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When the economy slumps, so does tax revenue, and this recession has been no different, says Kerry Lynch, senior fellow at the AIER and author of the study. “It illustrates how severe the recession has been.”

For example, 6 million people lost jobs in the 12 months ended in April — and that means far fewer dollars from income taxes. Income tax revenue dropped 44% from a year ago.

“These are staggering numbers,” Lynch says.

Big revenue losses mean that the U.S. budget deficit may be larger than predicted this year and in future years.

“It’s one of the drivers of the ongoing expansion of the federal budget deficit,” says John Lonski, chief economist for Moody’s Investors Service. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.7 trillion budget deficit for fiscal year 2009.

Interfax quoted an unnamed security source as saying a stand-off triggered by Pyongyang’s nuclear test on Monday could affect the security of Russia’s far eastern regions, which border North Korea.

“The need has emerged for an appropriate package of precautionary measures,” the source said.

“We are not talking about stepping up military efforts but rather about measures in case a military conflict, perhaps with the use of nuclear weapons, flares up on the Korean Peninsula,” he added. The official did not elaborate further.

North Korea has responded to international condemnation of its nuclear test and a threat of new U.N. sanctions by saying it is no longer bound by an armistice signed with South Korea at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

“They mumble, they dissemble, and there’s a lot of ‘on the one hand . . .'” said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name “Ishmael Jones.”

Jones denounced claims by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the CIA kept her in the dark about water-boarding terrorist suspects, saying the California Democrat “has been using the interrogation issue as a political tool for years.”

But he said the spy agency’s congressional briefers are also experts at camouflaging classified programs.

“In Mrs. Pelosi’s defense, CIA managers do not give fist-pounding briefings,” Jones recently wrote for the conservative National Review in a blog that drew scant media interest.

“They mumble, they dissemble, and there’s a lot of ‘on the one hand …’,” Jones declared.

The CIA deploys so many briefers to the Hill it’s hard for both the agency and intelligence committee members to reconstruct who said what to whom, he added.

“Its enormous numbers of employees have led to briefings being handled by groups, with vague chains of command, so that it may have been difficult to pin down what was said, when it was said, and who was in charge,” Jones said of the CIA interrogation briefings.

Jones also charged that, contrary to beliefs that the agency has a political agenda, “In reality the CIA is loyal only to itself. As long as Mrs. Pelosi supported its bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her, but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive.”

Reports that CIA managers were outraged or demoralized by the water-boarding controversy are wrong, Jones also maintained. To the contrary, he said, they felt that revelations of their interrogators roughing up, or even torturing, detainees made them look tough.

“The interrogations controversy has served the CIA bureaucracy,” Jones asserted. “A top goal of bureaucracy is to look busy, and whether one agrees with the interrogation methods or not, the impression given is that the CIA is both busy and aggressive.”

Jones added: “It relishes this ‘cowboy’ image, and its greatest fear is that the taxpayer might figure out how little it actually is doing.

“Bans or restrictions on interrogations,” he added, “would have the constructive effect of removing this smokescreen, this distraction, and redirecting focus to what exactly the CIA is doing to provide the foreign intelligence the president needs.”

The high court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the 1986 Michigan v. Jackson ruling, which said police may not initiate questioning of a defendant who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the attorney is present. The Michigan ruling applied even to defendants who agreed to talk to the authorities without their lawyers.

The court’s conservatives overturned that opinion, with Justice Antonin Scalia saying “it was poorly reasoned.”

Under the Jackson opinion, police could not even ask a defendant who had been appointed a lawyer if he wanted to talk, Scalia said.

“It would be completely unjustified to presume that a defendant’s consent to police-initiated interrogation was involuntary or coerced simply because he had previously been appointed a lawyer,” Scalia said in the court’s opinion.

Scalia, who read the opinion from the bench, said the decision will have “minimal” effects on criminal defendants because of the protections the court has provided in other decisions. “The considerable adverse effect of this rule upon society’s ability to solve crimes and bring criminals to justice far outweighs its capacity to prevent a genuinely coerced agreement to speak without counsel present,” Scalia said.

The Michigan v. Jackson opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the only current justice who was on the court at the time. He and Justices David Souter, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented from the ruling, and in an unusual move Stevens read his dissent aloud from the bench. It was the first time this term a justice had read a dissent aloud.

“The police interrogation in this case clearly violated petitioner’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel,” Stevens said. Overruling the Jackson case, he said, “can only diminish the public’s confidence in the reliability and fairness of our system of justice.”

The twin-engine plane was coming from Sao Paulo and crashed late on Friday about 450 miles from Salvador in Bahia state, near a luxury resort.

An air force spokesman said there was no report of survivors. The plane was owned by Roger Wright, owner of financial consulting firm Arsenal Investimentos, according to local media. Wright, his wife and two children were on board, local websites reported.

The cause of the crash was not known. The air force said the plane’s black box was found and was being analyzed.

An Arsenal Investimentos spokesman would not confirm who was on board.

A spokeswoman at Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency said the plane, a King Air B350, had been inspected and that its documents were in order.

Brazil had two major plane crashes in 2006 and 2007, raising concerns about the safety of air travel in Latin America’s largest country.

In July 2007, all 187 people on board and 12 people on the ground died when a TAM airline Airbus A 320 overshot a runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Sonitus didn’t say how much money In-Q-Tel invested.

Led by CEO Amir Abolfathi, Sonitus is making an in-the-mouth hearing aid that transmits sound through the teeth to the bones of the inner ear.

In-Q-Tel looks for technology to invest in which may benefit U.S. intelligence agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency set it up in 1999 as an independent, not-for-profit firm.

Flu vaccine (trivalent inactivated flu vaccine—TIV) has unknown effects on asthmatics.

“The concerns that vaccination maybe associated with asthma exacerbations have been disproved with multiple studies in the past, but the vaccine’s effectiveness has not been well-established,” said Avni Joshi, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. “This study was aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the TIV in children overall, as well as the children with asthma, to prevent influenza-related hospitalization.”

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend annual influenza vaccination for all children aged six months to 18 years. The National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (3rd revision) also recommends annual flu vaccination of asthmatic children older than six months.

In order to determine whether the vaccine was effective in reducing the number of hospitalizations that all children, and especially the ones with asthma, faced over eight consecutive flu seasons, the researchers conducted a cohort study of 263 children who were evaluated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota from six months to 18 years of age, each of whom had had laboratory-confirmed influenza between 1996 to 2006. The investigators determined who had and had not received the flu vaccine, their asthma status and who did and did not require hospitalization. Records were reviewed for each subject with influenza-related illness for flu vaccination preceding the illness and hospitalization during that illness.

They found that children who had received the flu vaccine had three times the risk of hospitalization, as compared to children who had not received the vaccine. In asthmatic children, there was a significantly higher risk of hospitalization in subjects who received the TIV, as compared to those who did not (p= 0.006). But no other measured factors—such as insurance plans or severity of asthma—appeared to affect risk of hospitalization.

South Korea’s actions are tantamount to a “declaration of war,” the official Korean Central News Agency said in a statement today. “If the armistice agreement loses its validity, the Korean peninsula will revert to a state of war.”

The threats are the strongest since North Korea tested a nuclear weapon on May 25th, drawing international condemnation and the prospect of increased sanctions against Kim Jong Il’s reclusive regime. South Korea yesterday joined the U.S.-led initiative to locate and seize shipments of equipment and materials used to make weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea can’t guarantee the safety of ships passing through its western waters near the maritime border with the South, the KCNA statement said. South Korea’s benchmark Kospi stock index fell almost 2 percent, paring earlier gains.

Under the July 27, 1953, armistice that ended the Korean War, both sides agreed to “a complete cessation of all hostilities” and pledged to accept the demarcation line that has become the most-heavily mined demilitarized zone in the world.

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak had resisted joining the anti-proliferation program until the nuclear test, even after North Korea fired a ballistic missile on April 5. His predecessor, Roh Moo Hyun, had said that joining the initiative would be too provocative.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature.”

“I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia’s “Confucian” culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

Mr Fisher, the Fed’s leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of the original decision to buy Treasury debt, fearing that it would lead to a blurring of the line between fiscal and monetary policy – and could all too easily degenerate into Argentine-style financing of uncontrolled spending.