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“They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine was completely destroyed.”

The 34-year-old’s experience isn’t unique in the German capital. At least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30 percent of the total for 2008. The latest to go up in flames was a Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a public car park.

While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars — symbols of German wealth and power.

A group calling itself BMW — the initials stand for Movement for Militant Resistance in German — has claimed responsibility for several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites, police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said.

At 1120 Park Avenue, a classic prewar co-op filled with multimillion-dollar apartments, it appears that a buyer forfeited a deposit of as much as $1.1 million.

Real estate agents representing buyers of at least three other multimillion-dollar properties also report clients who knowingly left deposits of more than $1 million or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.

In each case, the buyers had signed their contracts before the financial meltdown last fall, but decided in recent months that because values in the luxury real estate market have dropped 20 to 40 percent, it no longer made sense to go through with their deals.

Sam Chandan, the president of Real Estate Economics, a research company in New York, said the fact that people were forfeiting such large deposits was “indicative of the degree of uncertainty in the market.”

Given how difficult it has become in recent months to get a mortgage, he said, even buyers at the high end may be concerned about getting financing to complete their deals.

“This drought is having a devastating impact on our people, our communities, our economy and our environment, making today’s action absolutely necessary,” the Republican governor said in his statement.

Mandatory rationing is an option if the declaration and other measures are insufficient.

The drought has forced farmers to fallow their fields, put thousands of agricultural workers out of work and led to conservation measures in cities throughout the state, which is the nation’s top agricultural producer.

Agriculture losses could reach $2.8 billion this year and cost 95,000 jobs, said Lester Snow, the state water director.

State agencies must now provide assistance for affected communities and businesses and the Department of Water Resources must protect supplies, all accompanied by a statewide conservation campaign.

Three dry winters have left California’s state- and federally operated reservoirs at their lowest levels since 1992.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. now expects that bank failures will cost the insurance fund around $65 billion through 2013, up from an earlier estimate of $40 billion. The bank failures, 14 already this year following 25 last year, reflect the ravages of rising unemployment and falling home prices that have sent loan defaults soaring.

The FDIC said the economic crisis, which has caused the insurance fund to drop to its lowest level in nearly a quarter-century, also warranted extending the plan to rebuild the insurance fund from five years to seven.

The emergency premium, to be levied on the roughly 8,500 federally insured institutions on June 30, will be 20 cents for every $100 of their insured deposits. That compares with an average premium of 6.3 cents paid by banks and thrifts last year.

In addition, the FDIC raised the regular insurance premiums for banks to between 12 and 16 cents for every $100 in deposits starting in April, up from a range of 12 to 14 cents.

The law requires the insurance fund to be maintained at a certain minimum level but it fell below that minimum — 1.15 percent of total insured deposits — in mid-2008.

But 25 U.S. banks failed last year — including two of the biggest thrifts — more than in the previous five years combined and up from only three failures in 2007.

The review, which could be announced as early as today, will use official testimony and hundreds of classified documents to piece together an authoritative account of one of the most clandestine — and, to some former and current agency officials, darkest — chapters of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism war, the officials said.

Lawmakers will try to determine not only how detainees were interrogated, but also whether the CIA’s controversial methods produced useful intelligence, according to three congressional officials briefed on the plans.
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Plunging exports and the biggest fall in consumer spending in 28 years dragged the figure down from the 3.8% estimate the government gave earlier.

The decline was much worse than analysts had expected.

In 2008 as a whole, the economy grew by 1.1%, the slowest pace since 2001. The Dow Jones was down 1.6% in early trade.

Recession warning

Consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of domestic economic activity, fell by a rate of 4.3% in the final quarter – the biggest fall since the second quarter of 1980. This was a revision of the earlier figure of 3.5%.

With rising unemployment, sliding home values, increasing numbers of repossessions and the slumping value of investments, observers say many US consumers are hanging on to whatever disposable cash they have.

The four-tonne shipment takes the number of seeds stored in the frozen repository to more than 20 million.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built 130m (426ft) inside a mountain, aims to protect the world’s food crop species against natural and human disasters.

The £5m ($7m) facility took 12 months to build and opened in February 2008.

“The vault was opened last year to ensure that, one day, all of humanity’s existing food crop varieties would be safely protected,” explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT).

“It’s amazing how far we have come towards accomplishing that goal.”

The arrival of the latest consignment of seed samples means that the vault, deep inside a mountain on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, is now storing a third of the planet’s most important food crop varieties.

Among the anniversary arrivals are 32 varieties of potatoes from Ireland’s national gene banks.

It is thought the lack of diversity in Ireland’s potato crops played a major part in the spread of blight through the nation’s harvests in the mid-1800s, contributing to the Great Famine.

The vault, operated by a partnership between the GCDT and the Norwegian government, stores duplicates of seeds held in national collections.

It acts as a fail-safe backup if the original collections are lost or damaged.

“We are especially proud to see such a large number of countries working quickly to provide samples from their collections for safekeeping in the vault,” said Norway’s Agriculture Minister Lars Peder Brekk.

“It shows that there are situations in the world today capable of transcending politics and inspiring a strong unity of purpose among a diverse community of nations.”

As well as the consignment of seeds, experts on climate change and food production have gathered in Longyearbyen for a three-day anniversary conference.

They will examine how climate change threatens global food production, and how crop diversity will improve food security for people in regions that are going to be worst affected.

The encrypted document, which is dated October 6, and believed to be current, can be found on the Pentagon Central Command website “oneteam.centcom.mil”: [UPDATE Fri Feb 27 15:18:38 GMT 2009: the entire Pentagon site is now down–probably in response to this editorial]

…

The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon’s desire to stay on-message, even to itself.

Among the revelations, which we encourage the press to review in detail, is Jordan’s presense as secret member of the US lead occupation force, the ISAF.

Jordan is a middle eastern monarchy, backed by the US, and historically the CIA’s closest partner in its extraordinary renditions program. “the practice of torture is routine” in the country, according to a January 2007 report by UN special investigator for torture, Manfred Nowak.

With all due respect Mr. President, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are offering the same policies as President Bush and Secretary Paulson. Those policies are to bail out banks regardless of cost to taxpayers. Mr. President, it’s hard enough to overlook Geithner’s tax indiscretions. Mr. President, it is harder still, if not impossible, to ignore the fact that neither Geithner nor Bernanke saw this coming. Yet amazingly they are both cock sure of the solution. Even more amazing is the fact that solution changes every day.

With all due respect Mr. President, Geithner and Bernanke are a huge part of the problem, and no part of the solution and the sooner you realize that the better off this nation will be.

With all due respect Mr. President, your budget proposal is the same big government spending as we saw under President Bush. The only difference is you promised more spending and bigger government, while President Bush promised less government and less spending and failed to deliver on either count.

With all due respect Mr. President, it is impossible to spend one’s way out of a problem, when the problem is reckless spending.

With all due respect Mr. President, you and Congress want to force banks to lend when banks (by not lending) are acting responsibly for the first time in a decade. Mr, President can you please tell us who banks are supposed to lend to? Do we need any more Home Depots? Pizza Huts? Strip malls? Nail salons? Auto dealerships? What Mr. President? What? And why should banks be lending when unemployment is rising and lending risks right along with it?

With all due respect Mr. President, we were hoping your administration would not carry on the war mongering policies of your predecessor. Instead we see amazingly that you Seek $75.5 Billion More for Wars in 2009. Mr. President, do we really need another $75 billion for wars? Was there nothing in the military budget that could be cut?

The worst financial crisis in seven decades is forcing thousands of previously middle-income workers to seek social services, overwhelming local agencies, clinics and nonprofits. Each month 16,000 people, including many who were making $60,000 to $100,000 annually just a few years ago, fill four county offices requesting financial, medical or food assistance.