"The magnitude 7.9 quake on 12 May has brought several nearby faults closer to failure and could trigger another major earthquake in the region," the American Geophysical Union said in a statement. This happens because of a domino-like effect where the movement of one piece of Earth's crust forces another piece to move up, down and away, geophysicists reported.

"One great earthquake seems to make the next one more likely, not less," said Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey. "We tend to think of earthquakes as relieving stress on a fault. That may be true for the one that ruptured, but not for the adjacent faults."

For instance, 12% of bloodstream infections by E. coli in England, Wales and Northern Ireland now show some signs of not responding to drugs. The fight against drug resistance is an on-going battle because MANY BACTERIA CONSTANTLY MUTATE, GAINING RESISTANCE TO CURRENT ANTIBIOTICS IN THE PROCESS. This is what has been happening in recent years to the likes of E. coli.

HPA data show that there are about 20,000 bloodstream infections of E. coli each year - although the true level of infections would be much higher if urinary tract infections were taken into account. Of these, 12% show signs of resistance - up from about 4% at the turn of the century. The infections are mostly not yet resistant to all forms of antibiotics, just what doctors call the first-line. This means they are having to use back up drugs, which tend to have more side effects and raises the prospect of the widespread emergence of a new strain which is totally antibiotic resistant.

Dr David Livermore, an infections expert at the HPA, said, "GPs should not prescribe - nor patients expect - antibiotics for routine coughs and colds. Resistance has been accumulating. We have to use reserve antibiotics more than previously... that is worrying. THERE ARE SOME CRACKS IN THE SYSTEM, but they are not big ones yet."

If you or I were arrested tomorrow, in possession of a video in which we announced an intention to kill for Jesus and with a bomb-making kit in the living room at home, we would not expect to fare well in the dock by shrugging that we were not really serious. Yet the jury at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday failed to convict eight defendants of charges against them of conspiring to blow up airliners.

DESPITE THE DISCOVERY OF SEVEN 'MARTYRDOM VIDEOS', A BOMB-MAKING FACTORY AND DETAILED AIRLINE FLIGHT LISTS, the jury found only three men guilty of conspiracy to murder, and failed to agree on charges of conspiracy to detonate explosives on aircraft against any of those accused. Yesterday, the police and security authorities were stunned by the half-cock outcome of a prosecution for which they believed the evidence was overwhelming. It has important implications for the struggle against terrorism; for the credibility of Britain's anti-terrorist operations; for airline security; and maybe also for our faith in the jury system.

No responsible person wants innocents convicted of terrible crimes, nor an exaggerated climate of public fear. But if half the evidence produced against the defendants in the Walthamstow bomb plot was true, then we have reason to be deeply dismayed by the inconclusive outcome. The prosecuting authorities must demand a retrial. We have got to do better than this, if we are to protect ourselves from the real and present danger of Islamic terror.

UPDATE - The prosecuting authorities have requested a retrial.

The article also cites Open Europe, noting that the value of sterling against the euro could see Britain paying another £8 billion to the EU budget, possibly raising the UK's contribution to £47 billion under the current financial perspective.

"The former French president seems to need reminding that it wasn't the British who voted against his empire-building Constitution. It was the Irish, the Dutch and - sacre bleu! - his own fellow countrymen. THE SCANDAL IS THAT OUR GOVERNMENT SIGNED UP TO IT WITHOUT EVEN ASKING US."

Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Secretary, is expected to allow special exemption for farmers to salvage what is left of their crops by using heavy machinery on the wet fields. European Union machinery rules and prolonged rain mean the crops may rot in the wet fields before they can be collected. The EU rules ban farmers from using combine harvesters on wet land to protect soil quality, but Mr Benn's exemption is expected to last for about three weeks.

Guy Gagen, chief arable adviser at the National Farmers' Union, said: "THIS IS THE MOST DIFFICULT HARVEST FOR AT LEAST 40 YEARS. FARMERS SAY IT COMPARES TO 1968, which was very similar, with heavy rain throughout the summer. We just need a break in the weather. If we get that for five to seven days farmers can recover." There is also concern rising about next year's harvest, with fears FARMERS WILL BE UNABLE TO PREPARE THE GROUND AND PLANT SEED in time unless they can clear this year's crop within the next two weeks.

As recently as last winter, loan guarantees for carmakers had seemed like a piece of the Motor City's past (President Carter signed off on the Chrysler loan guarantees in 1980). But a combination of the economic slowdown and Presidential campaign politics, AS WELL AS THE PRECEDENT OF THE FEDERAL BAILOUT OF WALL STREET'S BANKS, have helped jump-start Detroit's campaign for loan guarantees.

"We think we have some real momentum," says one General Motor official, who has been close to the quiet campaign for federal aid. "Times have changed." The interest rates offered for industrial companies with shabby credit ratings have soared over the summer, making the federal option even more crucial. ALL THREE OF DETROIT'S CARMAKERS HAVE HAD THEIR CREDIT RATINGS DOWNGRADED.

Apart from America's Big Three, one third of U.S. automotive suppliers are now in danger of bankruptcy because of production cuts by Detroit according to a recent study. Even foreign carmakers operating in the U.S. could qualify for the loans, noted Bozzella. "There are no restrictions in the language on which companies are in and which companies are out," he says. However, NONE OF THE FOREIGN AUTOMAKERS WITH MANUFACTURING PLANTS (SUCH AS NISSAN) IN THE U.S. HAVE EXPRESSED A DIRECT INTEREST.

United briefly saw the value of its stock vanish in a matter of seconds on Monday. The company was the victim of a headline crossing over Wall Street's trading screens that claimed the airline was filing for bankruptcy. But wait, you might think - hadn't the airline already been in bankruptcy not too long ago? The headline was from a story that was six years old.

"I think everybody in the business was extremely disturbed by what happened, however it happened," said Michael James, a trader with Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles. United spokeswoman Jean Medina called the posting of the story and headline "irresponsible. This is what happens when you're careless and don't check facts," she said. Bloomberg LP, the news and financial company whose terminals sit on thousands of trading desks at investment banks throughout the world, was the financial media company that ran the headline.

It's never going to be a perfect system, traders and journalists admit. There are two forces working against accuracy: the Internet, where anyone can post anything at any time, and the quick-acting nature of Wall Street. "The digital age requires safeguards built into our news gathering and dissemination process," Cunningham said. "What's so troubling is nobody thought of picking up a phone. AS AN INDUSTRY, WE SHOULD REALLY THINK ABOUT SLOWING DOWN A BIT."

Barclaycard, owned by Barclays Plc, introduced its first contactless credit card as the OnePulse product one year ago, in which a microchip allows customers to pay for goods by touching the card against a reader without having to remove it from their wallet or purse. THE GROUP NOW PLANS TO ISSUE OVER ONE MILLION CONTACTLESS CARDS BY THE END OF THIS YEAR. Barclaycard then plans to make it possible to put the chip into a mobile phone or key fob, meaning the need to carry a plastic credit card will disappear.

"In time you won't have to carry a plastic credit card around with you if you don't want to, although some people will chose to for nostalgic reasons," Barclaycard Chief Executive Officer Antony Jenkins said in a statement on Monday.

"If I had said to you 10 years ago that you couldn't pay with a cheque at the supermarket, you wouldn't have believed me. That is now the reality, and we see plastic cards going the same way eventually," Jenkins added.

Most analysts had expected the producer cartel to maintain formal targets at its meeting in Vienna, although some had suggested they could tighten compliance in order to help stem a near 30 percent slump in oil prices since July.

U.S. crude for October delivery was up 52 cents at $103.78 a barrel by 10:30 p.m. EDT, reversing earlier losses of more than $1 a barrel after the OPEC decision. Prices slumped to their lowest in five months a day ago. London Brent crude rose 63 cents to $100.97, after falling below $100 on Tuesday for the first time since April.

"Since the market is over-supplied, the conference agreed to abide by September 2007 production allocations (adjusted to include new members Angola and Ecuador and excluding Indonesia and Iraq), totaling 28.8 million bpd," the group said in a communique after a nearly five-hour meeting. Analysts said the group had sent a clear message to markets. "IT CERTAINLY SHOWS THAT OPEC IS NOT AFRAID TO DEFEND A $100 PRICE LEVEL," said Jonathan Kornafel, Asia director at U.S.-based options trader Hudson Capital Energy.

The forced-sale of the Bear Stearns brokerage in March and the pre-emptive seizure Sunday of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac HAS SET A TEMPLATE THAT U.S. FINANCIAL AUTHORITIES MIGHT FIND HARD TO AVOID. Lehman, left as the smallest major U.S. independent investment bank after Bear Stearns' takeover by JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), has a prominent role in many of the same markets that Bear Stearns had: interest rate swaps, credit default swaps and equity derivatives.

While the government would be very reluctant to intervene yet again, especially if it required taxpayers' money, several experts say there may be no alternative to avoid a systemic financial crisis. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may be forced to act to preserve stability in the rest of the financial system.

"There is a risk that you could get THE EQUIVALENT OF A FINANCIAL BLACK HOLE and more people getting sucked in," said Robert Litan, a senior fellow in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In the most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be switched on Wednesday, accelerating sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together. "The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the HIGGS PARTICLE," Hawking told BBC radio.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs," added Hawking, whose books including "A Brief History of Time" have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle. The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is the "GOD PARTICLE" - it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive.

Though Sarkozy stressed the crime-fighting benefits of the database, he ordered the interior minister to open immediate talks about it to ensure that it "protect freedoms," according to an official in his office. The official was not authorized to be publicly named. Le Parisien daily's Tuesday edition quoted lawyer Jean-Marc Fedida as saying Edvige opens up "the possibility of tracking the entire population of France."

Edvige replaces an obsolete 1991 database that helped France's police surveillance agency track politicians, labor leaders and other activists - anyone who resorted to violence or supported the use of violence. But Edvige goes further, gathering personal information on health and sexual orientation, dropping the minimum age for surveillance from 18 to 13 and casting a wider net, allowing security officials to track anyone considered a "POSSIBLE THREAT TO PUBLIC ORDER."

Defenders insist Edvige is a measured response to France's changing security situation - particularly after a rise in youth violence and nationwide riots that shook poor minority neighborhoods in 2005. Jean-Pierre Dubois, the president of France's Human Rights League, called the database "THE PASSAGE TO A REAL SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY."

The storm was 120 miles (195 kilometers) west of Havana and moving west-northwest at 9 mph at 11 pm Miami time, according to the US National Hurricane Center. The US agency said the storm was starting to strengthen and may become a "major hurricane." Ike's winds strengthened to 80 miles per hour, the center said, and may increase in speed to 111 mph or higher in the central Gulf. The hurricane is forecast to bypass New Orleans and the offshore Louisiana oil and natural gas fields and strike the Texas coast on September 13.

There's "a significant chance that Ike will be the worst hurricane to hit Texas in 40 years," Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at private forecaster Weather Underground Inc, said. "I am giving it a 50 percent chance of being a major hurricane at landfall."

Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a disaster declaration yesterday along the coast in preparation for Ike's landfall. As many as 7,500 national guardsmen are on standby for rapid deployment and 1,350 buses are available for evacuations, the governor's office said in a statement today.

With the stock market tumbling, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the government takeover of Fannie and Freddie meant the companies should no longer be regarded as outside the public sector. Peter Orszag, CBO director, said: "It is the CBO view that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be directly incorporated into the federal budget."

The Bush administration appeared to be caught by surprise. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget told the Financial Times: "We are working through this issue with Treasury and other stakeholders." The White House could take a different view on Fannie and Freddie and exclude them from its budgets. But this would be difficult because the CBO is regarded as the leading independent authority on US finances and its assessments guide spending decisions by Congress.

The two mortgage companies have between them $5,400bn in liabilities, equal to the entire publicly traded debt of the US, alongside mortgage-related assets of about equal value. These will now all be accounted for by the CBO, although public accounting rules mean that its tally of US government debt may not necessarily increase by $5,400bn.

The CBO bombshell came as it raised its baseline estimate for the US budget deficit to $407bn this year and a record $438bn next year owing to falling revenues and higher spending, some of it related to the fiscal stimulus. The price of credit default swaps on five-year US government debt hit a record 18 basis points in early trading, according to CMA Datavision. This means that it costs $18,000 a year to buy insurance on $10m of US government debt.

After fifty years of social change, the country seems hungry for political change. Everything fixed has been questioned: the role of husband and wife, the primacy of patriarchy, the divine command to "be fruitful and multiply." THE COUNTRY HAS NO COMPASS, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHERE WE ARE HEADED.

An old Roman senator would decry today's slogans of change. The ancient idea of sticking with tried and true principles, of adhering to tradition, was the very ground of Roman political understanding. That is why Julius Caesar appeared as a scandal and a horror. The Roman Senate had to get rid of him, because he was a change agent. WHAT WE LEARN FROM THE LATE ROMAN REPUBLIC GOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS: change signals crisis, and CRISIS RESULTS IN EMERGENCY POWERS GIVEN TO ONE MAN or one party. And emergency powers lead to tyranny – to a permanent state of unnatural, unstable relations between the people and their government.

McCain and Obama seem to be nice fellows. The problem is with the country as a whole, and the crisis that is approaching. While the Republican National Convention was ongoing, the economy was groaning. The financial floodgates are creaking. The international order is coming apart. Something is in the air. SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO SNAP. CHANGE IS COMING, AND IT'S NOT A GOOD CHANGE. What the candidates are talking about in this election may be completely irrelevant.

As a Russian diplomat explained last July, AMERICA IS ABOUT TO ENTER "A CRISIS OF ITS EXISTENCE."