEY SEE ARAB BLOODSHED OR HAPPY WHEN THEY SEE SETTLEMENTS EVACUATED."

Four years on, a study by the Pew Research Center has warned of a possible "perfect storm" creating chaos at the polls - fuelled by record numbers of voters, new voters, and shortage of polling station staff. Another report on 10 swing states, by The Century Foundation and Common Cause, found that "SIGNIFICANT PROBLEMS IN THE BASIC FUNCTIONS OF AMERICAN ELECTION ADMINISTRATION SYSTEM PERSIST, AND IN A FEW CASES HAVE WORSENED".

Unsurprisingly, both the Democratic and Republican Parties have been signing up lawyers in readiness for rancorous disputes over voter identity, voting machine malfunctions and close counts. There have already been several legal challenges over the registration of voters and casting of absentee ballots.

In one, the Ohio Republican Party demanded access to lists of newly registered voters whose details did not match driver's licence or social security records - a move which could have enabled activists to challenge the right to vote of up to 200,000 people. On election day, Ms Brunner predicts Ohio's biggest challenge will be the sheer number of people at the polls, with some 80% of registered voters expected to turn out, compared with 70% in 2004.

Food prices have shot up, transport has ground to a standstill and although the waters are slowly receding the capital's streets are still under a meter of water. There have been widespread power cuts. Across the north of the country around 55,000 houses and 440,000 acres of crops have been flooded causing damage worth tens of millions of dollars, according to the government.

Officials say the heaviest rains in 24 years have caused rivers to burst their banks in several places. Hanoi, a picturesque city of three million people on the banks of the Red River, has been worst hit. "Flash floods on the Hoang Long river in the north and rivers from Thanh Hoa to Nghe An will continue to rise," the government's storm and flood control committee said in a flood report on Saturday.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University told the U.N. General Assembly that "THIS IS A GLOBAL CRISIS AND IT REQUIRES A GLOBAL RESPONSE." U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann convened a debate on the global financial meltdown to position the world organization squarely at the center of a possible fix.

Development economist and former U.N. official Sakiko Fukuda-Parr of the New School said that "GLOBAL SOLUTIONS ARE NEEDED." At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference of major powers in New Hampshire, the U.S.-led negotiations spawned the two major sister U.N. institutions, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The Department of Water Resources projects that it will deliver just 15 percent of the amount that local water agencies throughout California request every year. The reservoirs that are most crucial to the state's water delivery system are at their lowest levels since 1977, after two years of dry weather and court-ordered restrictions on water pumping out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. THIS YEAR, WATER AGENCIES RECEIVED JUST 35 PERCENT OF THE WATER THEY REQUESTED.

Farmers in the Central Valley say they'll be forced to fallow fields, while cities from the San Francisco Bay area to San Diego might have to require residents to ration water. In Southern California, the Metropolitan Water District — the agency that supplies water to about half the state's population — has depleted more than a third of its water reserves. The agency's general manager, Jeff Kightlinger, said Californians must immediately reduce their water use to stretch what little water is available.

"We are preparing for the very real possibility of water shortages and rationing throughout the region in 2009," Kightlinger said, adding that his board will consider rationing during its meeting next month.

Shin Bet internal security agency head Yuval Diskin says "a group in the extreme right" is prepared to assassinate politicians "in order to halt diplomatic processes." Diskin spoke Sunday at the weekly meeting of the Israeli Cabinet. His statement was released by another meeting participant who spoke on condition of anonymity because the session was closed.

This week, Israel marks the 13th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist.