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This request has already occasioned a dispute with the nation’s governors. And it raises the prospect of U.S. military personnel patrolling the streets of the United States, in conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

In June, the U.S. Northern Command distributed a “Congressional Fact Sheet” entitled “Legislative Proposal for Activation of Federal Reserve Forces for Disasters.” That proposal would amend current law, thereby “authorizing the Secretary of Defense to order any unit or member of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve, to active duty for a major disaster or emergency.”

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Experts have long believed epidemics unleashed by a vaccine’s mutated virus wouldn’t last since the vaccine only contains a weakened virus strain — but that assumption is coming under pressure. Some experts now say that once viruses from vaccines start circulating they can become just as dangerous as wild viruses.

The 22-year-old officer was dispatched after residents in the New Jersey town of Long Branch had phoned to complain that a man in the Latin quarter was acting suspiciously.

When the officer asked the man for identification papers, he did not have a driving licence or other form of ID to prove his identity.

The songwriter, famous for hits such as Like a Rolling Stone and Mr Tambourine Man, was then ordered into the back of her police car and driven back to his hotel to authenticate his story.

It was not until she radioed her colleagues at the police station to ask who he was did she realise her mistake.

A spokesman for Long Branch police confirmed the incident with Dylan took place last month at the seaside town on the Jersey shore.

“It has been the talk of the station,” said one officer.

“The policewoman was very young and did not recognise Dylan. There was another officer with her and even he did not recognise Dylan.

“Both said they never listened to his music and had no idea what he looked like.”

Dylan, 68, who was in the area for a concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, has been spotted out alone previously

Rather than use a chauffeur-driven car after a concert in belfast in 1991, he was spotted waiting at a bus stop by a television crew.

The Montgomery, Ala., bank, which has 346 branches spread across Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas, is the sixth largest bank failure in U.S. history and by far the largest failure of 2009.

With $25 billion in assets and $20 billion in deposits, Colonial is 100 times larger than the typical bank to have failed this year.

BB&T will buy $22 billion of Colonial’s assets, as well as its deposits and branches, leaving the remaining assets in the hands of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

BB&T, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., is also a regional banking power, with 1,500 branches across the Southeast. It is also a major mortgage lender.

Most customers of Colonial should not be affected by the closing. The FDIC, the federal agency that has protected bank deposits since the Great Depression, will guarantee account balances up to $250,000.

But home buyers and those who want to refinance their mortgages could end up paying somewhat higher rates, even if they have never heard of Colonial, said Guy Cecala, publisher of trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.

Cecala said Colonial was a significant player in the sector of the business known as “mortgage warehouse” lending, which provides financing needed by mortgage brokers and non-bank lenders to make home loans.

“The more firms like this that get out, the more dependent we get on large banks, and less competition there is. That’s never a good thing,” he said. Warehouse lending used to be a huge source of funds for home loans, according to Cecala, but the mortgage defaults and declining home prices of recent years has decimated the business.

The number of banks exceeding the threshold more than doubled in the year through June, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as real estate and credit-card defaults surged. Almost 300 reported 3 percent or more of their loans were nonperforming, a term for commercial and consumer debt that has stopped collecting interest or will no longer be paid in full.

The biggest banks with nonperforming loans of at least 5 percent include Wisconsin’s Marshall & Ilsley Corp. and Georgia’s Synovus Financial Corp., according to Bloomberg data. Among those exceeding 10 percent, the biggest in the 50 U.S. states was Michigan’s Flagstar Bancorp. All said in second- quarter filings they’re “well-capitalized” by regulatory standards, which means they’re considered financially sound.

“At a 3 percent level, I’d be concerned that there’s some underlying issue, and if they’re at 5 percent, chances are regulators have them classified as being in unsafe and unsound condition,” said Walter Mix, former commissioner of the California Department of Financial Institutions, and now a managing director of consulting firm LECG in Los Angeles. He wasn’t commenting on any specific banks.

Cape Verde coastguards reported that the Russian owned and crewed merchant vessel, which is thought to have been hijacked, has been seen cruising over 460 miles from archipelago, which lies 280 miles off the coast of Senegal.

“The Arctic Sea is some 400 nautical miles off one of the islands of Cape Verde, therefore outside its territorial waters,” said an official, without specifying the vessel’s precise location.

The Cape Verde authorities have hinted that the sighting may have followed an ongoing surveillance operation of the Maltese-flagged vessel by Nato or other international security agencies.

“The Cape Verde coastguard is in contact with international agencies and organisations that are continually informing it of the movement and progress of the ship,” said the official.

Later, the French defence ministry confirmed the sighting, saying the ship had been “found”, and was last seen about 520 miles off the islands.

Russian diplomatic sources said that at least one frigate was headed to the West African islands on Friday night in pursuit.

The sighting of the ship, the first since Aug 1, comes three weeks after its Russian crew of 15 reported a first boarding of the vessel in Swedish waters by 12 armed, English-speaking, men disguised as police officers.

According to European Union officials a second attack was reported a week later off the Portuguese coast, possibly by intruders who had remained as stowaways after the first attack.

The Russian state news agency Itar-Tass has reported that the original tip-off giving the Arctic Sea’s location came from Russia’s old Cold War rival Nato, with the French armed forces playing a key role.

Cmdr Chris Davies, the spokesman at Nato’s British maritime headquarters, acknowledged that the Western military alliance had been monitoring the situation since the first reports of a possible hijacking.

Five Russian naval vessels, including frigates and nuclear submarines, are in the region after being scrambled on Wednesday in an international maritime hunt for the 4000 ton ship.

The sighting off Cape Verde, a key staging post for cocaine trafficking from Latin America, will renew speculation that the vessel could been have been hijacked by drug or arms smugglers.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, was in Cape Verde on Friday on the final leg of an 11-day tour of Africa.

At a joint press conference with Jose Maria Pereira Neves, Cape Verde’s prime minister, Mrs Clinton praised the former Portuguese colony as representing “a new and emerging Africa”.

The Arctic Sea left the Finnish port of Pietarsaari on July 23 en route to the Algerian port of Bejaia with an official cargo manifest of sawn timber.

The ship has food supplies for a 45-day voyage and enough fuel for 40 days of cruising.

Russia’s navy fleet and two nuclear submarines have been scrambled as efforts intensified to locate the Maltese-flagged Arctic Sea and its 15-strong Russian crew.

Experts and marine authorities continued to be baffled today that the 4,000-tonne vessel “disappeared” after its last official recorded positioning off northern France on July 30.

Mikhail Voitenko, editor of Russia’s Sovfracht maritime bulletin, said the ship, carrying sawn timber from Finland to Algeria, might have been targeted because it was also loaded with an unknown cargo.

He told the Russia Today news channel: “The only sensible answer is that the vessel was loaded secretly with something we don’t know anything about.

“We have to remember that before loading in Finland the vessel stayed for two weeks in a shipyard in Kaliningrad.

“I’m sure it cannot be drugs or illegal criminal cargo. I think it is something much more expensive and dangerous.

“It seems some third party didn’t want this transit to be fulfilled so they made this situation highly sophisticated and very complicated.”

The Arctic Sea made routine radio contact with Dover Coastguard as it was about to enter the Strait of Dover from the North Sea at 1.52pm on July 28.

Days later Interpol informed the British Coastguard that the ship had been hijacked days before in the Baltic Sea.

According to reports, it was boarded by up to 10 armed men purporting to be anti-drugs police on July 24.

Some 12 hours later, the intruders apparently left the ship on a high-speed inflatable boat and allowed the vessel to continue on its passage but with its communications equipment damaged.

By the time Interpol alerted Dover Coastguard about the apparent hijacking, the Arctic Sea had already passed through the English Channel, UK Coastguards said.

The ship failed to reach its destination at Bejaia in northern Algeria on August 4, as a supposed crew member on board the vessel told Dover Coastguard when radio contact was made.

It was last recorded on the AISLive ship tracking system off the coast of Brest, northern France, just before 1.30am on July 30, but its whereabouts now remains a mystery.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has ordered all Russian navy ships in the Atlantic to search for the missing vessel, the country’s Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Mark Clark, of the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), said Dover Coastguard was unsuspecting of anything untoward as a supposed crew member radioed before the ship journeyed through the Channel.

He said: “It’s bizarre. There is no coastguard I know who can remember anything like this happening. Who would think that a hijacked ship could pass through one of the most policed and concentrated waters in the world?”

The MCA said it was informed a Portuguese coastal patrol aircraft spotted the vessel later but its current whereabouts remain unknown.

The school on Route 26 at the Paris-Norway town line has been designated by state officials as a distribution site for the H1N1 flu vaccine. The drill is to prepare for a worst-case scenario should the serum have to be transported from Augusta and people rush to get it.

On Thursday morning, four or five National Guard Humvees will travel from Augusta to Paris with vials of fake serum. The National Guardsmen will take on the roles of panicked citizens and military police and practice what they would do, such as using tear gas, in the case of a riot.

“This is just a component of moving the stuff from point A to B,” said Oxford County Emergency Management Agency Director Scott Parker. The plan will be put into place only if needed, he said.

Plans were developed in April to have vials of serum sent from the federal government to Augusta, Parker said. From Augusta, the supplies will be transported to designated distribution centers.

During the April conference, concerns were raised about a possible out-of-control rush on the serum, Parker said. Because of that concern, Gov. John Baldacci and Gen. John Libby, adjutant general of the Maine National Guard, agreed that a plan should be devised to quell such a disturbance.

Local police chiefs have also been involved in the planning, Parker said. In a real event, local police would be in charge of security once the serum arrives in Paris. “We own it. We’re in charge of providing security,” he said.

As of Aug. 5, the Maine Center for Disease Control said there had been 323 confirmed cases of H1N1 in Maine, of which 176 are Maine residents and the rest out-of-staters diagnosed in Maine. A total of 19 people required hospitalization. Sixty percent of the victims were under the age of 25.

On Tuesday, health authorities reported Maine’s first death from the H1N1 virus. Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, said a York County man in his 50s was hospitalized for three weeks and died last week of underlying conditions complicated by H1N1.

The agency said the screening would all play out behind the scenes, meaning there should be no additional delays for passengers at airport terminals. The change will be phased in starting Saturday. Not all airlines are fully participating yet and might not request the data.

The TSA said it would be up to individual airlines or travel agents to decide how to collect the required information at the time a reservation is made. The program, called Secure Flight, is aimed at meeting congressional mandates, including those passed in 2007 to put into practice recommendations from the commission that investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks. The government’s goal is to vet all passengers on domestic commercial flights by early next year.