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Up to 50 nurseries and playgroups have already signed up for the new security measures, thought to be the first time aprents have been targetted in this way.

Civil libertarians have branded the decision a “huge overeaction”.

The new entry system requires people who collect their children to place their finger on a scanner, to make sure that only nominated individuals can get through secure entrances.

Kidsunlimited, the nursery chain, will be rolling out the new technology to its 50 playgroups.

Honeycomb Solutions, the security firm behind the technology, say it is an effective way to monitor who is on their premises.

The scanners work by converting parents’ finger prints into a code number. This number enables the system to recognise the finger, without storing any biometric data.

The company claims that the database cannot be accessed by any human, similar to the way banks protect credit card pin numbers.

Peter Churchley of Caring Daycare, a group of eight nursery schools in Surrey that cater for children aged 3 months to 5 years, said: “We’ve had the Honeycombe Solutions fingerprinting technology installed in two of our nurseries.

“Parents have reacted very positively to the moves and the security is a reassurace that the premises are secure for recognised people. I do think a greater number of nurseries will be thinking about finger printing. We also have CCTV camera.”

Mr Churchley said that a package of five CCTV cameras and the fingerprinting systems costs £10,000.

The Government has issued guidance telling head teachers they have the right to collect pupils’ biometric data for security reasons.

The information could be used to monitor attendance, control entry to the school building and allow pupils to take books out of libraries.

But the move continues to be criticised by civil liberty groups and opposition MPs, who fear that data may be stolen by identity thieves. Official guidance says that personal data, including fingerprints and eyeball scans, can be collected from pupils, although schools must consult parents before installing the technology.

Any information gathered will be subject to data protection laws and should not be shared with outside bodies, says the guidance.

However, the Government insists that using biometric data is an efficient way of tracking children during the school day. It is estimated that at least 200 schools used fingerprint scans, before any official guidance was published. But this is thought to be the first time that parents have been targeted.

However there have been concerns about parents’ privacy and campaigners have said the decision is a “huge overreaction”.

Dan Norris, Labour MP for Wansdyke and a prominent child welfare campaigner, said: “My instinct is that is some what of an overreaction. It strikes me quite a strong reaction to a problem that could be managed in a less confrontational way. Fingerprinting is quite a big deal.”

The new program, which involves random searches, begins in time for the election and inauguration.

“Inspections could take place at any Metrorail station or Metrobus stop,” Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn says in a statement. “They will be random, unannounced and focused on explosive detection.”

Officials tell local news organizations that the new policy wasn’t enacted in response to a specific threat against the USA’s second busiest transit system.

The searches are expected to begin before Election Day, they say.

Automakers everywhere are getting battered by an economic slowdown, but today Europe’s top carmaker is the biggest company in the world.

Because of a freak event, shares of Volkswagen have spiked, giving it a market value of $370 billion, surpassing that of Exxon Mobil, at $343 billion.

On Sunday, Porsche unexpectedly disclosed that it had raised its stake in Volkswagen to 74.1 percent from 35 percent, through the use of derivatives.

At a time when much of the world is looking at the markets for signs of whether we can weather a financial crisis, an episode like this makes the volatility in stocks look like slapstick comedy. It is baffling how something so basic as a major shareholder doubling its stake could cause so much turmoil in a market. Yet somehow the acquisition came as a complete surprise. Where was the transparency here?

The price spike resulted from a squeeze. A number of hedge funds had shorted VW shares, betting that the company, like other automakers, would fall in the market as consumers cut back spending. In short sales, investors borrow shares and sell them, betting that the stock price will fall and that they can buy them back at a lower price and profit from the difference.

But the move by Porsche meant that there were very few shares of VW available. The German state of Lower Saxony, where Volkswagen is based, owns 20 percent. That means only about 5 percent of VW shares were on the market.

“Each and any short-seller in the world is trying to close up their position, and there is no way they can do it except for trying to buy like mad,” Heino Ruland, an analyst with FrankfurtFinanz, told Reuters. “Someone is selling it at a rather interesting and rich price: It is about 10 times as much as it should trade.”

The VW squeeze play may well generate sympathy for short-sellers after months of vilification from politicians and executives who should know better. Shorts have been accused of manipulating stock prices through secretive means. Now they have been the victims of similar force.

The Fund is already close to committing a quarter of its $200bn (£130bn) reserve chest, with a loans to Iceland ($2bn), Ukraine ($16.5bn), and talks underway with Pakistan ($14.5bn), Hungary ($10bn), as well as Belarus and Serbia.

Neil Schering, emerging market strategist at Capital Economics, said the IMF’s work in the great arc of countries from the Baltic states to Turkey is only just beginning.

“When you tot up the countries across the region with external funding needs, you get to $500bn or $600bn very quickly, and that blows the IMF out of the water. The Fund may soon have to start calling on the West for additional funds,” he said.

Brad Setser, an expert on capital flows at the Council for Foreign Relations, said Russia, Mexico, Brazil and India have together spent $75bn of their reserves defending their currencies this month, and South Korea is grappling with a serious banking crisis.

“Right now the IMF is too small to meet the foreign currency liquidity needs of the larger emerging economies. We’re in a dangerous situation and there is the risk of extreme moves in the markets, as we have seen with the Brazilian real. I hope policy-makers understand how serious this is,” he said.

The IMF, led by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has the power to raise money on the capital markets by issuing `AAA’ bonds under its own name. It has never resorted to this option, preferring to tap members states for deposits.

“The IMF can in theory create liquidity like a central bank,” said an informed source. “There are a lot of ideas kicking around.”

For now, Eastern Europe is the epicentre of the crisis. Lars Christensen, a strategist at Danske Bank, said the lighting speed and size of Ukraine’s bail-out suggest the IMF is worried about the geo-strategic risk in the Black Sea region, as well as the imminent risk a financial pandemic. “The IMF clearly fears a domino effect in Eastern Europe where a collapse in one country automatically leads to a collapse in another,” he said.

Mr Christensen said investor sentiment towards the region has reached the point of revulsion. The Budapest bourse plunged 10pc yesterday despite the proximity of an IMF deal Meanwhile, Standard & Poor’s issued a blitz of fresh warnings, downgrading Romania’s debt to junk status, and axing the ratings Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Croatia.

The agency said Romania was “vulnerable to a sudden-stop scenario where capital inflows dry up or even reverese”, leaving the country unable to cover a current account deficit of 14pc of GDP.

Romania’s central bank has taken drastic steps to defend the leu, squeezing liquidity so violently that overnight rates shot up to 900pc. But there are growing doubts whether this sort of shock therapy can obscure the fact that economic booms are now turning to bust across the region.

Merrill Lynch has advised to clients to take “short” positions against the leu. “The fundamental picture suggests that Romania may face a currency crisis in the near term, similar to what Hungary has gone through over the last week,” it said. The bank also warned that Turkey and the Philippines are vulnerable.

Hungary was forced to raise interest rates last week by 3 percentage points to 11.5pc to defend its currency peg in Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism. Even Denmark has had to tighten by a half point, raising fears that every country on the fringes of the eurozone will have resort to a deflationary squeeze.

The root problem is that Eastern Europe and Russia have together borrowed $1,600bn from foreign banks in euros and dollars to fund their catch-up growth spurt over the last five years, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements. These loans are now coming due at an alarming pace. Even rock-solid companies are having trouble rolling over debts.

Mr Schering said Turkey was likely to join the queue for bail-outs very soon. “Their external liabilities have reached $186bn, and a lot of this is short-term debt that has to be rolled over in coming months,” he said.

Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said over the weekend that his country would not “darken its future by bowing to the wishes of the IMF”, but it is unclear how long Ankara can maintain its defiant stand as capital flight drains reserves.

The new polymer could also enable much more efficient charge separation since electrons dislodged by light in the material remain free much longer than in conventional solar cells.

The inorganic/organic hybrid polymer material can be made into polymer blends that can “absorb essentially across the entire solar spectrum–they go from about 300 nanometers down to about 10,000 nanometers,” said professor Malcolm Chisholm of Ohio State University.

Solar materials work by using incident light to boost the energy of electrons, thereby separating then from the hull of atoms in the material. They can then be harvested to generate electricity.

However, separated electrons fall back into their host atoms if not collected quickly. Usually, solar materials either fluoresce (called singlet emisson) or phosphoresce (triplet emission). The new hybrid material does both, further increasing potential efficiency.

“The materials we have made show both singlet and triplet emissions,” said Chisholm. “The singlet state lasts a relatively long time, in the region of about 10 pico seconds; the triplet lasts a lot longer–up to a 100 or so microseconds, which should be good for separating the electrons and the hull.”

The new material was designed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center and synthesized at the National Taiwan University. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and Ohio State’s Institute for Materials Research.

The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.

After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to use some of its powers deeper within the country, and now DHS has set up at least 33 internal checkpoints where they stop people, question them and ask them to prove citizenship, according to the ACLU.

“It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.

The ACLU says it has scores of complaints from citizens and wants Congress to investigate and roll back the buffer zone. According to a map the rights group released Wednesday, some 190 million citizens live within what the ACLU dubs the “Constitution-free Zone.”

DHS spokesman Jason Ciliberti says the ACLU’s description of the zone as “Constitution-Free” couldn’t be further from the truth and that the check points follow rules set by Supreme Court rulings.

“We don’t have the abilitty to just set up checkpoints willy-nilly,” Ciliberti said. “The Supreme Court has determined that brief investigative encontuers do not constitute a serach or seizure.”

When citizens or visa holders encounter a checkpoint, most are waived on after showing identification, but if an agent suspects the person is not lawfully in the country, the agent can detain the person until the agent’s investigation is satisfied.

The government has long had the power to set up such check points, but has recently expanded the number of permanent and ‘tactical’ check points and deployed them in areas they hadn’t before — such as near the Canadian border.

The government gathers more data on us than anyone else and has big plans to collect even more.

The Home Office has drawn up plans for the creation of a single central database containing details, though not the content, of every e-mail, text and mobile phone call made in the UK and of every web page browsed.

The government says no decision on the database proposal, which is expected to be included in the upcoming draft Communications Bill, has yet been made.

But in a speech on 15 October, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said a consultation on the controversial plan would be held in the New Year.

‘Orwellian nightmare’

Supporters of the central database say it is necessary as part of the government’s ongoing battle against serious crime and terrorism.

“A new strategy with the focus of preventing dental problems among children is be introduced in Sheffield,” reports the Yorkshire Post.

The move comes in response to figures showing that the state of children’s teeth in the city is slightly higher than the national average.

“At present, fluoride is added to children’s milk in 42 primary schools in the city. This will continue, and the local NHS is also planning to begin talks on the possibility of adding fluoride to water.” the report continues.

While Fluoride has been proven to have a minimal effect in the prevention of tooth decay, the negative effects of the chemical are legion according to several medical studies, far outweighing any positive aspects.

A recent Scientific American study “Concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid — the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism.”

The report also notes that “a series of epidemiological studies in China have associated high fluoride exposures with lower IQ.”

50 per cent of the fluoride taken in on a daily basis remains in the body for life, accumulating in the skeleton. This can cause, skeletal fluorosis, a crippling and painful condition.

“Epidemiological studies and tests on lab animals suggest that high fluoride exposure increases the risk of bone fracture, especially in vulnerable populations such as the elderly and diabetics,” writes Dan Fagin.

Fagin interviewed Steven Levy, director of the Iowa Fluoride Study which tracked about 700 Iowa children for sixteen years. Nine-year-old “Iowa children who lived in communities where the water was fluoridated were 50 percent more likely to have mild fluorosis… than [nine-year-old] children living in nonfluoridated areas of the state,” writes Fagin.

President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa’ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq’s claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam’s own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the “treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country”.