If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it's because they are. But some disasters seem to be affecting us in worse ways — and not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters has gone up 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (between 2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster, with an average annual rate of increase of 8.4%). Of the total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.

It is tempting to look at the line up of storms in the Atlantic Ocean (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live. In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse to big cities near water. The population of Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150,000 in the 1930s, a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1,600%, to 2,400,000.

What's changed is what we've put in storms' way. Crowding together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First, it is harder for us to evacuate before a storm because of gridlock. And in much of the developing world, people don't get the kinds of early warnings that Americans get. So large, migrant populations — usually living in flimsy housing — get flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has repeatedly been the hardest hit area by disasters in recent years.

Secondly, even if we get everyone to safety, we still have more stuff in harm's way than ever before. So each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even after adjusting for inflation.

Over the weekend, the mercury at Fairbanks International Airport dropped to 39 degrees below zero. Areas in the Interior outside the city were even colder; 46 below on the Yukon Flats, 41 below in Fort Yukon and 44 below in Central, according to the weather service. Rick Thoman, lead forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Fairbanks, said temperatures rose a few degrees on Sunday, but that was it.

"The temperature will probably continue to go up and down randomly," he said. "With no clouds and no wind on the valley floor, temperatures are pretty much probably going to be stuck." Fairbanks had experienced a relatively mild winter prior to Christmas. It had only dropped to 30 below once, in early December.

The index of leading shares will close down by 32% on a year ago. Banks have been hit hard over the past 12 months, with HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland losing roughly 90% of their share value, while Lloyds TSB and Barclays have lost about 70% of their value.

"The problems that started to emerge in 2007 always meant that 2008 was going to be a volatile year, but few could have predicted just how traumatic it would have turned out," analyst Henk Potts of Barclays Wealth told the BBC Radio Five Live's Wake Up To Money programme.

Egypt is divided, and so is much of the Arab and Muslim world. A proper response to the Israeli air raids on the Gaza Strip - launched in response to rockets being fired into Israel from Hamas militants based in the Gaza Strip - has proven elusive.

Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia officially support the Fatah Party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. In the summer of 2007, however, the radicals from Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah. Syria and Iran have thrown their support behind Hamas - and they have both accused Egypt of being Israel's accomplices. Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon charge Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak with being a traitor.

Those pushing the resolution, which will come before the Republican National Committee at its January meeting, say elected leaders need to be reminded of core principles. They said the RNC must take the dramatic step of wading into policy debates, which traditionally have been left to lawmakers.

"We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, WHICH LEAD TO BIG GOVERNMENT, SOCIALISM AND HIGH TAXES AT THE EXPENSE OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY AND FREEDOMS," said Solomon Yue, an Oregon member and co-sponsor of a resolution that criticizes the US government bailouts of the financial and auto industries.

The strain that caused a severe epidemic in Australia, killing six children, has arrived here as the UK struggles with its worst flu outbreak for eight years. Experts have warned that infections in Britain and Ireland will increase from January to March.

A sharp rise in the number of flu-like illnesses has already been reported by the Health Protection Agency. Soaring infections have caused havoc at A&E departments in NHS hospitals in the past two weeks as thousands of GPs' surgeries have been closed over the Christmas holiday period. The flu season began a month earlier than last year and coincided with widespread outbreaks of the norovirus "winter vomiting bug".

Now the arrival of the H3N2 Brisbane 10 strain will put further pressure on the health service. Latest figures show that among the over-65s, 45 in every 100,000 people now have flu, up from 18 just a week ago. This year's outbreak is well on course to be the worst since 1999/2000, when 22,000 people died. Officially, an outbreak does not become an epidemic until the rate is higher than 200 per 100,000 people.

The index fell to 38, from November's revised 44.7 figure, though it had been expected to rise. The dismal job market appears to have outweighed falling oil prices in consumers' minds, analysts said. Meanwhile, October house prices in 20 US cities fell by a record yearly rate, according to a key home price survey.

The index shows that the price of homes is continuing to fall across the US with many areas showing record price falls. David Blitzer, of Standard & Poor's said that "home prices are back to their March 2004 levels".

In the UK, house prices in England and Wales fell by a further 1.9% in November as activity in the market dropped again, according to the Land Registry. This pushed the annual drop in property prices to 12.2% - the 15th consecutive monthly decrease, the figures show.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor acknowledged that the Pope's remarks made in an end-of-year address to the Curia, the Vatican's central administration, had been "quite difficult to interpret". But he said the Pope's remarks had not been intended to condemn anyone.

He said the Pope's remarks about "human ecology" were aimed at emphasising the primacy of the family at the heart of society. "He wasn't condemning anyone or any person," he said.

As the army said it was ready to launch a ground incursion and tanks and infantry forces massed on the border, Israeli officials claimed the military "has made preparations for long weeks of action." Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, upped the stakes further today when he said he had informed Shimon Peres, the country's ceremonial president, that the current aerial phase of the operation was the "the first of several stages approved by the security cabinet".

There were signs that Hamas was feeling the strain with claims that its leader-in-exile was ready to renew a ceasefire that expired ten days ago. Rhetoric from Jerusalem has hardened, however, with Meir Sheetrit, the Interior Minister, claiming "there is no room for a ceasefire" with Hamas until the threat of rocket fire had been removed.

Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister, said Israel was in an "all-out war against Hamas", while Brigadier-General Dan Harel, the Israeli deputy chief of staff, said that his forces would erase every trace of Hamas from Gaza's crowded cities. "After this operation there will not be a single Hamas building left standing in Gaza, and we plan to change the rules of the game," the general said. "We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole Hamas Government and all its wings. We are hitting government buildings, production factories, security wings and more."

The Egyptian Foreign Minister launched an attack on Iran, the Shia state known to support and arm Hamas and Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon. In a message aimed at Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Egyptian television, he said: "You are a man who used to enjoy respect, but you have insulted the Egyptian people." In Iran, a hardline student group started recruiting volunteers to fight Israel after the country's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that anyone who died in the defence of Gaza would be deemed a martyr.

In 2008, the world has continued moving toward multi-polarization, resulting in a distinctive shift of international forces. Globalization is developing in depth and regional cooperation is gathering momentum. The world has been confronted with one hotspot issue after another and non-traditional threats are increasing. The world economic growth took a turn for the worse due to the outbreak of the global financial crisis.

In recent years, the international political structure has transformed gradually from "one superpower coexisting with several other powers," formed after the Cold War, to multi-polarization. The transformation picked up speed this year, with significant changes in the balance of international forces. THE UNITED STATES has been acting as the world's only superpower in 2008, but the financial turmoil, which broke out in Wall Street in September, SHOWED ITS VULNERABILITY.

The outgoing 2008 has also seen a large number of developing countries rise with increasing momentum. From a geopolitical perspective, the center of world power is shifting from both sides of the Atlantic to the western Pacific region, as the emerging countries are mostly located in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. This shows that the existing international system is undergoing readjustment with new reshuffles and restructuring PROFOUNDLY CHANGING THE BALANCE OF POWER IN THE WORLD.

So say some experts looking forward to 2009 and what it will mean for the computer security world. "Crime tends to rise when you have more unemployment," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. "If you look, in general, where the attacks are coming from you can find social reasons behind them. It's not a technical problem, it's social," he said.

Layoffs of many people familiar with net technology may tempt more into crime, he said, simply because their chances of being caught are slim. Equally, he said, the punishments for those that are caught are not harsh. Those that did turn to hi-tech crime would find, he said, an underground service economy that will sell them all the bits they need to get started as a net criminal. This could mean that the intellectual property that a company relies on to keep going, such as its customer database, is copied and walks out of the door when employees pack up and leave.

"The damage that insiders can do should not be underestimated. It can take just a few minutes for an entire database that has taken years to build to be copied to a CD or USB stick," said Adam Bosnian, a spokesman for Cyber-Ark.

Councils have been forced to recycle more by facing higher penalties for every tonne of waste that they dump in landfill to help the UK hit new European Union recycling targets. But demand for recycling material has dropped sharply since October as sales of new cars, white goods and new homes - which provide a market for recycled material - have tailed off in the global downturn.

The price of recycled cans has fallen from £200 a tonne to £20 a tonne, while paper and card has also dropped from £60 a tonne to just £10 a tonne. Prices have now fallen so far that the cost of making new plastic is cheaper than reusing the recycled material. The result has been a big increase in stockpiles of recycled rubbish, which contractors are battling to clear.

Neil Rippon, the managing director of Greencycle - which collects waste for councils in the North east of England - said: "The market is the worst that anybody has ever known. People who I know who have been in the business for 30 years have never known anything like it." Mr Rippon estimated as much as 15 per cent of all recycling could be stockpiled temporarily. Last year 800,000 tonnes of recycling was collected from households in England and Wales every month.

Prof Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on US-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the US that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario - for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the US

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation WILL TRIGGER A CIVIL WAR next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, THE USA WILL BREAK INTO SIX PIECES - with Alaska reverting to Russian control. Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But WHEN SPRING COMES, IT WILL BE CLEAR THAT THERE ARE NO MIRACLES."

Talbots Inc and Sears Holdings Corp are among chains shuttering underperforming locations. More than a dozen retailers, including Circuit City Stores Inc, Linens 'n Things Inc, Sharper Image Corp and Steve & Barry's LLC, have sought bankruptcy protection this year as the credit squeeze and recession drained sales. Investors will start seeing a wide variety of chains seeking bankruptcy protection in February when they file financial reports, said Burt Flickinger.

"You'll see department stores, specialty stores, discount stores, grocery stores, drugstores, major chains either multi-regionally or nationally go out," Flickinger, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a retail-industry consulting firm in New York, said today in a Bloomberg Radio interview. "There are a number that are real causes for concern."

Discounts of 70 percent or more by Macy's, AnnTaylor Stores Inc and other retailers failed to prevent a spending drop of as much as 4 percent during the final two months of the year, according to data from SpendingPulse. Retailers' pricing models are being challenged by consumers, according to Richard Hastings, consumer strategist at Global Hunter Securities LLC of Newport Beach, California.

Although the number of natural disasters was lower than in 2007, the catastrophes that occurred proved to be MORE DESTRUCTIVE IN TERMS OF THE NUMBER OF VICTIMS AND THE FINANCIAL COST of the damage caused, Germany-based Munich Re said in its annual assessment. "This continues the long-term trend we have been observing. Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes," Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said.

The world needed "effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions, so that climate change is curbed and future generations do not have to live with weather scenarios that are difficult to control," board member Jeworrek said. Last December, the international community agreed in Bali on a two-year roadmap culminating in a new global climate deal to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Unprecedented in scale and complexity, this accord, due to take effect from 2012, is meant to rein in the greenhouse gases that stoke global warming and throw a lifeline to poor countries exposed to mutated weather patterns.