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Mr Correa was rescued after soldiers opened fired on dissident police.

Moments after being freed he appeared on the balcony of Quito’s presidential palace and spoke to thousands of cheering supporters.

He thanked the crowds and said he had just lived through the saddest day of his government.

The violence came after dark on a day of unrest in Ecuador that the president and his supporters said amounted to an an attempted coup.

Mr Correa had been holed up in the police hospital, where he was treated after being hit by tear gas in a confrontation.

Hundreds of police, angry over a law that would cut their benefits, appeared to have prevented him from leaving the clinic.

Under cover of darkness Mr Correa was reportedly smuggled out of the hospital in a wheelchair even as a gunbattle between troops and police was under way.

“In October 2008, the FDIC instituted a program providing unlimited protection for noninterest- bearing transaction accounts at participating banks and found it to be highly successful in providing stability at those institutions during one of the most severe economic downturns in our history,” said FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair. “The Dodd-Frank provision is different from the FDIC’s program but continues the purpose of that program as we emerge from the economic crisis.”

A new multibillion-dollar private security contract to protect U.S. diplomats is “about to drop” as early as this week, say two State Department sources, who requested anonymity because the contract is not yet finalized and they are not authorized to speak with the press.

So much for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s one-time campaign pledge to ban “private mercenary firms.”

Neither source would say which private security firms have won the four-year contract or how much it will ultimately be worth. The last Worldwide Protective Services contract, awarded in 2005, went to Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp. Rough estimates place that contract’s value at $2.2 billion.

“It’s a seller’s market now,” says Bai Baosheng, 43, puffing a cigarette in his office in Baotou, China, where his company sells bags of powder containing a metallic element known as neodymium, vital in tiny magnets that direct the fins of bombs dropped by U.S. Air Force jets in Afghanistan.

A generation after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made mastering neodymium and 16 other elements known as rare earths a priority, China dominates the market, with far-reaching effects ranging from global trade friction to U.S. job losses and threats to national security.

The U.S. handed its main economic rival power to dictate access to these building blocks of modern weapons by ceding control of prices and supply, according to dozens of interviews with industry executives, congressional leaders and policy experts. China in July reduced rare-earth export quotas for the rest of the year by 72 percent, sending prices up more than sixfold for some elements.

Military officials are only now conducting an inventory of where and how U.S. suppliers use the obscure but essential substances — including those that silence the whoosh of Boeing Co. helicopter blades, direct Raytheon Co. missiles and target guns in General Dynamics Corp. tanks.

“The Irish banking system is at rock bottom today,” Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said today in a Bloomberg Television interview in Dublin. He rejected speculation Ireland will need outside help. “It can only revive from now because it’s recapitalized and reformed,” he said.

Ireland’s deteriorating finances fueled investor concerns that it would become the first government after Greece to tap the 750 euro-billion rescue fund set up by the European Union and International Monetary fund to stanch the debt crisis. Irish bonds have plunged this month, sending the yield on 10-year securities to higher than any other euro nation except Greece.

The cost of bailing out the country’s banks may ultimately rise to about 50 billion euros, under a “stress case” scenario for Anglo Irish, according to figures published by the country’s finance ministry and the central bank in Dublin today. The base case estimate is about 45 billion euros, the figures show. Allied Irish may need as much as 3 billion euros.

A total of 248,534 homes that sold in the period had received a default or auction notice or been seized by banks, RealtyTrac said in a report today. The number was up 5 percent from the first quarter and down 20 percent from a year earlier, according to the Irvine, California-based data seller.

“We’re still clearly building up more distressed inventory,” Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s senior vice president, said in a telephone interview. “That will either put downward pressure on prices or keep them from going up.”

The discount reflects the average sales price of homes in the foreclosure process compared with properties not in distress, according to RealtyTrac. About 24 percent of all homes sold were in some stage of foreclosure, down from 31 percent in the first quarter. The average price of a distressed property was $174,198, up from $171,971, the company said.

If confirmed as suicides, it would be on top of 14 other suicides on the base this year. Base officials called a news conference for Wednesday afternoon to discuss the problem of suicides at the huge base in central Texas.

“Every one of these is tragic,” said Maj. Gen. William Grimsley, the post commander. “It’s personally and professionally frustrating as a leader.”

Grimsley did not announce any major action or response during the news conference. “I don’t think there is a simple answer,” he said.

The recent spate of incidents, began Friday Sept. 24 when the body of Pvt. Antonio E. Heath, 24, of Warren, New York, was found in Temple, Texas, the victim of a gunshot wound. Heath was deployed to Iraq for most of 2009 and earned a number of medals including the Army Commendation Medal.

The next day, Master Sgt. Baldemar Gonzales, 39, of Victoria, Texas was found dead in his residence on Fort Hood. During his service he had fought in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. During that time he earned a Bronze Star, a Meritorious Service Medal with one oak leaf cluster, an Army Commendation Medal with four oak leaf clusters as well as numerous other decorations.

That same day the body of Sgt. Timothy Ryan Rinella, 29, of Chester, Virginia, was found in his home in Copperas Cove, just outside of Fort Hood. He had an “apparent gunshot wound,” according to information released by Fort Hood.

Rinella served three tours of duty in Iraq and one tour in Afghanistan.

Flicking through a wallpaper app with backgrounds of Mickey Mouse and a tropical waterfall, Peter Gilbert gets a plain, black and white text notification on his smartphone.

A third of the way down the screen it says, “Taint: Phone Number, IMEI, ICCID (sim card identifier).” The message alerts Gilbert that the wallpaper app has sent his phone’s number and other identifying information to imnet.us. Checking online, it appears the address is a website in Shenzhen, China.

The notification came from TaintDroid, a prototype extension to the Android mobile-phone platform designed to identify apps that transmit private data. The phone-based tool monitors how applications access and use privacy sensitive data, such as location, microphone, camera and phone numbers, and provides feedback within seconds of using a newly installed app.

Forced labour and human rights abuses involving African crews have been uncovered on trawlers fishing illegally for the European market by investigators for an environmental campaign group.

The Environmental Justice Foundation found conditions on board including incarceration, violence, withholding of pay, confiscation of documents, confinement on board for months or even years, and lack of clean water.

The EJF found hi-tech vessels operating without appropriate licences in fishing exclusion zones off the coast of Sierra Leone and Guinea over the last four years. The ships involved all carried EU numbers, indicating that they were licensed to import to Europe having theoretically passed strict hygiene standards.

“We didn’t set out to look at human rights but rather to tackle the illegal fishing that’s decimating fish stocks, but having been on board we have seen conditions that unquestionably meet the UN official definition of forced labour or modern-day slavery,” EJF investigator Duncan Copeland said. A report on the abuses is published by the foundation today.

Its photographs and film of the areas in which the crews were working and sleeping show quarters with ceilings less than a metre high where the men cannot stand up. Temperatures in the fish holds on some vessels where men were being required to sort, process and pack fish for lucrative European and Asian markets were 40 to 45 degrees, with no ventilation, On some vessels the crews of up to 200 had little access to clean drinking water.

The trawlers have mostly been identified engaging in pirate fishing off west Africa. Many of the men on board have been recruited from the area around the Senegalese capital, Dakar. Others have been recruited from rural areas of Asia, including China and Vietnam, by agents.