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Speaking with reporters this morning, Boxer said EPA has determined that at least 44 of the hundreds of coal ash piles identified across the country pose a “high hazard,” meaning they could threaten human life if they fail — like an impoundment that collapsed at a Tennessee Valley Authority facility late last year. The agency collected the information on the locations from the utility companies that operate the ash disposal sites.

Boxer said EPA is notifying and working with first responders this week while conducting evaluations at the sites to determine whether there is an imminent threat of failure.

At least 10 leaders of two reformist groups who had backed opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi were under arrest last night as police used tear gas and clubs to quell mass street protests.

Speaking on national television, Mr Ahmadinejad praised the Iranian people for choosing to look towards the future.

“This is a great victory at a time and condition when the whole material, political and propaganda facilities outside of Iran and sometimes … inside Iran, were mobilised against our people,” he said.

The mood in the capital, Tehran, was tense as large groups of riot police patrolled the streets, moving along drivers who had been honking their horns in apparent protest.

The official IRNA news agency reported that two of the reformist leaders arrested were involved in orchestrating the weekend riots.

Amid charges of electoral fraud and vote rigging, official results showed Mr Ahmadinejad won 63 per cent of the nearly 40 million votes cast, with overwhelming backing from Iran’s vast rural constituencies, compared to 34 per cent won by Mr Mousavi.

The surge in Treasury yields is lifting mortgage rates, threatening to dampen home demand and kill off the refinancing boom that is bolstering the health of some households.

“What mistake can the U.S. economy afford to make? If you look at it that way, I suspect that we will see the Fed engage again in these markets,” El-Erian, who oversees $756 billion at PIMCO, told Reuters Financial Television.

Debate is brewing within the Federal Reserve over whether it should ramp up its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities to keep a lid on interest rates, or scale them back to avoid an outbreak of inflation.

Massive buying of securities by the U.S. central bank has doubled the size of its balance sheet to around $2 trillion as it flooded the economy with money to prevent a severe recession getting worse.

The Fed’s Open Market Committee voted unanimously in April to keep unchanged its targets for purchases of MBS and long-term Treasuries. But the panel left the door open to increasing purchases at future meetings if needed to secure a stronger recovery, according to minutes of the meeting. The FOMC next meets on June 23-24 in Washington.

DOLLAR, JUNK BONDS VULNERABLE

Edouard Stern, 50, scion of one of France’s wealthiest families and whose influential circle of friends included President Nicolas Sarkozy, was found dead in March 2005 wearing a latex suit, with two bullet holes in the head and two in the torso.

His lover, Cecile Brossard, has admitted killing Stern at his Geneva penthouse apartment, but her defence has said it was a “crime of passion” and not murder, as alleged by prosecutors.

Yesterday, a Parisian art dealer told the court that Stern was “incredibly charming” but also “calculating and manipulative”.

He said he had witnessed Brossard’s “mental torture” and described the banker as extremely possessive.

“He followed her, pestered her – her and all those around her. It was diabolical,” the art trader told the court.

Asked about written commitments made by the banker to marry his mistress and offer her a million dollars, the dealer said he “didn’t believe it, knowing Edouard”.

A businessman in his 70s, a friend of the couple who remains close to Brossard, described their relationship as “cat and mouse”.

“Edouard Stern had his prey and wanted to have it completely at his mercy. He was the master,” the businessman said.

The banker’s mistress was a woman driven “to the brink of suicide”, he added. The $1 million handed over by Stern “would not interest her” if it wasn’t a token of love, he said.

Earlier, an aristocrat friend of the lovers told the court: “Cecile Brossard was very much in love. She was not interested” in the money, he added.

These statements contradict the argument put forward by the Stern family lawyers, who claim Brossard murdered the banker because he had blocked $1 million paid into a bank account in the name of his mistress.

An attractive young, blonde woman told the court she had sexual relations with the banker and his mistress, at the request of Brossard, who was her friend.

The young woman claimed she was not shocked by the staging of the threesome in a hotel: the two women were dressed as schoolgirls and the sex games were spiced up with sado-masochistic accessories.

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

“The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America.

“Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.

Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

“Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said.

Pellecchia said the exchange was not planning on canceling trades in the affected stocks, which included General Electric, Bank of America, and Exxon Mobil.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.

The satellites’ main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.

The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.

“It’s baffling to us why this would suddenly change,” said one scientist familiar with the work. “It’s unfortunate because there was this great synergy…a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn’t be done any other way. It’s a regrettable change in policy.”

Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding of sometimes dramatic sky explosions will be diminished, perhaps leading to hype and fear of the unknown.

Incoming!

Most “shooting stars” are caused by natural space debris no larger than peas. But routinely, rocks as big as basketballs and even small cars crash into the atmosphere. Most vaporize or explode on the way in, but some reach the surface or explode above the surface. Understandably, scientists want to know about these events so they can better predict the risk here on Earth.

Yet because the world is two-thirds ocean, most incoming objects aren’t visible to observers on the ground. Many other incoming space rocks go unnoticed because daylight drowns them out.

Over the last decade or so, hundreds of these events have been spotted by the classified satellites. Priceless observational information derived from the spacecraft were made quickly available, giving researchers such insights as time, a location, height above the surface, as well as light-curves to help pin down the amount of energy churned out from the fireballs.

And in the shaky world we now live, it’s nice to know that a sky-high detonation is natural versus a nuclear weapon blast.

Where the space-based surveillance truly shines is over remote stretches of ocean – far away from the prospect of ground-based data collection.

With $45 billion in capital and $2.1 trillion in assets, the central bank would not withstand the scrutiny normally afforded other institutions, Grant said in a live interview.

“If the Fed examiners were set upon the Fed’s own documents—unlabeled documents—to pass judgment on the Fed’s capacity to survive the difficulties it faces in credit, it would shut this institution down,” he said. “The Fed is undercapitalized in a way that Citicorp is undercapitalized.”

Grant said he would support legislation currently making its way through Congress calling for an audit of the Fed.

Moreover, he criticized the way the Fed has managed the financial crisis, saying the central bank’s target rate should not be around zero.

“I think zero is the wrong rate for almost any economy,” Grant said, adding the Fed has “embarked on a vast experiment in moral hazard. Interest rates are the traffic signals in a market economy, and everything’s green. … You have to wonder whether these interest rates are the right clearing rate or rather they are the imposition of a central bank.”

Companies will face increased pressure to try to stem the tide, and need to be prepared to safeguard data as well as the cash, according to David Williams, the chief executive of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services.

Williams said this week that the money flowing from the current stimulus package is particularly vulnerable to fraud because almost all movement of money is now done electronically.

“We’re telling our clients to be very careful and to make sure their firms are resilient in terms of dealing with the potential opportunities for fraud and waste,” Williams said.

That means keeping an eye out for the traditional scams such as billing for services not performed. But it also means firms must become even more diligent about electronic records and network security.

“It becomes ever more important that firms remain diligent about their data,” Williams said.

Earlier this month, FBI director Robert Mueller warned the nation to brace for a potential crime wave involving fraud and corruption related to the economic stimulus package. “These funds are inherently vulnerable to bribery, fraud, conflicts of interest, and collusion. There is an old adage, that where there is money to be made, fraud is not far behind, like bees to honey,” Mueller said. See full story.

Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden said some stimulus-related scams had already happened and that mistakes were inevitable. President Barack Obama said Monday that the White House is trying to make sure the stimulus money isn’t being ill-spent.

He said many of the safeguards and transparency measures “so far seem to have worked” but added his administration will have to stay vigilant.

“At a time when everybody is tightening their belts, the last thing the American people want to see is that any of this money is being wasted,” Obama said.
Potential damage

Williams suggested that the fraud and theft losses from the roughly $787 billion stimulus package approved earlier this year could reach about $50 billion.