The satellite, which no longer can be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret. It was not clear how long ago the satellite lost power, or under what circumstances.

"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, when asked about the situation after it was disclosed by other officials. "Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause."

The largest uncontrolled re-entry by a NASA spacecraft was Skylab, the 78-ton (79.25-metric ton) abandoned space station that fell from orbit in 1979. Its debris dropped harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and across a remote section of western Australia. In 2000, NASA engineers successfully directed a safe de-orbit of the 17-ton (17.27-metric ton) Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, using rockets aboard the satellite to bring it down in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. In 2002, officials believe debris from a 7,000-pound (3175.18-kilogram) science satellite smacked into the Earth's atmosphere and rained down over the Persian Gulf, a few thousand miles from where they first predicted it would plummet.

Chávez made the suggestion Saturday as he hosted a summit aimed at increasing Latin American integration and countering U.S. influence. "We should start to bring our reserves here," Chávez said. "Why does that money have to be in the north? You can't put all your eggs in one basket."

To help pool resources within the region, Chávez and other leaders launched a new development bank at the summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA. The left-leaning regional trade alliance supported by Chávez is intended to offer an alternative, socialist path to integration while snubbing U.S.-backed free-trade deals.

Executives at Societe Generale had originally insisted that 31-year-old Jerome Kerviel acted alone. But yesterday they conceded that he was unlikely to have carried out his deception without accomplices. In interviews with detectives, Kerviel was said to be "naming names" and refusing to be a scapegoat.

Detectives are working on information that he made a series of phone calls to traders at other investment banks before news of the scandal broke - allowing them to make highly lucrative deals based on his tips. But Societe Generale has made it clear that Kerviel did not personally benefit from the fraud.

Jean Pierre Mustier, one of its chief executives, said: "I cannot guarantee to you 100 per cent that there was no complicity."

He didn't steal anything, take anything, he didn't take any profit for himself," the lawyer, Christian Charriere-Bournazel, told The Associated Press by telephone. "The suspicion on Kerviel allows the considerable losses that the bank made on subprimes to be hidden."

Societe Generale said Sunday that a trader who evaded all its controls to bet $73.5 billion - more than the French bank's market worth - on European markets hacked computers and "combined several fraudulent methods" to cover his tracks, causing billions in losses.

The bank says the trader, Jerome Kerviel, did not appear to have profited personally from the transactions and seemingly worked alone - a version reiterated Sunday by Jean-Pierre Mustier, chief executive of the bank's corporate and investment banking arm. But, in a conference call with reporters, Mustier added: "I cannot guarantee to you 100 percent that there was no complicity."

The UK's main FTSE 100 index was down 81 points or 1.3% to 5,788 in early trade, while Germany's Dax had lost 2%, and France's Cac had fallen 1.9%. In Japan, the Nikkei 225 had earlier finished the day's trading down 4%. Analysts said dealers were cautious ahead of an expected interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index closed Monday down 4.3%, while Mumbai's Sensex was down 3.5% in afternoon exchanges. Monday's falls come after Friday's declines on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones index losing 171 points or 1.4%.

The Fed, America's central bank, is widely expected to cut US interest rates to 3.25% when it makes its next scheduled decision on Wednesday. Last week it reduced rates to 3.5% from 4.25% in an emergency move.

If tests prove positive, it will mean new restrictions for thousands of livestock farmers in large parts of the UK previously free of the disease. Bluetongue is a non-contagious virus spread by a midge species, affecting ruminants including sheep and cattle.

The first case in the UK was detected last September. The disease spread to other parts of south-east England and protection and surveillance zones remain in place. According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair's website, as of noon on 11 January there were 66 confirmed premises affected by bluetongue.

The victims are said to have been beaten, hacked or burned to death by mobs in Naivasha. The town is about 60km (37 miles) south of Nakuru, also the scene of recent inter-ethnic fighting. The fighting in Naivasha is thought to have broken out late on Saturday, descending quickly into sickening brutality, says the BBC's Adam Mynott in Nairobi. Reports are unclear but at least nine people are said to have been hacked or clubbed to death as they tried to flee mobs with machetes.

The mobs appeared to be from the Kikuyu tribe of President Kibaki, which bore the brunt of the violence that erupted after the election. "We have moved out to revenge the deaths of our brothers and sisters who have been killed, and nothing will stop us," said Anthony Mwangi, hefting a club in Naivasha. "For every one Kikuyu killed, we shall avenge their killing with three," he told the Associated Press news agency.

Further north, Kenya's fourth biggest city Nakuru has also been the scene of deadly violence between rival Luo and Kikuyu communities. Dozens of people are feared to have died since Thursday and scores of people were injured in clashes between fighters armed with machetes, spears and bows and arrows. There were no reports of further fighting from Nakuru on Sunday. But the ruins of torched buildings smouldered, and a reporter for news agency AFP said bodies lay in the city's deserted slums.

Suharto was admitted to a hospital on January 4 and had been in intensive care. Blood transfusions and a pacemaker prolonged his life, but he suffered from lung, kidney, liver and heart problems. Over the past week his physicians had spoken of a recovery, but that had changed dramatically by Sunday, when his condition took a sharp downturn.

Soeharto had ruled Indonesia for 32 years before he stepped down from power following nationwide protests against his corrupt and repressive government in May 1998. He faced numerous allegations of human rights violation and corruption during his rules, but in May 2006 prosecutors closed a criminal case against him due to his deteriorating health.

Investment entities believed to be affiliated to the Qatar Investment Authority, which is closely linked to the emirate's royal family and has tabled unsuccessful bids for J Sainsbury and Thames Water, are understood to be considering building a 5 per cent stake in the Zurich-based bank. If it does opt to pursue a sizeable investment, the move by the QIA or connected funds would be the latest in a string of deals by a new breed of powerful government-backed investors.

Sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi, China, Dubai and Singapore have snapped up large stakes in banks such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS as they wilted under the weight of huge losses related to the implosion of the American sub-prime mortgage industry.

Credit Suisse's existing major shareholders include Olyan Group, a Saudi investment firm, and Axa, the French insurer.

If the washout summer was bad for us, for honey bees it was much worse. The record rains frequently prevented bees from foraging, stopped hive expansion and meant that honey production levels were often sharply down across the country, according to the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA). "The summer of 2007 was an awful one for British honey bees," said the BBKA president, Tim Lovett.

"Some of the flowering, such as the flowering of the lime trees, which is important for the bees, coincided with periods of heavy rain, so in some places the bees will have missed it entirely." Bees do not forage when it rains, he explained, because in the wet weather they lose body temperature, grow sluggish, cannot get back to the hive and eventually die.

The soggy conditions also meant that it was difficult for beekeepers who had lost bees during the winter ? to disease, for example - to rebuild their stocks in the summer months. And when autumn arrived and some beekeepers took their hives up onto moorland for heather honey, the situation was also found to be bad.

Global warming ranks far down the concerns of the world's biggest companies, despite world leaders' hopes that they will pioneer solutions to the impending climate crisis, a startling survey will reveal this week. Nearly nine in 10 of them do not rate it as a priority, says the study, which canvassed more than 500 big businesses in Britain, the US, Germany, Japan, India and China. Nearly twice as many see climate change as imposing costs on their business as those who believe it presents an opportunity to make money. And the report's publishers believe that big business will concentrate even less on climate change as the world economy deteriorates.

Some 67 per cent of the businesses surveyed agreed they have a role to play in tackling global warming, but only four out of 10 felt in a position to fulfil it. In China only 14 per cent of those questioned felt in a strong position.
The report concludes: "Businesses clearly are seeking long-term signals about where and how to invest. They are reluctant to make big investments in climate change-related initiatives until the scope of future regulation becomes clearer".

By Friday, January 18, Jérôme Kerviel, a junior suit in the banking world, was on the hook for €50 billion - the equivalent of about half of all the gold and currency reserves held by France. The sum also exceeded the entire value of the bank at which he worked. The 31-year-old trader at Société Générale, one of France's most prestigious institutions, had secretly set up a series of deals that were going horribly wrong. So wrong that they threatened the survival of the bank and the health of global financial markets.

Yet senior executives at the bank, which initially claimed that it had no inkling of Kerviel's activities, yesterday admitted that managers had missed several warning signs over many weeks that would have revealed the apparent fraud. Suspicions linger that the bank has not revealed the full story of the fraud. It initially claimed that Kerviel had so brilliantly manipulated its computer systems that he had completely covered his tracks.

Yesterday, however, Bouton admitted that some of Kerviel's deals had triggered warning signs in recent months but the trader had "managed to convince the controllers that it was just a simple error on his part". It was a damning admission for a giant bank that a junior trader could have talked his way out of a €50 billion hole.

The patriotic symbol - based on a Roman goddess - will no longer be on any British coin for the first time in more than 300 years, as part of a redesign by the Royal Mint. An overhaul of all coinage in April, being billed as the most significant change to the currency since decimalisation, will see it replaced with a representation of modern Britain. The disclosure makes a nonsense of Mr Brown's repeated declarations of his patriotism in the run-up to taking over from Tony Blair.

Soon after he took power, Mr Brown appointed Michael Wills, one of his most trusted allies, as Minister for Patriotism, with orders to promote "Britishness" across the country. Last night, the Treasury attempted to gloss over the reform by insisting the Britannia symbol would return for future Mint runs. But critics said it was "depressing" that it would not be the default design on the tails side of a British circulation coin for the first time since 1672.

The figure of Britannia first appeared almost 2,000 years ago when the Romans created her as a personification of the British Isles, which they called Britanniae. She made her first appearance on a Roman coin during the rule of Emperor Hadrian. Her first appearance on a British coin came during the reign of Charles II, on the copper farthing in 1672 and the copper halfpenny in 1673. She was conjured up as a symbol of Britain's political and naval might during the time of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and by the Victorian era she had grown to become a more forceful, trident-holding representation of the British Empire. Between 1797 and 1970, she was on the penny coin and now features on an estimated 769million 50p pieces in circulation.

At least 38 members of the Egyptian security forces have been hospitalized, some in critical condition, because of cross-border confrontations, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said. The minister complained of "provocations" at the border, a thinly veiled reprimand of Hamas, and said that while Egypt is ready to ease the suffering of Gazans, this should not endanger Egyptian lives.

In the West Bank, meanwhile, moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stuck to his tough conditions for resuming contacts with Gaza's Hamas rulers, dimming prospects for Egypt's proposal to have the two Palestinian rivals come to Cairo for talks on resolving the border crisis. Earlier, Hamas had accepted Egypt's proposal, and Hamas hardliner Sami Abu Zuhri accused Abbas of trying to bypass Hamas: "His statements are a rejection of the Egyptian initiative."

Israel, meanwhile, expressed growing concern about the possible influx of Palestinian militants into areas of Egypt that border Israel. The Israeli military announced Saturday that its troops were on heightened alert along the border with Egypt, and that an Israeli road and tourism sites in the area are temporarily closed.

Seeking to dispel international concerns amid increased violence, Khalid Kidwai, head of the Strategic Plans Division which handles Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, said Pakistan uses 10,000 soldiers to keep the weapons safe and has received up to $10 million in U.S. assistance to that end. "There's no conceivable scenario, political or violent, in which Pakistan will fall to extremists of the al-Qaeda or Taliban type," Kidwai told foreign journalists at a briefing. "Pakistan's nuclear weapons, fissile material and infrastructure are absolutely safe and secure."

Kidwai, a retired general, said his division was prepared for any contingency and had reassessed the militant threat in light of escalating attacks on security forces and intelligence personnel. He said he had received no information of a terrorist plot against nuclear facilities.

Media reports have said the Pentagon has contingency plans for seizing Pakistan's nuclear facilities if they ever fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. Kidwai called it "irresponsible talk" and said the United States would not succeed in such an operation.