In fact, the date has been gaining in so much popularity in the UK that it is expected to be WORTH AN ESTIMATED £235M TO THE RETAIL SECTOR this year, according to independent retail analysts Planet Retail. The phenomenal growth in sales of fancy dress, treats, tricks and dressings for the home mean that the season now is third only to Christmas and Easter.

Yet the festivities in the UK are nowhere near the terrifying scale seen IN THE US. IN 2008, HALLOWEEN WAS WORTH A DIZZYING $55.7BN, according to the National Retail Federation, with the average American spending $66.45, up from $64.82 a year earlier.

A new database called ContactPoint is being set up to hold details on every child in the land, including "information as to the existence of any cause for concern in relation to them". As a parliamentary committee observed when the legislation was being debated, this is "an extremely subjective and open-ended phrase which is almost bound to include very sensitive information about a child".

Will it, for instance, include their "racist tendencies"? Yet again we are witnessing AN UTTERLY DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE TO A PERCEIVED PROBLEM, WHICH IS NOT REALLY A PROBLEM. More than that: since the information on ContactPoint is not erased until the age of 24, an accusation of racism could follow a person from the nursery into adulthood.

In an incident that has generated a storm of publicity in devout Poland, Professor Maria Sobaniec-Lotowaska, of the medical university in Bialystok, has dumbfounded sceptics by saying she considered the material found in the container as heart tissue.

Pawel Grzesiowskia, a leading biologist from the National Medical Institute, has attributed the miracle to nothing more than bacteria growing on the small piece of wafer, which fell into a water container during a mass in the eastern village of Sokolka.

But this has failed to quell many believing that something miraculous took place. The Catholic Church said it had already ruled out the possibility of a hoax, and local police have said that there is no evidence of fraud.

WHAT IT IS: Gross domestic product is the broadest measure of the nation's economy. GDP measures what individuals, businesses and the government spend as well as the net impact of the nation's imports and exports.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT: Economists use GDP as one of several data points to determine whether the economy is in a period of recession or expansion. The 2008-2009 recession was one of the deepest ever - it was the first time in history in which the economy retreated for four straight quarters.

WHERE WE'RE HEADED: The economy returned to positive growth in the last three months after contracting by 3.7% since the recession began. But experts warn that government stimulus programs like Cash for Clunkers contributed strongly to the economic expansion and that THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY IS MORE FRAGILE THAN THE GDP NUMBERS MAY SUGGEST.

Mirinae, a category 2 typhoon with maximum center winds of 150 kph (93 mph) and gusts of up to 185 kph, was expected to make landfall on Saturday, dumping rains on major rice-producing provinces north of the capital. The same areas were submerged in floodwaters just a few weeks ago when Typhoon Parma hovered for a week over the north.

"The critical period is between LATE ON FRIDAY NIGHT AND EARLY ON SATURDAY MORNING (31st) because the typhoon is expected to pass through the... capital," Nathaniel Cruz, chief weather forecaster, told reporters. "We expect heavy rains that could bring floods and landslides in northern Luzon island," he said.

In late September, typhoon Ketsana dumped more than a month's worth of average rainfall on Manila and surrounding areas, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless and damaging more than 180,000 metric tons of paddy rice. About 80 percent of the capital was submerged by 2-3 meters of floodwaters. Nearly a month later, some areas remained flooded, causing a bacterial infection outbreak that has killed nearly 200 people.

Another typhoon, Parma, hit the country's northernmost tip early this month, taking the death toll from the two typhoons to more than 920 people. Damage to crops and infrastructure was estimated at nearly 38 billion pesos ($796 million).

And for those who cry "read the bill," beware. THERE ARE PLENTY OF PARAGRAPHS LIKE THIS ONE:-

"(a) Outpatient Hospitals – (1) In General – Section 1833(t)(3)(C)(iv) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395(t)(3)(C)(iv)) is amended – (A) in the first sentence – (i) by inserting "(which is subject to the productivity adjustment described in subclause (II) of such section)" after "1886(b)(3)(B)(iii); and (ii) by inserting "(but not below 0)" after "reduced"; and (B) in the second sentence, by inserting "and which is subject, beginning with 2010 to the productivity adjustment described in section 1886(b)(3)(B)(iii)(II)".

The section deals with "incorporating productivity improvements into market basket updates that do not already incorporate such improvements," if that helps.

Optimistic lawmakers say it could take a week just to get through the bill's text. "It's one thing to read it," said Representative Lee Terry (Republican for Nebraska), a lawyer who voted against the first version of the bill on its way through the Energy and Commerce Committee. "It's another thing to understand it when it's written in legalese." Republicans aide said a print-out of the bill weighs more than 19 pounds and stands nearly nine inches tall.

The answer is yes, if you believe that what makes America, America are the individual dreamers, builders and doers. Not the collective, but the individuals, the dreamers and the inventors. From the people that brought us moving pictures, the assembly line, the light bulb, the elevator, the Chia Pet, those are the individuals that made us great. And that is what is being stifled.

NOW, GOVERNMENT WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO CREATE, HOW TO CREATE IT AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT AFTER YOU'VE CREATED IT. They'll control your financing, control your education, control your health. They'll control what you watch on television, they'll control absolutely everything — because now, they'll own a lot of the banks and many of the companies. So now, not only does an inventor have to invent the thing the government says it is looking for, they'll also make sure that you can't go out on your own and try to create something better. IT IS TOTAL CONTROL. AND IT IS ALSO, TOTAL INSANITY.

JUST A YEAR AGO, THIS STUFF SOUNDED ABSOLUTELY CRAZY. We've all worried about the debt. I want to not only show you how bad the debt is, but I also want to arm you with information, you will not accept their answer when they present a solution for what's coming. And what's coming is a system that is unsustainable. A SYSTEM THAT IS GOING TO COLLAPSE.

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But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first US official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency. "I HAVE LOST UNDERSTANDING OF AND CONFIDENCE IN THE STRATEGIC PURPOSES OF THE UNITED STATES' PRESENCE IN AFGHANISTAN," he wrote September 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there - a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, US-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, THE UNITED STATES IS ASKING ITS TROOPS TO DIE IN AFGHANISTAN FOR WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY A FAR-OFF CIVIL WAR.

The $680 billion bill authorizes spending but doesn't provide any actual dollars. Rather, it sets guidance that is typically followed by congressional committees that decide appropriations. Obama hailed it as a step toward ending needless military spending that he called "an affront to the American people and to our troops."

The measure expands current hate crimes law to include violence based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. TO ASSURE ITS PASSAGE AFTER YEARS OF FRUSTRATED EFFORTS, DEMOCRATIC SUPPORTERS ATTACHED THE MEASURE TO THE MUST-PASS DEFENSE POLICY BILL OVER THE STEEP OBJECTIONS OF MANY REPUBLICANS.

Obama signed the bill in the East Room, adding some fanfare to draw attention to his message of fiscal responsibility and support for the military. He spoke more personally about the new civil rights protections. A priority of the late Senator Edward M Kennedy, Democrat for Massachusetts, that had been on the congressional agenda for a decade, the measure is named for Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming college student murdered 11 years ago.

Obama acknowledged Shepard's mom, Judy, and remembered that he had told her this day would come. He also gave a nod to Kennedy's family. Going forward, Obama promised, people will be protected from violence based on "what they look like, who they love, how they pray or why they are."

"This is a landmark step in eliminating the kind of hate motivated violence that has taken the lives of so many in our community," said Jarrett Barrios, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. The expansion has long been sought by civil rights and gay rights groups. Conservatives have opposed it, arguing that it creates a special class of victims.

They also have been concerned that IT COULD SILENCE CLERGYMEN OR OTHERS OPPOSED TO HOMOSEXUALITY ON RELIGIOUS OR PHILOSOPHICAL GROUNDS.

Today, Europe is a largely ineffectual player in world affairs. European states rotate the EU presidency, and for most non-European nations, the tenure of each new president is largely invisible. But what happens when the EU elects a full-time president with a five-year term, as the treaty stipulates? (Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, is the front-runner now.)

The European Union would then seem almost like the United States, a collection of states forming a cohesive union with a common foreign policy - and a single, prominent president who will immediately become an important player in the world. The European Union's 27 nations have A POPULATION OF ABOUT 500 MILLION, 40 percent more than the United States. Its gross domestic product is almost 20 PERCENT HIGHER THAN THE UNITED STATES'. HOW COULD IT NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY?

Of course, the EU has a fractious membership. The big states, particularly England, France and Germany, want to establish the EU as a major world party, while the smaller states, like Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, are less eager, afraid they will be marginalized. But don't we have similar arguments in this country, between the South, the Northeast and other parts of the nation?

Now, for the first time, our great new competitor is a collection of like-minded democracies - our friends and allies. It certainly won't be easy to ignore Europe's concerns. Much remains to be decided. BUT WHATEVER HAPPENS, THE UNITED STATES WILL SOON HAVE A POWERFUL ALLY - OR A FEARSOME RIVAL.

Graham Summers, senior market strategist at OmniSans Research, wrote in the firm's daily e-letter yesterday that the markets may finally be on the verge of the crash he has been predicting for more than two months. "Well, judging from the market's action today, I believe we may be within 48 hours of getting the "Official Sell" signal I've been waiting for," he wrote in "Gain, Pains, and Capital."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 119 points yesterday, or 1.2 percent, while the NASDAQ lost 2.7 percent. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped 3.5 percent. Summers explained in an online piece Tuesday that he has been watching an ominous pattern develop in which the trading range shrinks as stocks rise higher. In the past, that pattern has led to a sharp downturn, he said.

"I'VE BEEN FOREWARNING OF A POTENTIAL CRASH FOR MONTHS NOW. And the market's current action is precisely what you would expect for a major top (increased volatility)," Summers wrote. "We see this stuff all the time, but the recent number of them with more strident and panicky tones does not bode well for these markets," he writes. "Our readers know where we stand and our professional analyst friends agree with us. IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. WE ARE AT A TURNING POINT IN MOST MARKETS," HE SAYS.

This zero-tolerance policy tells us less about the child than THE MIND-SET OF OFFICIALDOM, INCREASINGLY OBSESSED WITH MONITORING THE MOST INFORMAL PARTS OF SOCIAL LIFE. A school playground is a mess of exuberant sociability, of running, shouting, falling-out, making-up, showing off and teasing. Now if a child uses a 'wrong' word there must be forms filled in and letters home, even a call from the police.

When anti-racist education is extended down to nursery schools, it means something quite different. Anti-racism becomes not about the worthy goals of equality and even-handedness, but about the management of subconscious thoughts and private relationships.

The idea that three-year olds can be 'racist', and require specialists to train them out of their prejudice, amounts to a notion that we are born sinners and ONLY OFFICIALDOM CAN SAVE US. From their first words, apparently, children are 'learning racism' that must be monitored and corrected. Worst of all, ANTI-RACIST POLICIES CAN START TO CREATE DIVISIONS WHERE NONE EXISTED, by turning everyday playground spats into 'race issues'.

Teaching staff report that awareness-raising assemblies can lead to an outbreak of incidents and resentments. If anything, it is the anti-racist bureaucracy itself that is the main obstacle to children building free and colour-blind friendships today.

The report also says teachers are being treated like counter staff in police stations, having to fill in forms detailing name-calling and jokes. At the same time, DIVERSITY "MISSIONARIES" sent into schools to teach pupils about bigotry are said to be increasing the divide between white and black children by FORCING THEM TO SEE EVERYTHING IN TERMS OF RACE.

Schools were placed under a duty by the Government in 2002 to monitor and report all racist incidents to their local authority. Adrian Hart, the author of the report which is published by the Manifesto Club, a civil liberties group, said: "The obligation on schools to report these incidents wastes teachers' time, interferes in children's space in the playground, and undermines teachers' ability to deal with problems in their classrooms."

"WORSE, SUCH ANTI-RACIST POLICIES CAN CREATE DIVISIONS WHERE NONE HAD EXISTED, by turning everyday playground spats into 'race issues'. There are a small number of cases of sustained targeted bullying, and schools certainly need to deal with those. But most of these 'racist incidents' are just kids falling out. They don't need re-educating out of their prejudice – they and their teachers need to be left alone."

Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there's no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing "green shoots" in the economy. BUT THE ONLY GREEN SHOOTS THAT MANY NON–WALL STREET TYPES HAVE SEEN LATELY ARE THE WEEDS SPROUTING IN THE PARKING LOTS OF ABANDONED MALLS. Unemployment is marching toward 10%, and house foreclosures are still rising.

If you're a day late with your credit-card payment or overdrawn by a few bucks on your ATM card, the bank (which your tax money helped bail out) is still sticking you with obscene fees and charges. Hence the question that so many of us are asking: Where's my bailout? Welcome to Round 2 of Main Street vs Wall Street. The divide is the worst I've seen in my 40 years of writing about finance.

In a new TIME poll, 75% of the respondents say they believe Wall Street will revert to business as usual, 67% want the government to force pay cuts, and 59% want more government regulation. Main and Wall are never going to love each other. And they probably shouldn't, because their interests aren't identical. But if we're going to get through this mess as a society and regain our prosperity, Main Street and Wall Street need to understand each other. And they don't.

Too many people on Wall Street are acting in an arrogant, clueless and tone-deaf way, huffily treating any criticism of their pay and practices and perks as an attack on the free-enterprise system. Wall Streeters like to say (and may even believe) that they're helping humanity — which occasionally happens, but only by accident — rather than being out to make the most money they can.

Engineers on Wednesday will evaluate the damage caused when the rod and metal brace fell into the 73-year-old bridge's westbound lanes during Tuesday evening's rush hour. When the rod apparently snapped at about 5:30pm, it brought down with it a steel patch roughly 3 feet long, authorities said.

The rod that fell Tuesday was erected last month during an emergency repair job. It was holding in place a saddle-like cap that had been installed over a cracked link discovered over the Labor Day weekend."If you look at the totality of the circumstances — you've got the 5:30 commute, you have a 5,000-pound piece of steel falling out of the sky. We are so fortunate that no one was injured or killed," CHP Sergeant Trent Cross told KTVU-TV.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a civil engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley who has spent 20 years studying the Bay Bridge, called THE INITIAL CRACK A "WARNING SIGN" OF POTENTIALLY BIGGER SAFETY ISSUES WITH THE BRIDGE. "The repair they were doing was really a Band-Aid," said Astaneh-Asl, who criticized Caltrans at the time for rushing to reopen the bridge. "The Band-Aid broke, in essence." Astaneh-Asl said the failure of the repair job demonstrates the need for a longer-term solution. THE BRIDGE'S AGE AND DESIGN MAKE IT SUSCEPTIBLE TO COLLAPSE, especially if commercial tractor-trailers are allowed to continue using it, he said.