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In a speech, he will urge countries to avoid “muddling through as pessimists” and “make the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting the new rules for this new global order”, according to his office.

Official data confirmed Friday that Britain is in recession. Days earlier, the government unveiled a new package of measures to help the flow of credit in the economy, but Brown has argued global action is needed for a quick recovery.

He will warn Monday that the crisis has given the world a choice: “We could allow this crisis to start a retreat from globalisation.

“As some want, we could close our markets — for capital, financial services, trade and for labour — and therefore reduce the risks of globalisation.

“But that would reduce global growth, deny us the benefits of global trade and confine millions to global poverty.

“Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth-pangs of a new global order — and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global society.”

Britain is hosting a summit of the Group of 20 (G20) advanced and developing nations in London on April 2, and Brown has held preparatory talks with the French and German leaders, as well as new US President Barack Obama.

He will meet with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, South Korean Prime Minister Han Seung-Soo and Japanese premier Taro Aso, as well as World Bank chief Robert Zoellick at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this week.

The heavily fortified compound of gray, stonewalled buildings and watchtowers has come to symbolize American abuse of some prisoners captured in Iraq after photos were released showing U.S. soldiers sexually humiliating inmates at the facility.

The scandal stoked support for the insurgency and was one of the biggest setbacks to the U.S. military effort to win the peace in Iraq.

The renovated facility will be called Baghdad’s Central Prison because the name Abu Ghraib has left a “bitter feeling inside Iraqis’ hearts,” deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim said Saturday.

Abu Ghraib, which was a torture center under Saddam Hussein, has been closed since 2006.

The prison will house 3,500 inmates when it reopens in mid-February and will have a capacity for about 15,000 by the end of this year, Ibrahim told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

The announcement comes as the U.S. military has begun handing over about 15,000 detainees in its custody to the Iraqis under a new security agreement, prompting concern about Iraq’s beleaguered judicial system. The United Nations warned in a recent human rights report about overcrowding and “grave human rights violations” of detainees in Iraqi custody.

“We have crowded prisons and the opening of Baghdad’s Central Prison will help ease the problem,” Ibrahim said.

He said the facility will be operated according to international standards.

Last year, the government said it would turn a section of the 280-acre prison into a museum documenting Saddam’s crimes but not the abuses committed by U.S. guards.

The photos from Abu Ghraib brought another serious stain to America’s reputation after worldwide protests against the March 2003 invasion. They also discredited Washington’s claims that it was trying to build a country based on rule of law and respect for human rights on the wreckage of dictatorship.

In all, 11 U.S. soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws and five others were disciplined.

“There are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need,” said Children’s Minister Baroness Delyth Morgan.

The government says there are no plans to remove the right to educate children at home.

But home educators’ charity, Education Otherwise, said it was “infuriated” by the proposed investigation.

There is no legal obligation for children to be sent to school – but parents have to provide a suitable education.

‘Offensive’

The review will consider how local authorities can ensure the education and well-being of children who are being taught outside school.

“Parents are able, quite rightly, to choose whether they want to educate children at home, and a very small number do. I’m sure, the vast majority do a good job,” said Baroness Morgan.

“However, there are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need. And in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse.

“This review will look at whether the right systems are in place that allow local authorities and other agencies to ensure that any concerns about the safety, welfare or education of home educated children are addressed quickly and effectively,” said Baroness Morgan.

Education Otherwise says that it finds this announcement “offensive” – with its “implication… that home educated children are at risk purely because they are home educated”.

Annette Taberner, from Education Otherwise’s policy group, said: “No other community would be expected to suffer the prejudice and discrimination which our community has to endure.”

The review, headed by Graham Badman, former Director of Children’s Services at Kent County Council, will consider whether local authorities are able to safeguard home educated children, whether parents have sufficient support to home educate and “consider what evidence there is to support claims that home education could be used as a ‘cover’ for child abuse”.

Mr Badman said: “Legislation affords every parent the right to choose to educate their child at home but with those rights go responsibilities, not least being to secure a suitable education.”

Head teachers have supported the announcement of the review.

Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that heads backed the right of parents to educate their children at home.

“However, there have been concerns about a small number of cases where this option has been exercised to the detriment of the child.”

Within the Lighthouse Cove subdivision of Lennar’s Heritage Harbour development, sits a quaint street of two-story homes called Montauk Point Crossing. Today, it is a virtual ghost town.

At least six families have already moved out of their homes, either at Lennar’s expense or their own. At least two more are planning their exits as soon as possible.

The residents, many with small children, are experiencing an outbreak of the same chronic symptoms — respiratory problems, painful sore throats, headaches and nosebleeds — which they attribute directly to the drywall chemicals filling their homes.

Lennar, a Miami-based company that is this region’s largest builder, would not discuss any pending repairs, residents’ health problems, or any other aspect of this story. Company officials said they stand by an earlier statement that the drywall is not a health risk and that Lennar is responding promptly to owners.

Residents of Montauk Point have seen their air-conditioners fail on a regular basis — so often that the presence of a white HVAC repair truck became a running joke in the neighborhood. Metal within their homes corroded and turned black: piping, electrical wiring, even silver jewelry.

Electronics also began to fail and short-circuit. Residents say they have gone through multiple televisions, computers and cable boxes. Light switches stopped working altogether, or only intermittently.

“I’m on my third TV,” said homeowner Dan Tibbetts. “Everything just dies.”

A number of the homes are supposed to be repaired by Lennar in coming months, which could involve ripping out all the drywall and other guts of the house. It is still unclear at this point, though, whether the wiring and electrical systems will be replaced.

Even the dog

Dan and Janet Tibbetts bought the home at 7111 Montauk Point Crossing in 2006, moving in during August 2007.

Almost immediately they noticed a foul, chemical-like odor, but chalked it up to the house being new.

“We figured it’s a new house, it would have a little smell and just need to be aired out for awhile,” Tibbetts said. “We figured it would go away.”

But it only got stronger. The family began having breathing problems, sore throats and then occasional nosebleeds, as did their son. Even their dog, a two-year-old dachshund, began acting strangely.

“He began throwing up, he didn’t want to eat,” Tibbetts said. “We thought, what is going on here?”

Like the others along Montauk Point, the family’s air-conditioning unit failed repeatedly. Wiring and piping turned black.

After repeatedly complaining to Lennar, the company conducted air quality tests and told the family there was no health hazard.

“I told them they’re not testing for the right things. They didn’t want to hear it,” Janet Tibbetts said. “They still won’t tell us exactly what they did find.”

To date, Lennar officials maintain that homes along Montauk Point are safe.

A Herald-Tribune reporter who spent time inside several of the homes this week, including the Tibbetts’, experienced discomfort in his throat, lungs and sinuses.

In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor. With just hours left in office, President George W. Bush late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to stay enforcement of an important Jan. 5 ruling admitting key evidence into the case.

Thursday’s filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration’s warrantless-eavesdropping program. The former president approved the wiretaps in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

“The Government’s position remains that this case should be stayed,” the Obama administration wrote in a filing that for the first time made clear the new president was on board with the Bush administration’s reasoning in this case.

The government wants to appeal Walker’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, a legal maneuver requiring Judge Walker’s approval. A hearing in Walker’s courtroom is set for Friday.

The legal brouhaha concerns Walker’s decision to admit as evidence a classified document allegedly showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004.

The lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo — sued the Bush administration after the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally released the Top Secret memo to them. At one point, the courts had ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case.

The document’s admission to the case is central for the two former lawyers of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation charity to acquire legal standing so they may challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless-eavesdropping program Bush publicly acknowledged in 2005.

The Friday hearing is needed, because disputes with pretrial decisions generally require the trial judge to permit an appeal.

The Obama administration is also siding with the former administration in its legal defense of July legislation that immunizes the nation’s telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicitity in Bush’s eavesdropping program, according to testimony last week by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder.

That immunity legislation, which Obama voted for when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois, was included in a broader spy package that granted the government wide-ranging, warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans’ electronic communications.

Tens of thousands of businesses are already planning to scale back working hours this year in an effort to stay afloat. But as the country comes to terms with the reality of a recession, it emerged that the Government is looking at compensating employees, through their firms – thereby drawing comparisons with the shutdowns of the 1970s.

While the move would safeguard jobs, it would mean that the financial crisis is on a much larger scale, further undermining confidence in the economy with the suggestion of Britain grinding to a halt.

Major firms such as JCB have already downed tools for one day a week and are considering moving to a three-day week, with state help, if the recession gets worse. The firm’s chief executive, Matthew Taylor, said that he is pressing Lord Mandelson, the Secretary of State for Business, to introduce compensation for workers if their hours are reduced. Some of the jobs earmarked for redundancy, he said, could be saved if the move is introduced by April.

Ministerial sources insisted last night that a scheme to help compensate workers was “not imminent” but said it was an option being discussed. It would match measures introduced by the German government.

The Thatcher government brought in a short-time working directive in the 1980s to cover earnings lost through shorter hours. Such a move would cost the Government millions of pounds, but would be cheaper than the huge rise in unemployment benefit claims as a result of job losses.

Yet the move would stir bad memories of the three-day week of the early 1970s, when the Heath government imposed a cut in hours to save electricity as a result of industrial action.

Advice on how to ride the downturn published on the Department for Business website tells firms that cutting hours is one way to reduce overheads and ride the economic storm. The guide, Real Help for Businesses Now, suggests firms could cut staff costs by reducing hours, rather than by making redundancies. “Cutting overheads such as property costs … will take much longer to have an effect on the balance sheet,” it said. “You can also cut staff costs by restricting overtime or cutting staff hours. You could also consider reducing your number of employees – though redundancy payments will increase costs in the short term. However, the consequences of redundancies can be devastating, particularly for small businesses, and morale could suffer.”

Experts fear that the recession could be the worst for 60 years. Figures released on Friday showed that the economy is contracting faster than at any time since 1980. Kenneth Clarke, the new shadow Secretary of State for Business, last night accused Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling of “panicking” over the recession. Ministers were treating voters “like fools” by claiming they could see the “green shoots” of recovery, Mr Clarke wrote in the News of the World.

Figures from the British Chambers of Commerce, which represent 100,000 firms, show that 39 per cent of businesses are planning to cut hours.

Many firms in the car industry have introduced or are considering a three-day week, such as Bentley Motors in Crewe and Nissan in Sunderland. But the practice is spreading to the rest of the manufacturing sector, and business leaders fear it is only a matter of time before other industries resort to the measure.

Mr Taylor, of JCB, said: “We would rather go to a shorter working week than lay people off.”

Three-day weeks have been backed by the unions, whose members are happier to take pay cuts than lose their entire salary and pension benefits.

Government sources said there were issues about whether to restrict compensation to the car industry or apply it to all firms.

The CBI refused to comment last night, but a source said some firms would be able to reduce output to three days more easily than others.

When the three-day week crippled Britain

The three-day week carries a particular resonance for anyone who remembers the 1970s, as it recalls a time when firms were forced into short-time working, redundancies, and lay-offs.

As now, the crisis erupted amid an economic emergency. But the cause of a problem that crippled the nation’s infrastructure was not a financial calamity but a breakdown in industrial relations.

Britain’s miners walked out on 9 January 1972 – their first strike in 50 years – over the failure to meet their demand for £9 on top of an average weekly wage of £25. The impact of closing all 289 pits in England and Wales – and pickets at power stations – was dramatic.

A month later, the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, declared a state of emergency and, with dwindling electricity supplies forcing factories to close, he imposed a three-day week. A week into the state of emergency, it was announced that electricity would be switched off on a rota basis between 7am and midnight every day.

By the middle of February, it was estimated 1.2 million people had been laid off. Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) gave a week’s notice to its 60,000 weekly paid staff as a precautionary measure.

Every Monday, at a Red Cross compound in Kabul, Pashtu families gather for a glimpse by live video feed of brothers, sons and husbands who have disappeared into a feared detention centre at the main American base in Afghanistan.

As President Barack Obama declared with a fanfare his intention to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp last week, he made no mention of another growing US-run prison – with more than twice as many inmates and an even murkier legal status.

More than 600 detainees are held at the US Bagram Theatre Internment Facility – known by campaigners as “the other Guantanamo”. Not only are there no plans to close it, but it is in the process of being expanded to hold 1,100 illegal enemy combatants; prisoners who cannot see lawyers, have no trials and never see any evidence there may be against them.

Like Guantanamo, since opening it has held men which the US military says must be kept off the battlefield; alleged al-Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters. Some, US officials have confirmed, were arrested abroad before being flown to Bagram for incarceration.

According to human rights lawyers the prison also holds scores of innocent people, many seized after tip-offs from feuding tribal rivals. The alleged offences are never tested in court.

The prison has been accused of torturing detainees and two men were allegedly beaten to death there in 2002. The US Army does not let outsiders in to view conditions inside.

While Mr Obama struggles to work out what to do with Guantanamo’s 245 remaining prisoners, critics claim Bagram and other detention centres around Afghanistan are still legal black holes.

“If they close Guantanamo and they expand the one in Bagram, it’s the same – there will be no difference,” said Lal Gul, chairman of the Afghanistan Human Rights Organisation.

“If Barack Obama wants to close Guantanamo he should also set out to close not just Bagram, but detention centres in Khost, Kandahar and Jalalabad.”

The US military admits that Bagram holds a “small number of individuals” seized outside Afghanistan. But even less is known about who they are or why they are held than is public about the Taliban fighters detained there.

Some prisoners are released each month or handed over to Afghan custody. Many are thought to have been there for years.

The International Justice Network, representing the families of four prisoners, has been arguing that they should have the same legal rights to challenge their detention that were eventually given to Guantanamo inmates.

“It’s being used not as a temporary battlefield detention centre, but as a legal black hole where you can bring people to evade public and political scrutiny,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, the organisation’s executive director.

“I think what Obama has inherited is a larger-scale problem that just Guantanamo. Bagram makes the farce of justice at Guantanamo look a lot closer to due process. There are people who have been held there for years without any basis and then they are released without any explanation of why they were taken in the first place.”

One of the most powerful arguments against the shadowy network of military prisons is that they have outraged Afghans and fuelled the insurgency.

Dr Ghairat Baheer was a former Mujahideen leader who was arrested in 2002 because he is related to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a notorious warlord whose men have killed dozens of American soldiers.

He was always anti-Taliban, but he condemned the US invasion of his homeland and was then arrested by CIA agents at his home in Pakistan and was shipped to Afghanistan.

There, in the notorious “Dark Prison”, he claims he was held in a cell just two metres by two and a half, completely without light.

He said: “There were loudspeakers which played horrifying music 24 hours a day, and sounds of people shouting. I was hooked to the wall by handcuffs, with my feet shackled, and stripped naked. I was there for six months. But I didn’t know where I was.”

Dr Baheer’s ordeal lasted for years as he was shifted from one Afghan prison to another. Sometimes he was denied food; and ins some facilities he was held in cells with al-Qaeda terrorists.

He said of one prison: “It was an enemy factory, creating future insurgents from the detainees and their large families.”

A Western diplomat in Kabul agreed. He said: “His treatment is an example of how we helped create the insurgency. He should not have been arrested at all. They (the Americans) thought arresting him would help them get to Hekmatyar.”

In the past year, relatives of prisoners have been allowed to make video calls to Bagram organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross. There have been some limited visits.

Waiting for their 20 minute call, each family insisted their relative was innocent and was only seized after a denunciation from a rival clan or feuding family.

Syed Mohammad, a Pashtu wheat farmer from Tarin Kowt district in Uruzgan, travelled for two days and two nights to see his brother Shah Mahmoud who had been held for nine months.

“Some villagers informed on him and the Americans attacked his house,” he said. “We don’t know what he is supposed to have done.”

The US military insisted it has been necessary to hold men who want to kill American soldiers.

“They are held because they are dangerous to us in this conflict. It’s to remove dangerous elements from the battlefield,” said Lt-Col Rumi Nielson-Green.Britain may reluctantly offer a home to “cleared” Guantanamo Bay detainees because it fears that turning down an expected request from the new Obama administration could harm relations with Washington.

Yet Mr Obama is so intent on closing Guantanamo Bay that he is to press America’s allies to offer a home to “cleared” detainees. Britain is expected to be among those countries which agree, because it fears that to say no to such a request from the new administration could harm relations with Washington.

Several other European nations have already agreed to take men no longer deemed a threat by the US but who cannot sent be back to their home countries because of fears for their security.

Britain has previously lobbied successfully for the return of all nine British citizens and four former British residents held there. Of the remaining 245 detainees, it has so far only asked for the return of two other former legal residents.

But officials now concede that Mr Obama’s victory has produced a “new context” in which Britain must show a willingness to cooperate, like other EU allies. Each request would be considered on its merits and whether the detainee is a security threat to the UK.

Mr Obama is pressing on with his plan to close the camp within a year, ban the use of torture and review how men such as alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are prosecuted, despite the major obstacles he faces. He has also suspended the controversial military tribunal process during a review.

Last week it was revealed that a released Guantanamo detainee is now a senior al Qaeda leader in Yemen, and the Pentagon claimed that 61 former detainees had “returned to the fight” – though with little evidence to back this up.

Clive Stafford Smith, head of the Reprieve law firm that represents dozens of detainees, said it was in America’s security interests to close the camp. “Gitmo has sadly acted as a recruiting tool for extremists and inspired more people to hatred of America than could be ever be held inside its walls,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

About 780 detainees have passed through the camp and some 530 have since been released. The biggest group remaining are more than 90 Yemenis but the US and Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland have failed to reach agreement over how returnees would be handled.

Mr Obama has set up a top-level defence, diplomatic and legal team to review how to pursue prosecutions and where to hold the extremists after Guantanamo. Republican lawmakers have denounced calls for them to be moved to high-security mainland US prisons and military bases and tried in regular courts.

But in Afghanistan, a series of scandals in which Taliban fighters have escaped from Afghan prisons, or have bribed guards and simply walked away from captivity, have made the US military wary of handing dangerous terrorists to the allies they are fighting alongside.

The case-by-case review of the 245 prisoners still held at Guantanamo will not be extended to the 600 prisoners held in indefinite US custody in Afghanistan, or the thousands more in Iraq.

His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.

Now, a historian claims, Mengele’s notorious experiments may have borne fruit.

For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.

Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled.

In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor’s mysterious later years.

After speaking to the townspeople of Candido Godoi, he is convinced that Mengele continued his genetic experiments with twins – with startling results.

He reveals how, after working with cattle farmers in Argentina to increase their stock, Mengele fled the country after fellow Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped by Israeli agents.

He claims that Mengele found refuge in the German enclave of Colonias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make regular trips to another predominantly German community just over the border in Brazil – the farming community of Candido Godoi.

And, Mr Camaras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

“I think Candido Godoi may have been Mengele’s laboratory, where he finally managed to fulfil his dreams of creating a master race of blond haired, blue eyed Aryans,” he said.

“There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins.”

The urbane German who arrived in Candido Godoi was remembered with fondness by many of the townspeople.

“He told us he was a vet,” said Aloisi Finkler, a local farmer interviewed by Mr Camarasa. “He asked about illnesses we had among our animals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cultured and dignified man.”

Another farmer, Leonardo Boufler, said: “He went from farm to farm checking the animals. He checked them for TB, and injected those that were infected. He said he could carry out artificial insemination of cows and humans, which we thought impossible as in those days it was unheard of.”

But the Nazi eugenicist did not concentrate on animals alone.

A former mayor and town doctor, Anencia Flores da Silva, set out to try to solve the town’s mystery. He interviewed hundreds of people, and discovered one character who crept on cropping up: an itinerant medic calling himself Rudolph Weiss.

Dr da Silva said: “In the testimonies we collected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him. Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood.”

The people of Candido Godoi now largely accept that a Nazi war criminal was an inadvertent guest of theirs for several years in the early 1960s. The town’s official crest shows two identical profiles and a road sign welcomes visitors to a “Farming Community and Land of the Twins”. There is also a museum, the House of the Twins.

While the twins birthrate varies widely in different countries, it is typically about one in 80 pregnancies – a statistic that has left Mr Camarasa certain in his claim that Mengele was successfully pursuing his dreams of creating a master race, a real-life Boys from Brazil.