Damn, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four will be cursing in his celestial attic, why didn't I think to have Big Brother spy on Winston Smith's tea?

Envirowise, which is funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, estimates that more than 30 billion cups of water are needlessly boiled each year in British offices. It has advised that companies re-introduce tea urns and encourage staff to brew collectively, in tea pots.

American Express announced that it will slash 7,000 positions — some 10% of its staff — as part of an effort to save $1.8 billion next year as a counterweight to the rising number of consumers defaulting on their payments. Within hours of that announcement, communications giant Motorola Inc., which cut some 2,600 jobs in April, said it would trim an additional 3,000 staffers over the next several months after posting a third-quarter loss of nearly $400 million. It will also postpone a planned spin-off of its ailing cell phone division.

With the country perched on the edge of a deep recession, the national unemployment rate above 6% and nine straight months of a national net decline in jobs, the question is whether the U.S. labor market's fortunes are about to plunge even more steeply. In the eyes of many experts, the answer is a bleak one. "Unfortunately, the worst is to come," says Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reich argues that consumers have only begun to tighten their purse strings, which will shrink business markets and force employers to cut costs largely through payroll reductions. "We will see substantial layoffs in the coming months, and probably through 2009," he says. It's a dire prognosis, but there are bright spots. Necessities like health care will remain steady, and "Hollywood should do O.K.," Reich says, suggesting that "Americans want to be cheered up."

Consumers and businesses are sharply reducing their spending and the government is awash in red ink. "He will inherit an economy that is in recession and… is likely to get worse before it gets better," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist for PNC Financial Services. The current administration on Wednesday will detail its plans to borrow a record $550 billion in the final three months of the year as a down payment for the various financial rescue packages put into effect in response to the global crisis.

A Treasury Department official on Monday projected the government would need to borrow an additional $368 billion in the first quarter of 2009. Treasury is expected to bring back its three-year notes to help cover the increased borrowing needs.

Still, investors seemed to draw hope Tuesday from the selection of a new presidential administration, while shrugging off the latest in a series of grim economic reports. The Dow Jones industrial average surged more than 300 points. The Dow and the other major stock indexes all finished with gains of more than 3 percent. Analysts said investors appeared to be looking forward to the end of political uncertainty and hoping the new U.S. president will move to boost the economy.

Obama's fundraising revolutionized the way presidential campaigns are financed and may kill the Watergate-era system of providing public money for the general election. His cash advantage helped him defeat New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who began the campaign as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Obama then swamped Republican candidate John McCain in the last two months.

"I don't think he wanted the campaign's identity to be that he could raise a lot of money, but it was indispensable for the Washington-insider community that wanted to dismiss us and would have, if not for that money," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. Almost half of Obama's money came from people giving $200 or less, compared with 34 percent for Arizona Senator McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington- based research group.

Obama reversed himself in June and became the first major party candidate to forgo federal funding for the general election, calculating that he would be able to raise more than the $84.1 million in federal funds that candidates would receive. His campaign argued that his large number of contributors was, in itself, a form of public financing.

The Israeli army said the clashes erupted late Tuesday after its forces uncovered a tunnel in central Gaza that militants planned to use to abduct Israeli soldiers. It said a special army unit headed to the area to destroy the tunnel. One Palestinian was killed in fierce gunbattles that ensued.

Hamas then fired mortars across the Gaza border into southern Israel and Israel answered with the airstrike in the early hours of Wednesday, killing five suspected Palestinian militants, Israeli and Palestinian officials said. The army said the airstrike aimed at the mortar launchers and hit them.

The clashes threatened to unravel the cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militant groups reached in June after months of indirect negotiations. The deal halted a deadly cycle of Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli reprisals, though sporadic rocket attacks on southern Israel have persisted.

FINANCIAL CRISIS - The U.S. financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. Economists say the country is in a recession that may get worse by the time the next president takes office in January.

HEALTH CARE - Both candidates identify bringing down high health-care costs and reforming the health insurance system as an economic priority.

ENERGY - U.S. dependence on foreign oil is seen as both a security and economic threat.

TAXES - The two candidates have clashed over taxes at the close of the campaign, with McCain accusing Obama of wanting to spread people's wealth around and Obama saying McCain's policies would benefit big corporations rather than the middle class

A record turnout of up to 130million voters spelled chaos for America's voting system today. The presidential election could descend into electoral farce as unprecedented numbers of voters turn out to cast their ballot in a system that is largely untested. THE U.S. HAS AN ELECTORAL SYSTEM THAT IS NOT ORGANISED, DESIGNED OR FUNDED TO COPE WITH 'ANYWHERE NEAR A 100 PER CENT TURNOUT', a director of a leading independent electoral reform group has said.

It is estimated that more Americans will vote in this election than in any other. Doug Chapin, director of The Pew Charitable Trust's Electionline.org, said voter turnout will 'dwarf' all other problems in this year's presidential election. There were also fears that the allegations of stolen votes that marred the 2000 and 2004 would be repeated, especially if the result is closer than the polls suggest.

Widespread claims have been made in the past few days that electronic voting machines have 'flipped' people's choices, so that votes cast for Barack Obama have ended up being counted as McCain votes. Similar claims have been widely reported in the last week of early voting, in which 27million Americans made their choice.

In an internal memo obtained exclusively by NBC 24 News, officers are ordered to "HAVE THEIR RIOT EQUIPMENT WITH THEM TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY". Police chief Mike Navarre confirms, officers will have gear similar to the equipment they used during the 2005 race riots. "THEY HAVE BEEN ASKED TO HAVE THEIR HELMETS AND THEIR GAS MASKS AVAILABLE TOMORROW AND WEDNESDAY.", Navarre says, "That's the equipment they would not normally carry with them on a normal day".

Navarre also says, officers will not be stationed at individual polling stations. But the memo says otherwise. It reads, "On Tuesday, units shall be directed to patrol the polling locations".

Berlin worries the verdict could set off an avalanche of World War II-related court cases against the German government. On Oct. 22, Italy's highest appellate court, the Cassation, ruled that Germany must pay €1 million in compensation to the descendents of those killed by Nazi soldiers in the Italian town of Civitella in 1944. Now, Germany has taken the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the hopes that it will rule that the payments don't have to be made. A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Berlin on Saturday confirmed a report in this week's SPIEGEL, saying that the ICC "has been asked to clarify this question."

The October verdict in Rome also sentenced a German officer named Max Josef Milde in abstentia to life in prison. The court found that the officer was involved in the June 29, 1944 massacre which saw over 200 villagers, including the village priest, executed in revenge for the killing of three German soldiers by partisans 10 days earlier. Germany and Italy signed an agreement in 1961, which resulted in a blanket payment of 40 million deutsche marks.

Of particular concern to Berlin, however, is the finding that Germany can also be held liable for the massacre. SUCH A PRECEDENT COULD TRIGGER AN EXPENSIVE WAVE OF INDIVIDUAL LAWSUITS AGAINST GERMANY.

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.