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With prescription drugs playing a key role, average annual out-of-pocket medical costs — those not covered by health insurance — rose from $427 per American in 1996 to $741 in 2005, researchers wrote in the journal Health Affairs.

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Based on government survey data, 44 percent of Americans in 2005 had at least one chronic medical condition, which could include diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, cancer, arthritis, heart failure and others. That compares to 41 percent in 1996.

The study did not look directly at the causes of the increases, but there appear to be several factors.

That’s according to the latest bi-annual IT salary survey from management consultant Janco Associates, which has painted a dreary picture for tech workers. The firm called current conditions “a perfect storm” of company closures, layoffs, cost cutting, outsourcing, and retirees returning to work. That massive surplus of IT talent is matched by what the firm reckons is the lowest hiring demand it has observed in the 15 plus years it’s conducted the salary survey.

Jeffrey Lockwood, professor of entomology at Wyoming University and author of Six-legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, said such Rift Valley Fever or other diseases could be transported into a country by a terrorist with a suitcase.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think a small terrorist cell could very easily develop an insect-based weapon.”

He said it would “probably be much easier” than developing a nuclear or chemical weapon, arguing: “The raw material is in the back yard.”

He continued: “It would be a relatively easy and simple process.

“A few hundred dollars and a plane ticket and you could have a pretty good stab at it.”

Governments, he advised, needed to have robust “pest management infrastructure that’s able to absorb and respond to an introduction” of infected insects, he said.

Trying to stop everything coming in at the border would not work, he said.

Rift Valley Fever is an east African disease which “can cause severe disease in both animals and humans, leading to high rates of disease and death” according to the World Health Organisation.

A 37 percent slump in December sales in Toyota’s biggest market was its sharpest fall in more than a quarter of a century and worse than declines at struggling U.S. rivals General Motors and Ford Motor.

“I never expected the crisis to spread this fast and leave this deep a scar,” Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters at a Tokyo event hosted by Japan’s top business lobbies.

Toyota had already announced a three-day production halt for this month at its 12 directly operated Japanese plants — four car assembly plants and eight for engines, transmissions and other components.

A sweeping suspension of domestic production is almost unprecedented. In 1993, Toyota halted output for one day as a strong yen hammered sales.

Japanese-built cars make up around 40 percent of Toyota’s sales in the United States, where foreign-made cars and trucks have been piling up at ports and dealers’ yards.

Automakers everywhere are cutting back production as consumers, hit by tight credit, shy away from big-ticket purchases even as companies dangle generous sales incentives.

Domestic rivals Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co have both cut output plans by at least 200,000 vehicles for the year to end-March, and analysts expect further adjustments in January-March.

Banks were sceptical that Mr Madoff could deliver the consistently high returns that he reported, and they were also put off by a lack of transparency at his investment firm. For these reasons, big Wall Street firms are notably absent from the long list of victims of Mr Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme.

Fabio Savoldelli, chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Investment Management prior to its 2006 merger with BlackRock, sounded the warning internally years ago. One of Merrill’s financial advisers, who deals with clients worth tens of millions of dollars, recalled Mr Savoldelli’s suspicions of Mr Madoff’s returns eight years ago.

Two years ago, an internal Merrill report drawn up in connection with Merrill’s European fund of funds group, concluded the group should not deal with Mr Madoff, the financial adviser said. “We had a red light on doing business with him. There was no transparency.”

However, a fear of alienating clients who had invested with Mr Madoff prevented many Merrill executives from voicing their concerns too loudly. “You sell your product but you don’t bad-mouth others. You don’t say bad things about Bernie Madoff. That is where you cross the line,” one former Merrill staffer recalled being told by a senior executive.

The large surviving investment banks did not put Mr Madoff’s funds on the recommended list of their investment arms and never dealt directly with him in their prime brokerage arms.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management said it “never felt comfortable with Madoff”, because it “never understood the investment process or the returns … if clients wanted to invest with him, they did not do it through us”.

Goldman’s scepticism extended to Tremont Group Holdings, a fund of hedge funds based in Rye, New York, that gave more than $3bn to Mr Madoff through several channels. In 2001, when Tremont was sold to Oppenheimer, the brokerage, Goldman was representing another potential buyer. But Tremont did not let Goldman’s team have a close look at the firm’s operation, so Goldman’s client backed out.

A worldwide study found pesticide levels in orange and lemon drinks sold under the Fanta brand, which is popular with children, were at their highest in the UK.

The research team called on the Government, the industry and the company to act to remove the chemicals and called for new safety standards to regulate the soft drinks market.

The industry denies children are at risk and insists that the levels found by researchers based at the University of Jaen in southern Spain are not harmful.

The researchers tested 102 cans and bottles of soft drinks, bought from 15 countries, for the presence of 100 pesticides. The UK products were bought in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St Andrews and at Gatwick Airport.

The experts said the levels found were low under the maximum residue levels allowed for fruit, but they were ‘very high’ and ‘up to 300 times’ the figure permitted for bottled or tap water.

The chemicals detected included carbendazim, thiabendazole, imazalil, prochloraz, malathion and iprodione. They are mainly applied to fruit after harvest to stop it developing fungal infections and rotting.

A total of 19 products were bought in the UK, all made by Coca-Cola.

Two orange drinks bought in the UK contained imazalil at 300 times the limit permitted for a single pesticide in drinking water.

Two similar products contained 98 times the legal drinking water limit for thiabendazole.

The average level of the total pesticide contamination of the British drinks was 17.4 parts per billion – 34.6 times the EU maximum residue level for water.

Coca-Cola GB insisted the products are safe. A spokesman said: ‘All of the drinks tested meet the safety regulations relating to food products made from agricultural ingredients, which include drinks with fruit juice as an ingredient.

Ms Turner, 38, who was at the heart of the cash-for-honours inquiry in 2006 and 2007, was chosen by the former Prime Minister last spring to run his new Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

It has become a highly lucrative vehicle for the ex-premier, concentrating its activities at America’s Yale University, where Mr Blair teaches a course on ‘faith and globalisation’ – and where Ms Turner’s British-born father, Denys, is a theology professor.

Yale, which is one of America’s top three universities, has paid the foundation more than £127,000 since it appointed Mr Blair as its Howland Distinguished Fellow.

A recent posting on the foundation’s website announced that ‘a small team of staff’ will be based on the campus to ‘extend the [foundation’s] reach across North America’.

Yale maintains that Mr Blair’s post has nothing to do with Ms Turner’s father. But yesterday the university confirmed that the foundation’s office will be in the picturesque neo-Georgian divinity school complex, where Ms Turner’s father is based.

The foundation insists it wants to promote understanding between world religions. But The Mail on Sunday has been told that several of its key figures are Catholics.

Mr Blair converted to Catholicism in 2007 with his wife Cherie, a Catholic, as his sponsor. It is less well known that it is a faith he shares with Ms Turner and her father. Sources close to the Blairs say that Ms Turner was one of the figures in whom Mr Blair confided as he decided whether to convert to Catholicism.

Professor Turner is a prominent writer and scholar who once described himself as a ‘Marxist Catholic’. And intriguingly he is a former member of Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic lay organisation shrouded in mystery with rituals that include wearing a cilice – a spiked chain strapped around the thigh.

Author Dan Brown is accused of exaggerating its alleged secretive sadomasochistic practices in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. According to Catholic magazine The Tablet, Professor Turner was a member of Opus Dei for eight years and faced threats that he would ‘lose his soul’ when he left.

The magazine said that Professor Turner believed Opus Dei ‘traded on the instinct which Catholics had for obedience, exercised a kind of mind control and cultivated a psychology of dependence’.

The article continued: ‘He des-cribes leaving as a catastrophic experience for him and was told he would lose his soul over it.’

Ms Turner accompanied Mr Blair to Yale last month for his seminars on faith and globalisation. And breaking her silence about her association with him for the first time, she contributed to an article about him in New York magazine.

Speaking warmly about Mr Blair’s devotion to the new charity, she declared: ‘You can make the case extremely convincingly for why religion is an absolutely terrible thing, and you’ll be right in every respect. Except for the fact that it’s not only like that and, anyway, it’s not going to go away.’

She disclosed that she is so close to him she can predict his choice of clothing when he visits his old haunts in the North-East of England. ‘Whenever he goes back, it’s fantastic,’ she said gushingly. ‘He wears a tracksuit all day.’

Ms Turner was born in Dublin in 1970 and spent her childhood moving between university towns as her father’s career took off. He was a professor of theology at Cambridge before his appointment at Yale.

She is a committed socialist and launched the Northern version of Big Issue magazine, where she earned a formidable reputation for using her charm to raise big sums of money from businesses. It was when she joined Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee in 2000 that she caught the eye of Mr Blair, who promptly recruited her to No 10. A former Downing St aide said: ‘Ruth is clever, sexy and has a sparkling personality. Everybody loved her at No 10. Underneath it all, she is very tough, but she has this delicate vulnerable look that makes you want to put your arm round her.’

Ms Turner worked 18-hour days at Downing Street, often reporting directly to Mr Blair.
He displayed fierce loyalty to her when she was arrested and quizzed by police in the cash-for-honours row, and took the unusual step of issuing a statement defending her. ‘Ruth is a person of the highest integrity for whom I have great regard and I continue to have complete confidence in her,’ he said.

After being cleared in the scandal, Ms Turner remained loyal to Mr Blair. When he left No 10 in 2007, she was top of the list of Downing Street staff he wanted to take with him.

Professor Turner told The Mail on Sunday that he had gone to great lengths to avoid any connection to Mr Blair’s activities at Yale. ‘I have been careful to be sure that my relationship with Ruth is kept entirely out of the way of her professional relationship with Tony Blair,’ he said.

Explaining why he left Opus Dei, Professor Turner said: ‘I moved in a pendulum-like way into a rather opposed position politically and eventually the pendulum settled down in the middle somewhere.

‘I am a Catholic, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a Marxist now. I’ve been through that phase and came out of it at the other end.’

A spokesman for Mr Blair said yesterday: ‘Professor Turner is a highly respected member of the [Yale] faculty but he had no role in establishing the partnership between Yale and the foundation.’

Asked about the foundation’s expansion plans and whether Catholicism played a role in it, his spokesman drew attention to an article on its website, which said: ‘As Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair was officially an Anglican. Unofficially, though, he was a practising Roman Catholic.’