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Prosecutors claimed Won Jeong-Hwa, 35, entered South Korea posing as a refugee when in fact she was a spy with handlers in Pyongyang.

But the defence painted a different picture of Won, who has confessed and signed a pledge of repentance and loyalty to South Korea.

The court heard how she began her career as a spy after falling into the hands of the North’s secret services and being “brainwashed.” She was arrested for stealing zinc, a scrap metal which North Koreans often smuggle into China in return for food.

Fearful for her life, she claimed in her defence that she complied with her orders only to protect her family, who would now be at grave risk and possible execution.

A tearful Won had pleaded for leniency at a previous hearing.

“I wanted to turn myself in but I just could not because of fears for my relatives in the North,” she said in a choking voice.

“I repent my past activities. I just want a chance to live again with my daughter in South Korea.”

Investigators said Won had served jail time for theft in the North and feared possible execution for another theft.

She fled to northeast China but returned home and in 1998 became a spy for the North’s espionage agency.

Her first task was to arrange the kidnap of North Korean defectors in China, they said.

“In China, I earnestly carried out various missions, helping kidnapping North Korean defectors and South Koreans and engaging in drug trafficking,” Won told the court.

In 2001 she entered South Korea and lived as a housewife and mother, having married a South Korean businessmen, with whom she had a daughter, now seven.

Meanwhile, she sought out army officers in accordance with her orders from Pyongyang — photographs and business cards belonging to 23 were found in her belongings. She slept with them and eventually became the long-term lover of one, Captain Hwang.

She used him to obtain secret information, according to evidence produced at her trial.

This included details of military installations, weapons systems and lists of defectors. Soon, she was commissioned to find Hwang Jang-yop, the North’s highest-ranking defector who lives under guard in the South, and kill two South Korean agents with a poisoned needle. The plot did not go ahead.

She was also convicted of taking part in the kidnapping of a South Korean businessman in China, who was smuggled into the North.

Perhaps the oddest feature of her case is how she first aroused suspicion. She had been hired to talk to South Korean soldiers of the evils of life in the North. Touring military bases provided good cover for her activities. But in her 33rd lecture she loosed a volley of pro-Pyongyang propaganda.

While the Paris metro and rail networks already operate around 9,500 CCTV devices, police have only 330 at their disposal to survey outside public areas. The new plan, dubbed “A Thousand Cameras for Paris”, will raise that number to more than 1,200 – with most installed in high-risk areas and outside railway and underground stations.

The figure is still small compared with London, where each citizen is caught on average several hundred times a day. Britain has about four million closed-circuit security cameras compared with France’s 340,000.

In a little noticed move, federal officials this month have declared a series of public health emergencies relating to potential weapons of biological terror.

On Oct. 1, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared an anthrax public health emergency. On Oct. 10, he declared health emergencies for smallpox, radiation sickness from the detonation of a nuclear device and poisoning from botulinum toxins, the active ingredient of Botox.

There’s no clear evidence that terrorists have managed to weaponize anthrax or stolen large caches of Botox from cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills.

But by declaring these public health emergencies, HHS has granted manufacturers of anti-terrorism drugs and vaccines and others involved with the products protection from lawsuits if the drugs were to cause unfortunate side effects.

In the past, drug companies have shied from vaccine development because of low profit margins and legal risks. The actions of HHS are a necessary reassurance to persuade companies to make the drugs, and doctors and other providers to administer them, federal officials and some terrorism experts say.

But consumer advocates see it as a giveaway to the drug industry that strips the public of legal protections.

“It gives the manufacturers and other people involved a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Washington-based Public Citizen.

“These are potentially dangerous products. There could be a bad vaccine, and suppose people relied on that?” Claybrook asked. “There is no deterrent if there’s no liability.”

The emergency declarations cover a host of antibiotics to fight anthrax infection, anthrax and smallpox vaccines, and a drug to stimulate white blood cell production in people harmed by radiation.

Concerns about the safety of vaccines against potential bioweapons have been raised repeatedly in recent years. Some soldiers, for example, have balked at anthrax vaccinations. And a federal effort to inoculate 500,000 doctors, nurses and other health care workers against smallpox resulted in only about 40,000 volunteering for the vaccine.

Health and Human Services’ authority to grant drugmakers liability protection comes from a controversial measure that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert added to a Defense Department appropriations bill in the waning days of 2005.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act targets liability protections for products used during epidemics and pandemics, or as security countermeasures.

The HHS secretary can trigger the protections by declaring that a public health emergency exists or that there’s a “credible risk” of one in the future.

And legal immunity can apply to anyone involved in the development, testing, manufacture or distribution of the drugs. Also covered is anyone who prescribes, dispenses or administers the drugs, including state and local government officials.

Public Citizen and the Consumer Federation of America were among the groups that protested the bill.

In a letter to Frist and Hastert, Sen. Ted Kennedy and 20 other members of Congress called the measure “a stealth provision to shield manufacturers from responsibility for making faulty drugs and vaccines.”

Due to the opacity of the market, which is one of the most complex, least regulated and least understood in the global financial system, it is still not clear how many contracts have to be settled or which institutions will take the ultimate hits once the billions of dollars worth of contracts have been unravelled. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, is expected to trigger credit default swap (CDS) protection pay-outs of about $400bn but because the contracts were sold many times through different counterparties it is not yet known who will be liable.

One commentator said: “This will be the greatest illustration of the follies of Wall Street and how unnecessarily complicated the wild off-track betting became in the past few years.”

Five years ago Warren Buffett, the iconic American investor, warned that the chaotic profusion of derivatives used by companies and hedge funds to fund financial growth were “financial weapons of mass destruction.’’

Bankers in the City and on Wall Street are bracing for yet another round of turbulence as the contracts are unwound.

The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in America have said they will keep their special liquidity windows open late on Tuesday night to allow the contracts to settle.

“What I see is a system where we have more centers of gravity” Nowotny said today in an interview with Austrian state broadcaster ORF-TV. “I see for the future a tri-polar development, and I don’t think that there will be fixed exchange rates between these poles.”

The leaders of the U.S., France and the European Commission will ask other world leaders to join in a series of summits on the global financial crisis beginning in the U.S. soon after the Nov. 4 presidential election, President George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Barroso said in a joint statement yesterday.

Nowotny said he was “skeptical” when asked whether the Bretton Woods System of monetary policy, set up after World War II and revised in 1971, could be revived to aid global currency stability. The U.S. meeting should aim to strengthen financial regulation, define bank capital ratios and review the role of debt-rating agencies.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.

The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

Bush, of course, was speaking of the government’s coordinated efforts to tackle a financial crisis that has roiled global markets and brought down venerable financial institutions.

“These measures will require us to put a significant amount of taxpayer dollars on the line,” the President added.

Ah, yes. There is no free lunch. Just how significant an amount of taxpayer dollars remains unknown, but it’s going to be massive.

Estimates of the proposal to let the government buy bad assets from banks range from $500 billion to $1 trillion — and that’s in addition to costs already incurred for various government actions this year, including, but not limited to:

* $29 billion to fund JPMorgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns
* Up to $200 billion each for nationalization of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac
* Up to $85 billion for AIG
* $50 billion to insure money market funds
* Approximately $300 billion of Fed liquidity measures this week alone.

The state will inject SFr6bn (£3.1bn) into UBS, its biggest bank, in return for a 9.3 per cent stake, and will allow UBS to unload $54bn (£31bn) of toxic assets, including sub-prime mortgages and Alt-A securities, into a fund controlled by the central bank.

Credit Suisse, the No 2 Swiss lender, obeyed instructions from the central bank by raising about SFr10bn from investors in the market, including the Qatar Investment Authority, which is already a big shareholder and is a major stakeholder in Barclays. The fundraising, which allows Credit Suisse to meet tough new Swiss capital rules, represented about 12 per cent of the bank’s existing equity.

Switzerland had to act to underpin confidence in its prized banking system after Britain, the US and others announced massive capital injections into their major lenders. Without doing likewise, the Swiss banks would have been left exposed to market jitters and speculation.

The country of 7.5 million people houses SFr3.46trn of bank deposits, almost seven times its gross national product. That is less than Iceland, whose deposits are nine times GDP, but much higher than the UK where deposits are close to double GDP.

“It’s clear that we have a confidence problem,” Philipp Hildebrand, the Swiss National Bank’s vice president, said. “It is notably the two large banks that are affected.”

The woes of its banks, and UBS in particular, have rocked Switzerland, where the financial sector accounts for almost 15 per cent of output. The government said it did not intend to hold the stake in UBS for many years and hoped to sell it to private investors soon. It will impose changes in corporate governance and risk controls in return for the state’s support.

The capital increase will lift UBS’s tier one capital ratio to 11.5 per cent by the end of the year from 10.4 per cent. After its fundraising, Credit Suisse’s tier one ratio would have been 13.7 per cent at the end of September, compared with the 10.8 per cent the bank reported.

The Swiss government also said it would follow other European governments by increasing its depositor protection scheme from the current SFr30,000 level. It stressed that the country’s other banks were generally sound.

UBS said the government’s measures should help it reverse withdrawals of client assets. Wealthy clients have been taking money out of the bank’s core wealth management business because of a stream of writedowns at the investment banking division, which expanded into structured credit just before the market imploded in the summer of 2007.

Net outflows of SFr49.3bn hit the wealth management business in the third quarter, while the global asset management division leaked SFr34.4bn. The withdrawals increased as the financial crisis worsened in September after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the US. UBS recorded a small net profit of SFr296m for the third quarter, though it was helped by benefits from the reduced value of its own debt and tax gains.

UBS said its biggest need was to reduce its exposure to illiquid assets, whose plunging value has caused massive losses and shattered confidence in the bank, and that the central bank’s fund would help it get back to running its business as normal. The investment bank made new writedowns and losses of $4.4bn on top of $42bn of writedowns since the start of the credit crunch.

“All European governments intervened and this left the Swiss banks at a competitive disadvantage,” Dirk Becker at Kepler, the brokerage, told Reuters. “The Swiss have recapitalised their banks and made them the best capitalised banks in the world.”

Credit Suisse saw strong inflows at its wealth management business of about SFr14bn in the quarter but made a net loss of about SFr1.3bn due to new writedowns.

The government also said that if refinancing problems emerged, it would guarantee banks’ new short- and medium-term interbank liabilities and money market transactions. The move would follow a key step announced by the UK as part of its rescue package for the sector.

Shares in the two banks rose after the rescue package was announced but fell at the end of the session in line with the wider market after gloomy employment numbers from the US increased fears about the world economy. Credit Suisse drop-ped 0.9 per cent to SFr45.5 while UBS lost 4.9 per cent, closing at SFr19.09.

Like other governments, Switzerland has acted to try to stop the financial crisis wreaking havoc on the wider economy. With banks refusing to lend to each other, the cost and lack of credit for small businesses and corporations threatens to turn the economic downturn into a punishing recession.

“This package of measures will contribute to the lasting strengthening of the Swiss financial system,” the government said. “The resulting stabilisation is beneficial for overall economic development in Switzerland and is in the interests of the economy as a whole.”

Ukraine and Baltic states also hit hard by the financial crisis

With even the mighty Swiss banking system needing government support, it will come as little surprise that a swathe of emerging market economies are suddenly looking fragile.

Ukraine emerged yesterday as the winner of the title “the next Iceland”, with the International Monetary Fund offering the former Soviet republic up to $14bn (£8bn) to shore up its financial system. An IMF delegation landed in the country on Wednesday to try to stabilise the country’s battered banking sector and ailing currency, hit hard by the global financial crisis. The central bank was forced to impose restrictions on deposit withdrawals and lending after panicked savers rushed to empty their accounts, draining the banking system of more than $1.3bn. The authorities also had to rescue two key banks and battle a sharp fall in the currency as the stock market plunged.

Ukraine emerged as the biggest crisis after Hungary agreed to borrow up to €5bn from the European Central Bank. Capital Economics warned that there were risks for a swathe of emerging European economies in the Baltics and the Balkans, including Lithuania and Latvia.

Their problem is that they have been living beyond their means by borrowing to finance increases in their standard of living.