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Don’t think the chances are any better at 7-Eleven. One California store received more than 100 applicants in a week and a half for jobs that pay $8.50 per hour — and the retailer doesn’t even usually hire holiday workers.

From department stores and convenience chains to call centers, managers who only a year ago had to scramble to fill holiday jobs are seeing a surge in the number of seasoned applicants — many of them laid off in other sectors and desperate for a way to pay the bills.

The flood of jobseekers comes even as the retail industry drastically cuts back on holiday hiring because of the drop-off in consumer spending, and the applicants — who differ from the usual pool, teens or stay-at-home moms looking for extra spending money — reflect the nation’s fast-deteriorating job market.

“I thought it was going to be pretty easy, but I am not the only one looking for a job. There are thousands of us going for the same thing,” said Kimberly Caparo of Chesterfield, Mich., who has applied for part-time jobs at Toys “R” Us Inc., Home Depot Inc. and Lowe’s Cos. Inc. in recent weeks since she and her husband were laid off by American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc.

At UPS Inc., which is just starting to ramp up its holiday hiring, as much as 30 percent of the seasonal hires in the Northeast are coming from the ranks of the recently laid off, said spokeswoman Ronna Charles Branch. In the past, she said, applicants for holiday jobs at the world’s biggest shipping carrier were largely students.

The service will review brain waves, eye movements and other physical features of potential customers to precisely study the impact of commercial messages or products, the two firms said.

Nielsen will collect the necessary data in Japan and the California-based NeuroFocus will use its teams of experts, including physicians, to examine the effects of the tested products or commercial messages, they said.

The differences “were statistically significant in the third and fourth litters,” according to an abstract of the study led by Professor Juergen Zentek and commissioned by Austria’s Environment Ministry.

Although in an alternative set-up of the study the differences between the groups of mice were found to be less pronounced and statistically not significant, the environmental organization Global 2000 said this meant that further long-term tests were needed.

Austria has long resisted calls by the European Commission to allow the use of genetically modified food, but it finally had to lift its ban on MON810 maize as animal feed last year.

However, Austrian feed companies have so far agreed to a self- imposed ban on MON810.

The tested corn breed is a cross of MON810 and another variety and is designed to be resistant against herbicides and insects.

An expert panel of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) found in 2005 that the hybrid was “safe for human and animal health.”

Following the release of the study at a conference in Vienna, Global 2000 and Greenpeace criticized EFSA’s approval of the variety and called for a ban of genetically engineered maize.

Take a good look at some of the 17 people our nation’s president-elect chose last week for his Transition Economic Advisory Board. And then try saying with a straight face that these are the leaders who should be advising him on how to navigate through the worst financial crisis in modern history.

First, there’s former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Not only was he chairman of Citigroup Inc.’s executive committee when the bank pushed bogus analyst research, helped Enron Corp. cook its books, and got caught baking its own. He was a director from 2000 to 2006 at Ford Motor Co., which also committed accounting fouls and now is begging Uncle Sam for Citigroup- style bailout cash.

Two other Citigroup directors received spots on the Obama board: Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anne Mulcahy and Time Warner Inc. Chairman Richard Parsons. Xerox and Time Warner got pinched years ago by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting frauds that occurred while Mulcahy and Parsons held lesser executive posts at their respective companies.

Mulcahy and Parsons also once were directors at Fannie Mae when that company was breaking accounting rules. So was another member of Obama’s new economic board, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. He’s now a member of the executive committee at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which, like Citigroup, is among the nine large banks that just got $125 billion of Treasury’s bailout budget.

There’s More

Obama’s economic crew might as well be called the Bailout Bunch. Another slot went to former White House economic adviser Laura Tyson. She’s been a director for about a decade at Morgan Stanley, which in 2004 got slapped for accounting violations by the SEC and a month ago got $10 billion from Treasury.

That’s not all. There’s Penny Pritzker, the Obama campaign’s national finance chairwoman. She was on the board of the holding company for subprime lender Superior Bank FSB. The Chicago-area thrift, in which her family held a 50 percent stake, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2001. The thrift’s owners agreed to pay the government $460 million over 15 years to help cover the FDIC’s losses.

Even some of the brighter lights on Obama’s board, like Warren Buffett and former SEC Chairman William Donaldson, come with asterisks. Buffett was on the audit committee of Coca-Cola Co.’s board when the SEC found the soft-drink maker had misled investors about its earnings. Donaldson was on the audit committee from 1998 to 2001 at a provider of free e-mail services called Mail.com Inc. Just before he left the SEC, in 2005, the agency disciplined the company over accounting violations that had occurred on his watch.

Telling Stories

So, by my tally, almost half the people on Obama’s economic advisory board have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both. Do you think any of that came up in the vetting?

Let’s say we give Buffett a pass — smart move he made, skipping the group photo-op last week in Chicago. What about the rest of them? Donaldson, for one, was chairman when the SEC voted in 2004 to let the big Wall Street banks, including Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos., lever up their balance sheets like drunks. Talk about blowing it.

And whom did Obama tap for White House chief of staff? Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who was a director at Freddie Mac in 2000 and 2001 while it was committing accounting fraud.

Ideally, this job would go to someone who can’t be easily fooled. Think about it: Of all the people Obama could have chosen as his chief of staff, couldn’t he have found someone who wasn’t once on the board of Freddie Mac?

Renewed Confidence

The president-elect needs some new advisers — fast. We are in a crisis of confidence in American capitalism. These aren’t the right people to re-instill its sense of honor.

Many of them should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses right about now, not places in Obama’s inner circle. Did Obama learn nothing from the ill-fated choice of James Johnson, the former Fannie Mae boss, to lead his vice- presidential search committee?

Does he think people like Robert Rubin or Richard Parsons will offer any helpful advice on how to stop crooked bankers or sleep-walking directors from sinking our economy? Or that they won’t mistake the nation’s needs for their own corporate interests? Or that the people who helped get us into our long financial nightmare have any clue how to get us out?

Obama has created hope that our nation can stand for all that is good in the world again. It’s not too late to change course.

Paulson, in an update on the Treasury’s financial rescue efforts, said his staff has continued to examine the benefits of purchasing illiquid mortgage assets under the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“Our assessment at this time is that this is not the most effective way to use TARP funds, but we will continue to examine whether targeted forms of asset purchase can play a useful role, relative to other potential uses of TARP resources,” Paulson told a news conference.

When Treasury was selling the $700 billion bailout plan to Congress, it initially promoted it as a vehicle that would purchase illiquid mortgage assets from banks and other institutions to cushion potential losses.

But it became quickly apparent that setting up such purchases would take time, and Treasury opted for the faster method of injecting capital directly into banks by buying preferred stock. The Treasury has allocated $250 billion of the fund to such purchases so far.

Paulson said the Treasury is evaluating a second program that would provide government investments that would match private investments in capital raisings.

“In developing a potential matching program, we will also consider capital needs of non-bank financial institutions not eligible for the current capital program,” Paulson said.

He also said support was needed for the markets that securitize credit outside the banking system for products such as car loans, credit cards and student loans. The Treasury and Federal Reserve are exploring the development of a potential liquidity facility for highly rated AAA asset-backed securities.

Earlier this week, American Express received approval from the Federal Reserve to become a bank holding company, which is a similar structure to traditional commercial banks. The credit card company now has access to financing from the Fed and the ability to grow a large deposit base.

The increased funding opportunities through government programs, including the potential $3.5 billion investment, could be a huge boost to American Express as one of its primary sources of funding has nearly disappeared amid the ongoing credit crisis.

American Express relied on packaging pools of credit card debt and selling them to investors in the securitization market. As investors have shied away from purchasing all but the safest forms of debt, the market for credit card-backed securities has dwindled.

“There are lots of families hemorrhaging into homelessness and we need to figure out how to put a tourniquet on the hemorrhaging,” Philip Mangano, the homelessness czar appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002, told Reuters.

There is little time to waste. The U.S. unemployment rate is at a 14-year high and more job losses are forecast, while the Mortgage Bankers Association says nearly 1.5 million homes are in the process of foreclosure.

The U.S. Congress approved a massive housing market rescue bill in July that sets aside $3.9 billion that can be used partly by local authorities to buy foreclosed properties. Those could potentially house homeless families.

Citi said it was imposing a moratorium on foreclosures for all clients willing to work “in good faith” to restructure mortgages, as long as they have sufficient income to make payments of some sort.

The initiative came amid fresh signs of the turmoil gripping the financial sector. Late on Monday, the credit card company American Express revealed it was turning itself into a bank, which makes it eligible for aid under the US government’s $700bn (£444bn) bail-out fund. American Express has struggled with a surge in bad debts on customers’ cards. The 158-year-old firm said offering high-street bank accounts would “build a larger deposit base to broaden our funding sources”.

Political momentum has been gathering for aid to homeowners to help “main street” alongside the US treasury’s rescue of Wall Street banks.

Citi, which is getting a $25bn equity investment from the US government, has written off more than $70bn of losses on mortgages and delinquent derivatives, making it one of the worst-hit surviving institutions. In addition to freezing foreclosures, the financial services group is launching a programme to pre-empt problems with some 500,000 loan customers who are not yet behind on payments but who may need help.

“We will pre-emptively reach out to help homeowners before they become delinquent, which is critical to avoiding the loss of a home and protecting their credit score and future borrowing potential,” said Sanjiv Das, chief executive of Citi’s mortgage arm.

The Mortgage Bankers’ Association recently revealed 4 million US borrowers are at least one payment behind on their loans, with 500,000 in the process of losing their property. America’s two government-sponsored mortgage aggregators, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are close to announcing a far broader initiative to keep families in their properties, in an extension of a programme — Hope Now — to slow the rate of repossessions. It is backed by the Bush administration.

According to messages on AVG’s support forums and its own support site, an update released late Saturday for the company’s security software fingered the “user32.dll” file as a Trojan horse. As per the program’s settings, the AVG software, including the newest version 8.0 and its predecessor 7.5, shut the .dll away in quarantine. The result: A crippled computer.

The problem only affects users of the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP.

“If you have chosen ‘heal’ or ‘quarantine,’ your PC will no longer restart,” said a panicked user named “pa3bar” in a message Sunday. “It shows a blue screen at start up and tells you it cannot find winsvr, error c0000135. System recovery has no effect.”

The problem only affects users of the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Windows XP, according to the company. English versions of AVG are not affected.

AVG, best known for its free Antivirus, confirmed the error in a FAQ on its support site. “In case you are not able to run your Windows XP operating system after AVG 8.0 virus definition update, it may be caused by a false positive on a specific ‘user32.dll’ system file,” the company said. “The file was moved to the AVG Virus Vault and deleted. Therefore it is not possible to start Windows.”

Although some systems refused to boot, others rebooted endlessly instead.

On its support site, AVG posted instructions for affected users that involved running Windows XP’s Recovery Console, disabling several AVG services and restoring the user32.dll file by copying it from the operating system’s install CD. For users unable to locate their installation disc, AVG offered a utility that fixed the problem; those users also needed to create a bootable CD or USB drive.