Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds. Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession. Now the $700 billion of commercial-mortgage-backed securities outstanding are being tested for the first time by a massive downturn, and the outcome so far hasn't been pretty.

The CMBS sector is suffering two kinds of pain, which, according to credit rater Realpoint LLC, sent its delinquency rate to 3.14% in July, more than six times the level a year earlier. One is simply the result of bad underwriting. In the era of looser credit, Wall Street's CMBS machine lent owners money on the assumption that occupancy and rents of their office buildings, hotels, stores or other commercial property would keep rising. In fact, the opposite has happened. THE RESULT IS THAT A GROWING NUMBER OF PROPERTIES AREN'T GENERATING ENOUGH CASH TO MAKE PRINCIPAL AND INTEREST PAYMENTS.

The other kind of hurt is coming from the inability of property owners to refinance loans bundled into CMBS when these loans mature. By the end of 2012, some $153 billion in loans that make up CMBS are coming due, and close to $100 billion of that will face difficulty getting refinanced, according to Deutsche Bank. BANKS HOLD $1.7 TRILLION OF COMMERCIAL MORTGAGES AND CONSTRUCTION LOANS, and delinquencies on this debt already have played a role in the increase in bank failures this year.

Still, most of the $6.7 trillion in commercial real estate is privately owned. Also, it is unlikely commercial real estate will benefit much from an early stage of an economic recovery. WHAT LANDLORDS NEED is occupancy and rents to rise, and that means employers have to start hiring and consumers need to shop more. SO FAR, THERE ARE FEW SIGNS THIS IS HAPPENING.

Q: How bad is this wave of failures?

A: A cascade of collapses began last year as the financial crisis struck. Eighty-four banks have fallen so far this year as tumbling home prices and spiking unemployment pushed loan defaults upward. That's the largest number in a year since the early 1990s, at the apex of the savings and loan crisis. It compares with 25 bank failures last year and three in 2007.

Q: What's behind this?

A: Banks around the country have run into trouble on their loans for construction and development, the fastest-growing category of troubled loans for US banks, especially in overbuilt areas. Many companies have shut down in the recession, vacating shopping malls and office buildings financed by the loans. Lots of banks have heavy concentrations of these loans in their lending portfolios, and some small banks are considered by regulators to be particularly vulnerable.

Q: So even though the economy is starting to recover, banks are still struggling?

A: The condition of the banking industry is what economists call a lagging indicator: It falls behind the state of the economy because the problems take longer to percolate through banks, as opposed to other signposts such as consumer spending, gross domestic product or permits for building construction. That means the pain will continue to weigh on the banking sector while the economy rebounds.

The heat-driven fire nearly doubled in size overnight and has now burned 35,000 acres (14,000 hectares) of thick, bone-dry brush in the mountains above five towns, a 12-mile (19 km) stretch from La Crescenta to La Canada Flintridge, the California Fire Department said. Authorities have ordered residents to evacuate about 2,000 homes threatened by the fire about 15 miles (24 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

"THESE FIRES ARE STILL TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL," Schwarzenegger told reporters at the firefighters' command post in Lake View Terrace, California. "This is a huge and very dangerous fire. The fire is moving very close to homes and to structures... this is why it's important to pay close attention to the evacuation."

Three remote homes have been destroyed so far and some 10,000 others and 2,500 other buildings are in danger, AS IS MOUNT WILSON, THE NEXUS FOR KEY TELECOMMUNICATIONS FACILITIES. "That site is the nerve center for most of communication in the Los Angeles area," Station Fire Commander Mike Dietrich said. "It is not out of danger as we speak."

The law change applies to female couples in England and Wales who were having fertility treatment on or after 6 April 2009. Previously, the mother's female partner could not be registered as a parent. But the change in the law confers legal parenthood on the mother's female partner.

According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, there were 728 lesbians who underwent in vitro fertilisation (IVF) between 1999 and 2006. And in the same period, there were 5,211 lesbian females who received donor insemination (DI) treatment.

Stonewall's Head of Policy and Research Ruth Hunt said that as a result of the law change, life for lesbian families "isn't only fairer, it's also much easier". She added: "As the law improves to provide further equality, knowing your new rights will help people make full use of the services they're entitled to. And, if discrimination occurs, the same knowledge can help them demand fair treatment. Now lesbian couples in the UK WHO MAKE A CONSIDERED DECISION TO START A LOVING FAMILY will finally be afforded equal access to services they help fund as taxpayers."

Wilders asked Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen if he agrees that "this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married a six-year-old girl." Wilders wants the Foreign Minister to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the Netherlands to express his disgust at the act.

WILDERS HAS ENJOYED GROWING SUPPORT THROUGHOUT EUROPE, as well as in his own country, for his outspoken statements against Muslim terror. He sparked furious protests two years ago when he disseminated his 15-minute film called Fitna, which exposes links between the Muslim religion and terror. The Saudi Arabian Arab News reported the incident of the 10-year-old bride. It said the man denied he is 80-years old, as claimed by the girl's family, which he accused of meddling in his affairs.

"My marriage is not against Shariah [Muslim law]," he told Arab News. "It included the elements of acceptance and response by the father of the bride." The unidentified man explained that he had been engaged to his wife's elder sister, who broke off the engagement. In return, her father offered his younger daughter. "I was allowed to have a look at her according to Shariah and found her acceptable," said the elderly man.

Soon they will be the only kind of light bulb allowed, but now officials in BRUSSELS HAVE ADMITTED THAT ENERGY-SAVING BULBS ARE NOT AS BRIGHT AS THE OLD-FASHIONED KIND THEY ARE REPLACING. From tomorrow a Europe-wide ban on traditional incandescent bulbs will begin to be rolled out, with a ban on 100W bulbs and old-style frosted or pearled bulbs.

Buyers of the main type of energy-saving bulb, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), are told on the packaging that they shine as brightly as an old-fashioned bulb. For example, AN 11W CFL IS LABELLED AS BEING THE EQUIVALENT OF A 60W INCANDESCENT BULB. However, the European Commission, which was responsible for the ban, has now conceded that this is "not true" and that such claims by manufacturers are "exaggerated".

The Sunday Telegraph has conducted its own tests on level of illuminance provided by light bulbs from different manufacturers to see whether their claims stand up to scrutiny. We found that under normal household conditions, using a single lamp to light a room, AN 11W LOW-ENERGY CFL PRODUCED ONLY 58 PER CENT OF THE ILLUMINATION OF AN "EQUIVALENT" 60W BULB – even after a 10-minute "warm-up".

Mr Hatoyama, 62, said people were "fed up" with the governing party. Prime Minister Taro Aso said that he took responsibility for the defeat and would resign as head of the LDP. Japan is suffering record unemployment and its economy is struggling to emerge from a bruising recession. The DPJ has said it will shift the focus of government from supporting corporations to helping consumers and workers. The White House has already said it hopes to forge a "strong alliance" with the incoming government.

Mr Hatoyama, who is almost certain to lead the next government, is the wealthy grandson of the founder of Bridgestone tyres. His other grandfather was a former LDP prime minister. He said after polls closed: "We will not be arrogant and we will listen to the people. The people are angry with politics now and the ruling coalition. We felt a great sense of people wanting change."

Mr Hatoyama, who is expected to announce a transition team on Monday, has promised to boost welfare and reform the bureaucracy. He also vowed on Sunday to strive to resolve a long-standing territorial feud with Russia. The White House called the election "historic", adding: "We are confident that the strong US-Japan alliance and the close partnership between our two countries will continue to flourish."

“The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out.

If the trucks stopped moving, we'd start to worry and we'd head out to the shops, stocking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We'd be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol. What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn't stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?”

“Conventional wisdom had it that in an age of mechanisation, the cost of producing the food that we eat would decrease as technology found new ways of improving yields and minimising labour costs. But there was a problem that hadn't been factored in. Production methods are now such that 95 per cent of all the food we eat in the world today is oil-dependent.

This is a continuation of an Islamic-PA campaign to convince the world that the millennia-old natural association between Jerusalem and Jews is a myth. As Islamic Movement chief Raed Salah stated in 2006, "We remind, for the 1,000th time, that the entire Al-Aqsa mosque [on the Temple Mount], including all of its area and alleys above the ground and under it, is exclusive and absolute [emphasis added] Moslem property, and no one else has any rights to even one grain of earth in it."

HOWEVER, THIS "ABSOLUTE" MOSLEM CLAIM IS ACTUALLY NOT ALL THAT ABSOLUTE. Back in 1925, the Supreme Moslem Council - also known as the Waqf, which traditionally oversees Temple Mount activities on behalf of Islam - BOASTED PROUDLY THAT THE TEMPLE MOUNT SITE WAS NONE OTHER THAN THAT OF SOLOMON'S TEMPLE.

The official 1925 Supreme Moslem Council Guide Book to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Moslem name for the Temple Mount) states, on page 4, "Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which 'David built there an altar unto the L-rd...'" The pamphlet cites the Biblical source in 2 Samuel XXIV,25.

Kennedy's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died August 10. SHE ALSO RECEIVED A LETTER FROM THE POPE before she died. Both were siblings of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy, who were both assassinated in the 1960s.

The Vatican newspaper revealed that when President Barack Obama visited the Vatican in June, THE POPE SENT WITH THE PRESIDENT A LETTER TO THE DYING SENATOR. Kennedy had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in May 2008.

While noting Kennedy's "unfortunate" support for abortion rights, L'Osservatore noted as well that the senator "was constantly on the front lines in the battles on behalf of immigrants, arms control, and a minimum wage for the poor."

Torop, 48, is the spiritual leader of at least 5,000 devoted followers, among them intellectuals, artists and professionals who flock to worship him in the small isolated village of Petropavlovka - more than 2000 miles from Moscow.

He says he realised that God had sent him to Earth to teach mankind about the evils of war and the havoc we were wreaking on the environment. WITH CHRISTMAS ABOLISHED his followers mark the day of his first sermon on August 18 as their special feast day.

HIS FOLLOWERS, who have given up their lives to follow him, ARE STRICT VEGANS and are banned from smoking and drinking or handling money. Around 300 of them live in wooden huts in the village that has grown up around his church and which does not appear on any maps. Many thousands more have made their homes in the small villages that surround Petropavlovka and survive the vicious Siberian winters so that they can be close to their Messiah.

According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, more than a million bone parts are used in transplants every year. IN NO OTHER COUNTRY IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE SO MUCH MONEY WITH BODY PARTS. If a body were disassembled into its individual parts, then processed and sold, THE TOTAL PROCEEDS COULD AMOUNT TO $250,000 (€176,000). For a single corpse! The US tissue industry generates total revenues of about $1 billion a year, says journalist Martina Keller, a co-author of this article and the author of the German book, "Cannibalized: The Human Corpse as a Resource."

According to Klaus-Peter Günther, president of the German Society of Orthopedics and Orthopedic Surgery, they are often "not the first choice" in operations. "For us, the gold standard is still tissue taken directly from the patient in question." Alternatives are only an option, says Günther, when the material from the patient's body is insufficient. Those alternatives include animal bones and artificial replacement parts made of ceramic material, for example - or human donor bones.

In the United States, doctors have far fewer qualms about using body parts from corpses than their German counterparts - in such areas as spinal surgery, sports injuries and cosmetic surgery. For instance, DOCTORS USED PULVERIZED SKIN PARTICLES TO ENHANCE LIPS AND SMOOTH OUT WRINKLES.

That has left the supply chain with an unknown number of suppliers who are dead but do not know it - companies so undercapitalized and overleveraged they will never raise the money they need to get their idle plants running again. "Their lenders are going to say, 'Sorry, we're not going to increase our exposure with you because we don't know if you're going to make it or not,'" says Bill Diehl, the chief executive of BBK, an advisory firm that does supply chain risk analysis.

And that, of course, would be a horror show for the publicly traded manufacturers that rely on these suppliers. It could leave them scrambling to secure components once the recovery starts - and missing some of the rebound's benefits. "That's the bigger risk," says Craig Giffi, the head of Deloitte's US consumer and industrial products practice. "THEY COULD BE LEFT UNABLE TO CAPTURE THE UPTURN."

In the past, suppliers were often initially insulated from the effects of industrial cycles because their big customers were slow to cut production - because they believed the downturn would be brief or because slow internal processes made quicker cuts impossible. BUT THE INDUSTRY'S MOVE FROM MASS PRODUCTION TO A BUILD-TO-ORDER PARADIGM, and the outsourcing of many parts once produced in-house to outside suppliers, have changed all that.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which STILL APPEARS TO PERMIT THE PRESIDENT TO SEIZE TEMPORARY CONTROL OF PRIVATE-SECTOR NETWORKS DURING A SO-CALLED CYBERSECURITY EMERGENCY.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I THINK THE REDRAFT, WHILE IMPROVED, REMAINS TROUBLING DUE TO ITS VAGUENESS," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "IT IS UNCLEAR WHAT AUTHORITY SENATOR ROCKEFELLER THINKS IS NECESSARY OVER THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."

Los Angeles County Fire Department dispatcher Melanie Flores told The Times that two people were being treated for burns at the Big Tujunga ranger station, though more details were not immediately available. The Station fire has now burned more than 20,000 acres, according to fire officials.

The latest evacuation zone is in the remote upper reaches of Big Tujunga Canyon near the ranger station, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The city of GLENDALE also ordered evacuations north of Santa Carlotta Street between Pennsylvania and Lowell avenues. The city of PASADENA advised residents of the Florecita neighborhood in the far northwest of the city to evacuate their homes voluntarily.

Massive and ominous-looking smoke plumes continue to envelop the area and have made for poor air quality, falling ash and smoky odors in the nearest communities, the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles. Outside the fire command post today at the Hansen Dam Recreation Center in Lake View Terrace, the air is so choked with smoke that it resembles a London fog of decades ago. Literally adding fuel to the fire is 20- to 30-foot-high brush that has not burned in 60 years, said Mike Dietrich, incident commander from the Forest Service.