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They could face losing their status if they get drunk and into arguments while out socialising, or do not get help for drink or drug problems.

The draft code has been published by the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE).

GTCE chief executive Keith Bartley said the code set out to teachers that they had to consider their place in society.

‘Responsible profession’

Sarah Stephens, director of policy for the GTCE, said: “What it means is to act as a role model, holding the bar for children in terms of your own conduct outside the classroom.”

The document says teachers should “uphold the law and maintain standards of behaviour both inside and outside school that are appropriate given their membership of an important and responsible profession”.

The GTCE said the behaviour of teachers could still be inappropriate even if it did not involve doing something illegal.

GTCE head of professional regulation David James said: “You might have an incident in a pub, someone has had too much to drink and there’s been some pushing and shoving.

“It hasn’t resulted in a criminal offence, but we would look at it in great detail. It is not something we would want teachers to do, but professionally would it have an impact on their registration status?”

On alcohol or substance abuse, he said: “We have the ability to impose restrictions on registration, ways you can remain as a teacher, but you must undertake some training, or counselling or you must give us a medical report.”

‘Slippery slope’

Teachers could also be disciplined if they fail to pass on suspicions about child abuse.

The code says they should “take all reasonable steps to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children and young people under their supervision; endeavour to pick up on and address issues that impact adversely on them at the earliest possible stage”.

The GTCE is conducting a consultation on the document until February.

Nansi Ellis, head of education policy at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, voiced concern about the code.

She said: “We urge the GTCE to tread carefully with its proposed code of conduct for teachers.

“It is treading a potentially slippery slope if it creates a code of practice which covers teachers’ behaviour in their private lives.”

Madoff, 70, had been subject to electronic monitoring and a 7 p.m. curfew under a Dec. 17 court order. Now he is barred from leaving his Upper East Side apartment except for court appearances, and his building will be watched by security guards and video surveillance, according to a letter from prosecutors filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan.

“The bail conditions are what the government has agreed to,” Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, said in an interview, declining further comment. He wouldn’t say whether Madoff had been threatened.

Madoff, 70, was arrested Dec. 11 after telling his two sons and federal investigators that he had been using money from new investors to pay off old ones in a massive Ponzi scheme. He said clients of New York-based Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC lost $50 billion.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt said in the letter, sent to U.S. Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz in New York, that Madoff’s wife, Ruth, will pay for the surveillance. Katz agreed to the conditions.

‘Harm or Flight’

The security service, scheduled to be in place by today, will watch Madoff’s doors and will be able to send a signal from an observation post to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the letter. One reason for the new bail conditions was “to prevent harm or flight,” the government said.

The New York Daily News reported on Dec. 18, citing an unnamed source, that Madoff and his family were threatened with harm if he didn’t repay investors.

Other bail conditions remain as before. Madoff posted a $10 million bond, guaranteed by his wife and brother Peter, and he and his wife have agreed to surrender homes in Manhattan, Montauk, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, if he flees. Madoff remains subject to electronic monitoring. The Manhattan apartment is worth about $7 million, according to bail papers.

Ruth Madoff, who hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, also has surrendered her passport.

Madoff, who hasn’t formally responded to a securities fraud charge against him, is due to return to court Jan. 12, unless prosecutors indict him before then. Prosecutors and defense lawyers may also agree to postpone the court date.

In a Dec. 18 interview, Sorkin said Madoff’s company is “cooperating fully with the government.” Madoff met with prosecutors earlier this week, according to people familiar with the case.

The furloughs will begin in February and will last through June 2010, Schwarzenegger said in an executive order. He also ordered all departments to cut 10 percent of their workforce costs, through firings if necessary.

“Every California family and business has been forced to cut back during these difficult economic times, and state government cannot be exempt from similar belt tightening,” Schwarzenegger said in a letter to state workers.

The furloughs came after Schwarzenegger vowed to veto a package of tax increases and spending cuts approved yesterday. Democrats had attempted to find a way around a two-thirds supermajority normally needed for passage of a tax measure as they considered ways to close the $42 billion shortfall that has depressed California bond prices and forced officials to halt $3.8 billion of public-works projects. The deficit also threatens to leave the most-populous U.S. state without enough cash to pay bills by February.

The furloughs would amount to a 10 percent pay cut, Chris Voight, executive director of the California Association of Professional Scientists, a group that represents about 3,000 scientists working for the state. The association and the Service Employees International Union announced they will sue to block the furloughs and any layoffs, which they said would violate collective-bargaining deals.

Regressive Bargaining

“We don’t think it’s right, and we’re prepared to file an unfair practices charge against the governor,” Yvonne Walker, SEIU Local 1000 president said today at a news conference in Sacramento. “We think it’s regressive bargaining. For him to do this outside of existing negotiations is improper.”

Schwarzenegger today also ordered lawmakers into a new special session to grapple with the crisis, the third time he’s done so since Nov. 6.

He again invoked powers granted him in 2004 to declare a fiscal emergency, which gives lawmakers 45 days to close the gap. If they fail to take action by then, they are barred from doing any other legislative work.

“China’s increased purchase of US Treasury securities should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the assumption that the US can borrow its way out of the current financial crisis,” the China Daily said in an editorial.

The warning from the state-run newspaper, an English-language daily that mainly addresses a foreign audience, came after the US Treasury Department reported a steep increase in Chinese holding of US Treasury bonds.

China held 652.9 billion dollars of US Treasury bonds at the end of October, up 11.2 percent from 587 billion dollars a month earlier, when China became the largest creditor ahead of Japan, according to the data released Tuesday.

Japan remained in second place, with total holdings of 585.5 billion dollars at the end of October.

The China Daily said that, given the global economic crisis , the consequences would be serious if China and other nations stopped channelling money into the US economy.

“Interest rates in the US would rise to undermine that government’s efforts to bailout distressed financial institutions and companies,” it said.

China was also constrained by a lack of other places to put its money, according to the paper.

“With few options to invest its increasing reserves safely and profitably, China may thus have to buy more US Treasury securities in spite of growing domestic skepticism that such purchases may incur huge losses later,” it said.

However, as China and other nations help prop up the US economy, the United States should use the window of opportunity to undertake necessary reforms, the China Daily said.

“The current strong foreign appetite should not be taken by the US government as solid proof of the long-term value of its Treasury bonds,” it said.

As rain pelted the roads and Obama announced more Cabinet appointments, close to 500 people filed through the hotel lobby, hoping to get a job flipping or serving burgers.

Today more of the same is expected, meaning that by day’s end close to 1,000 will have applied for no more than 50 $10-an-hour jobs at an In-N-Out restaurant opening at Tropicana Avenue and Tee Pee Lane.

Some wore ties. Some wore their pants too low. Some were balding. Some owed two months of mortgage payments. Some spoke openly of suicide. Some asked this reporter for a job. Some asked the manager at the hotel hosting the event for a job.

Of the crowd, Blande Pittman, regional division manager for the chain, flatly observed, “We expected a high turnout, because of the economy and all.”

In a statement, France Telecom reported that the “Sea Me We 4” cable was cut at 7:28 AM local time, the “Sea Me We3” was severed at 7:33 AM, and the FLAG cable was severed at 8:06 AM. While a repair boat is en route, full service is not expected to be restored until Dec. 31.

The causes of the cuts were not known at press time, although boat anchors have been blamed for previous outages. The cable runs between Alexandria, Egypt, and Sicily.

France Telecom estimated that 82 percent of India was without service as of Friday; major Middle East nations such as Saudi Arabia were 55 percent out of service, while Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan were 52 percent, 68 percent and 39 percent out of service, respectively. The list of affected nations also included Lebanon, Malaysia, the Maldives (which was completely without service), Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Yemen, and Zambia.

Keynote Systems also confirmed the outages.

“Keynote maintains a global network of more than 3,000 performance measurement systems, at 115 locations, in 59 countries,” Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote, said in an emailed statement. “We have measurement systems in India (Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and New Delhi) representing the largest incumbent ISPs there, VSNL and Sify. Unfortunately, we do not have any public data for performance measurement data from the Middle East; though, we do have a measurement system in The United Arab Emirates (Dubai).

“According to our data, between 12/18 @ 10:45pm and 12/19 @ 5:00am (PST) the average network response time between India and the rest of the world slowed by as much as 3x to 4x of normal,” White added. “During this same period, network availability dropped to between to between 83% and 93% and at one point, near midnight (PST) as low as 72%. After 5:00am (PST), network performance and availability returned to “almost” normal with periodic slowdowns and availability drops. At 9:00am (PST) and continuing as I write this update, we saw some average network response times slow by 2x on some networks and availability drop to approximately 96 percent.”

Most of the errors appeared to be network outages, producing TCP connection errors and TCP connect timeout messages which often indicate significant packet loss between Keynote’s measurement systems and the Web sites they access, White said.

‘Chile is in fact a hotspot for UFO sightings, as are many of its South American neighbours, and the Chilean Air force has a specific unit set up to investigate UFO related phenomena’ one ufologist told us. ‘If you look at segments of the video in question, well some of it simply doesn’t look like anything resembling a squadron of acrobatic planes: some of it looks remarkably like one disc shaped UFO type object’.

Speaking from the White House, President George W. Bush said the administration decided against forcing a bankruptcy to compel cost-cutting, in order to avoid the risk that consumers would desert one or more of the companies and touch off an industry collapse, deepening the current economic downturn.

“In the midst of a financial crisis…allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course of action,” Mr. Bush said.

“Under ordinary economic circumstances, I would say ‘this is the price that failed companies must pay’ and I would not favor intervening to prevent the auto makers from going out of business,” the president said. “But these are not ordinary circumstances.”

The deal would extend $13.4 billion in loans to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC in December and January, with another $4 billion likely available in February. It also would provide the government with non-voting warrants, although the exact amount was unclear immediately.

The deal is contingent on the companies’ showing that they are financially viable by March 31. If they aren’t, the loans will be called and all funds must be returned, officials said.

The failures cut the flow of “data of various kinds” between Europe and the Middle East, and there’s no timeframe for when communications will be restored, said Sanjeev Gaur, director of assurance at Mumbai-based Reliance Globalcom Ltd.

Three submarine cable systems linking Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe are affected, according to Reliance and Melbourne-based Telstra Corp. The cables run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to southern Italy. In January, two cable systems were severed by an anchor 8.3 kilometers (5.2 miles) from Alexandria beach after bad weather conditions forced ships to moor off the coast.

A fault is affecting the SMW4 cable near the Alexandria cable station, the FLAG FEA cable is down and the SMW3 cable system is also affected, according to information received from Telstra. Flag Telecom Group Ltd. operates FLAG FEA and the other cables are owned by groups of phone companies across the regions.

Reliance Globalcom leases capacity on the SMW 3 and SMW 4 cable systems that run in the Mediterranean, said Anurag Joshi, head of the global network operations center at the company. Joshi said he doesn’t know exactly what happened and that engineers were working on it.

According to a time-line of the attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration notified NORAD that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked at 9:24 a.m. The Pentagon was not struck until 9:43 a.m.

On behalf of retired Army officer April Gallop, California attorney William Veale has filed a civil suit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and former US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11. It alleges they engaged in conspiracy to facilitate the terrorist attacks and purposefully failed to warn those inside the Pentagon, contributing to injuries she and her two-month-old son incurred.

“The ex-G.I. plaintiff alleges she has been denied government support since then, because she raised ‘painful questions’ about the inexplicable failure of military defenses at the Pentagon that day, and especially the failure of officials to warn and evacuate the occupants of the building when they knew the attack was imminent” said Veale in a media advisory.

Gallop also says she heard two loud explosions, and does not believe that a Boeing 757 hit the building. Her son sustained a serious brain injury, and Gallop herself was knocked unconscious after the roof collapsed onto her office.

The suit also named additional, unknown persons who had foreknowledge of the attacks.

“What they don’t want is for this to go into discovery,” said Gallop’s attorney, Mr. Veale, speaking to RAW STORY. “If we can make it past their initial motion to dismiss these claims, and we get the power of subpoena, then we’ve got a real shot at getting to the bottom of this. We’ve got the law on our side.”