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Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stepped out of his car and was greeted by Meir Dagan, the 64-year-old head of the agency. Dagan, who has walked with a stick since he was injured in action as a young man, led Netanyahu and a general to a briefing room.

According to sources with knowledge of Mossad, inside the briefing room were some members of a hit squad. As the man who gives final authorisation for such operations, Netanyahu was briefed on plans to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a member of Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over La Jolla Bank, FSB, in La Jolla, Calif. The bank had 10 branches and about $3.6 billion in assets and $2.8 billion in deposits.

Also seized was George Washington Savings Bank in Orland Park, Ill. It had four branches and about $412.8 million in assets and $397 million in deposits.

The FDIC said OneWest Bank in Pasadena, Calif., agreed to assume all deposits and essentially all assets of La Jolla Bank. The takeover is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund an estimated $882.3 million.

The FDIC and OneWest will share losses on about $3.3 billion of the failed bank’s loans and other assets.

Meanwhile, FirstMerit Bank, National Association of Akron, Ohio, agreed to take over deposits at George Washington Savings Bank. FirstMerit is also taking over essentially all the assets. For George Washington, the FDIC predicts the takeover will cost the insurance fund $141.4 million.

The loss-sharing agreement for George Washington covers $324.2 million in assets.

The other seized banks were smaller and located in Florida and Texas. They were Marco Community Bank, with a single office on Marco Island, a wealthy barrier island near Naples on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and La Coste National Bank of La Coste, Texas.

Marco Community Bank had about $119.6 million in assets and $117.1 million in deposits. Mutual of Omaha Bank, a division of the big insurance company Mutual of Omaha, agreed to assume the assets and deposits of Marco Community Bank.

The failure of Marco Community Bank will cost the deposit insurance fund an estimated $38.1 million.

In addition, the FDIC and Mutual of Omaha Bank, which is based in Omaha, Neb., agreed to share losses on $104.8 million of the failed bank’s loans and other assets.

Florida is among the states with the highest concentration of bank failures and where the meltdown in the real estate market brought an avalanche of soured mortgage loans. Last year saw the failure of 14 banks in the state. Also high on the list are California, Georgia and Illinois.

La Coste National Bank had a single branch and $53.9 million in assets. Deposits totaled $49.3 million.

The banking regulator recently began running recruiting advertisements for the new office, saying it’s looking for people with skills and experience in such areas as loan management, contract oversight and asset marketing. Its Web site lists more than 330 job openings in Schaumburg.

The FDIC, which has a downtown office, said the new location will open in March. It will manage receiverships and liquidate assets from failed Midwest banks.

That suggests that the pace of Illinois bank failures is likely to remain brisk. In 2009, regulators seized 21 banks statewide, topped only by Georgia.

The FDIC’s new office is at 200 N. Martingale Road. It said it’s occupying 105,700 square feet of the 150,705-square-foot building, or seven out of its 11 floors. It’s a three-year lease with an option to renew one to two years.

In surprise news which sent the pound sliding on Thursday, official figures showed that the Government borrowed £4.3 billion last month.

It was the first time since 1993 that the public finances had gone into the red in January – a month in which tax revenues usually push the Exchequer into the black.

Economists said that the scale of the shortfall in the budget could this year mount to above £180 billion – higher than even the Chancellor’s forecast of a record £178 billion.

Such a deficit would, at 12.8 per cent of British gross domestic product, be even greater than the deficit faced in Greece, which is facing a full-scale fiscal crisis and may need to be bailed out by fellow euro nations or the International Monetary Fund.

The public borrowing figures coincided with further bad news from the housing market, as the Council of Mortgage Lenders reported that mortgage lending dropped last month by 32 per cent, hitting the lowest monthly total in a decade.

A 92-page report laid out the evidence against Ivins, including his equivocal answers when asked by a friend in a recorded conversation about whether he was the anthrax mailer.

“If I found out I was involved in some way,” Ivins said, not finishing the sentence. “I do not have any recollection of ever doing anything like that,” he said, adding, “I can tell you, I am not a killer at heart.”

But in a 2008 e-mail to a former colleague, one of many reflecting deep mental distress, Ivins wrote, “I can hurt, kill, and terrorize.” He added: “Go down low, low, low as you can go, then dig forever, and you’ll find me, my psyche.”

The report revealed the FBI’s theory that Ivins embedded in the anthrax notes a complex coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluding to two former colleagues, both women, with whom he was obsessed.

The report described how an FBI surveillance agent watched in 2007 as Ivins threw out an article and a book, Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” that could betray his interest in codes, coming out of his house in Frederick, Md., at 1 a.m. in long underwear to make certain the garbage truck had taken his trash.

Whether the voluminous documentation will convince skeptics about Ivins’ guilt was uncertain. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a physicist who has criticized the FBI’s work, said the case should not have been closed.

“Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,” Holt said, noting the National Academy of Sciences was still studying the agency’s scientific work. He said the FBI report laid out “barely a circumstantial case” that “would not, I think, stand up in court.”

Dropped into a mailbox in downtown Princeton, N.J., the anthrax letters were addressed to news-media organizations and two U.S. senators and contained notes with radical Islamist rhetoric that appeared to link them to the Sept. 11 attacks, which occurred a week before the first of the two mailings.

In the wake of Sept. 11, they set off a nationwide panic over random discoveries of white powder that people feared might be more anthrax. The real anthrax — a few teaspoons of fine powder — infected at least 22 people, including postal workers, and killed five.

The five who died: two postal workers in Washington, D.C., a New York City hospital worker, a Florida photo editor and a 94-year-old Connecticut woman who had no known contact with any of the poisoned letters.

Congressional offices and the Supreme Court were evacuated as a result of anthrax contamination, and the Postal Service spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up mail centers.

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The federal government increased spending on biodefense, with a total of nearly $60 billion since 2001, and rejuvenated the faltering military’s anthrax-vaccine program on which Ivins had worked for many years.

The investigation included more than 10,000 interviews on six continents, the report said. FBI investigators conducted preliminary investigations of 1,024 people and “in-depth investigations” of more than 400 people, examining those with possible financial motives, links to the drug and pesticide industries or a history of correspondence with the lawmakers targeted by the mailings.

In response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau also posted on the Web more than 2,700 pages of interview notes and investigative documents to bolster its case.

Ivins, 62, was a microbiologist who had worked with anthrax for decades as part of the vaccine program at the Army’s biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

He took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in July 2008, after months of intense scrutiny by the FBI, which had placed a GPS device on his car, examined his trash and questioned his wife and two children.

Investigators discovered his penchant for taking long, aimless drives at night, sometimes mailing letters and packages from distant points under assumed names. They discovered his obsession with a sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and with images of blindfolded women, hundreds of which were found on his computer, the report says.

Days after his suicide, Justice Department and FBI officials said they believed Ivins had carried out the anthrax attacks alone and they released search-warrant affidavits that included some of the evidence against him.

The affidavits included e-mails in which he confessed to paranoia and delusion; time records showing he had worked alone in the laboratory late at night before the anthrax mailings in September and October 2001; and genetic analysis tracing the mailed anthrax powder to a flask overseen by Ivins and stored in his lab.

Some of Ivins’ colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, including several supervisors who knew him well, publicly rejected the FBI’s conclusion. They said he was eccentric but incapable of such an act.

Skeptics also pointed to investigators’ long focus on Steven Hatfill, another former Army scientist whom the FBI pursued in 2002 and 2003, keeping him under constant surveillance.

In 2008, the government exonerated Hatfill and agreed to a settlement worth $4.6 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging his privacy rights had been violated.

That power of the wind will soon reassert itself in Plymouth, Mass., when a giant device becomes the first thing any visitor to this historic town will notice. That’s because plans are under way to build a wind turbine at the county jail here, on a hill less than a mile from the coast.

“We hope to be generating power, if not next year, then in the foreseeable future,” says John Birtwell, the spokesman for the Plymouth County Sheriff’s department. “We’ve been waiting for a year to buy a wind turbine after finishing all feasibility studies.”

According to Mr. Birtwell, the jail’s electricity bill runs close to $1 million per year.

“Unlike a school building or another commercial building, we’re always open,” Birtwell says. “When you have to feed and house 1,600 souls at a location, we have an enormous demand for energy.”

An increasing number of correctional facilities in the United States and in other countries are beginning to look at wind power to supply energy to their 24-hour operations. With the rising cost of fossil fuels, governments are finding that investing in wind energy at correctional facilities makes sense. Plus, green energy improves the image of prisons and jails.

The state of Massachusetts is currently planning wind turbine projects at three prisons – after the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust overlaid a wind map with the locations of state facilities and provided thousands of dollars for feasibility studies.

“Our governor asked state agencies to lead by example and become more sustainable in our operations,” says Kevin Flanagan, the deputy director of the Massachusetts Division of Capital Asset Management.

Construction of two turbines at the North Central Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in the city of Gardner, is scheduled to begin in the spring. When the project is completed – in approximately 12 months – it will be the first wind-energy system at a prison in the state.

Wind will meet the entire electricity demand at the prison, and extra electricity will be sold to the grid, according to Mr. Flanagan.

The first wind turbine for a US prison was built in March 2005 at the Victorville Federal Correctional Complex in California. Scott Debenham, a developer who worked on that project, says that wind supplies approximately 10 percent of the prison’s energy needs, and prisoners’ help maintain the turbine by washing the bugs and dirt off the its blades twice a year.

“It’s in a remote area where the neighbors won’t complain about the looks of it,” he says.

The government is planning to build another wind turbine at the Federal Correctional Institution Big Spring, in Texas, according to Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons.

In California, where two state prisons already use solar energy, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is studying the feasibility of wind power at three prisons, according to Paul Verke, a spokesman for the department.

In Indiana, the first wind turbine at a corrections facility was installed last year, according to Kevin Durbin, a maintenance supervisor at the Putnamville Correctional Facility. The prison is on the highest elevation in the county, he says, which made the location perfect for wind.

Virginia is planning to use stimulus money to erect three turbines on a ridge at the Wallens Ridge Correctional Center, according to Michael Kelly, a spokesman for the governor’s office. He says that when completed, this will be the largest wind-energy system on state land in Virginia – and the first one at a prison in that state. Construction is scheduled to begin this year.

Why are correctional facilities considered well suited for wind energy?

In addition to consuming a great deal of electricity, they’re on public land, where no special permits from town committees are necessary. Prisons are also often located in areas – such as on islands, along seacoasts, or at high elevations – where winds are stronger.

Those locations aren’t an accident. “Because when it’s on a hill, you have a better view,” said Étienne Chiasson, a spokesman for Correctional Service Canada, when asked why prisons are often built on windy hills or mountains. “It would be a good vintage point when you have someone trying to escape.”

Canada installed its first wind turbine at a federal correctional facility – at the Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick – last April and is currently building a second one at the Drumheller Institution, a medium-security prison on the prairies of Alberta.

In New Brunswick, the turbine reduced the prison’s carbon dioxide emissions by 940 metric tons, which is the equivalent of taking 265,511 small cars off the road or planting 4,700 trees, according to the Correctional Service’s press office.

The Canadian government is also evaluating the feasibility of wind power at 10 other prisons.

“The Government of Canada is committed to demonstrating leadership in promoting renewable energy technology,” the press office said in an e-mail. “This project is a concrete example on how CSC is delivering on its Sustainable Development Strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Wind turbines are also going up at prisons in Britain, according to Lauren Starr, a press officer for the Ministry of Justice. Ms. Starr says the ministry is now evaluating 50 potential locations for windmills, an initiative that will offset up to 50 percent of prisons’ carbon emissions.

Back in Plymouth, Mr. Birtwell is excited about tapping into wind energy, but he says the county jail has been unable to purchase a turbine for a few months because of a shortage. Still he remains optimistic:

Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, 33, is accused of killing Bandar Abdullah Abdulaziz in the third-floor room of the Landmark Hotel in Marylebone, central London on Monday.

The Saudi royal is also charged with “unlawfully and maliciously” causing 32-year-old Abulaziz grievous bodily harm at the hotel on January 22.

Earlier in the week, police said a post-mortem found he had been strangled and had suffered a head injury.

The prince, wearing a long-sleeved white top and white trousers, stood in the dock at London’s City of Westminster Magistrate’s Court, flanked by an interpreter.

He spoke only to confirm his name and address during the 10-minute hearing.

“We look forward to a trial, when we will expose a prosecution case which has turned a genuine friendship of the deceased into a forced relationship of master and servant,” the prince’s lawyer Michael Wolkind said.

He was remanded in custody to appear at the Old Bailey next week when his lawyer said an application for bail would be made.

Dubbed “Cyber ShockWave,” the elaborate exercise was held in a Washington hotel room transformed for the day into the White House Situation Room, where the president and his advisers typically meet to address national emergencies.

Former president George W. Bush’s Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff played the role of National Security Advisor as the “cabinet” sought to respond to a nightmare scenario drawn up by former CIA director Michael Hayden.

As the “crisis” escalated, the officials discussed various actions including calling out the National Guard, nationalizing the utility companies and staging a retaliatory strike if the authors of the cyberattack become known.

“If this is an attack on the United States the president, as commander in chief, has the authority to use the full powers at his disposal,” said former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, in her role as attorney general.

“We’re in good shape from a command-and-control standpoint,” Charles Wald, a retired general acting as Secretary of Defense, reassured the team.

“We can take action offensively if we know where to go,” said Wald, former deputy commander of US European Command. “Problematically, we don’t know where that is.”

“I do think we need to be careful about talking about acts of war,” cautioned John Negroponte, the former Director of National Intelligence who switched hats for the simulation to portray the Secretary of State.

The exercise, which was filmed by CNN and will be broadcast at a later date, was organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center to “educate the public about our vulnerabilities,” said Eileen McMenamin, BPC vice president of communications.

Three large video screens behind the participants displayed multi-color maps of the United States with a series of mock updates and a fictional television network, “GNN,” broadcast news reports on the cascading crisis.

The simulated cyberattack was spread through a free application for smartphones about “March Madness,” the wildly popular annual US college basketball tournament.

The “March Madness” malware contained video footage of the Red Army although a security adviser warned this may be a “red herring” and whether the attack was launched by a state, terrorists or criminals was not immediately clear.

Launched from servers in Russia, it first crippled cellphone networks, then landlines, then the Internet and eventually the electricity grid in the entire eastern United States, exacerbated by a pair of bombings at power stations.

New York, Philadelphia and Washington were plunged into darkness, airline traffic was disrupted and the financial markets ground to a halt.

“This is a massive blow to the solar plexus of the economy,” said “Treasury Secretary” Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council.

National Security Adviser Chertoff peppered the cabinet with questions.

“If we were to shut a server down in Russia, would the Russians view that as an attack?” he asked. “If the attacker is either a state actor or a terrorist group what are our options for responding or retaliating?”

Speaking after the scenario was over, Negroponte said it was fairly realistic. “None of it struck me as particularly outlandish,” he said.

Former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin, who was bumped up to Director of National Intelligence for the cyber game, said Al-Qaeda would clearly “like to carry out something like this but we don’t know their capabilities.”

“The Chinese and the Russians have the capability,” added Fran Townsend, Bush’s one-time Homeland Security advisor, who was promoted to Homeland Security secretary for the simulation.