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In a report “Recession Coming” released today, the bank’s US team said the credit crunch had started to inflict serious damage on US companies.

“Slipping sales and tightening credit are pushing companies into liquidation mode, especially in motor vehicles,” it said.

But the 6,000-plus people who applied for jobs at the new Supercenter in Cleveland’s Steelyard Commons took everyone, even Wal-Mart, by surprise.

“We had to recount [the applications] three times,” said Mia Masten, Wal-Mart’s director of corporate affairs, Midwest division.

When thousands of people compete for a few hundred ordinary jobs, trend watchers say it’s an indication not only of a less-than-stellar economy but also of a workforce short on marketable skills.

The huge number of applicants wouldn’t have caught anyone’s eye had these been skilled, high-paying jobs, the types of positions that thousands of people always seek.

But these were regular retail jobs with low-to-average wages and benefits, not the sort of positions typically in high demand. Target wouldn’t disclose the number of people who applied to work at its Steelyard Commons store.

Sadly, few of the people interested in working at Cleveland’s first Wal-Mart actually got a job.

Those 6,000 people were competing for some 300 positions. That means for every one person hired, 19 people walked away empty-handed.

It could have been worse. In Illinois recently, Masten said, 25,000 and 15,000 people applied at two Wal-Mart stores in the Chicago area, and neither of those is a large Supercenter.

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Amy Hanauer, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio, said she finds these ratios “deeply troubling,” reminiscent of bread lines in times of great poverty. She said the figures paint a bleak portrait of the regional job market and underscore the need for more and better employment opportunities.

Not so, says an Australian medical expert who is calling for couples to be charged A$5000 a head for any “extra” children they have – that’s every child after their second.

Professor Barry Walters even thinks parents should incur an annual tax of up to A$800 every year – for life.

But wait, there’s a silver lining in that nappy.

Coughing up under the controversial plan could help to save the planet, he writes in the latest Medical Journal of Australia.

The lifelong tax would simply offset the extra offspring’s carbon-dioxide emissions, he explains.

The Independent on Sunday has learnt that, in an astonishing U-turn, the Secretary of State for Business, John Hutton, will announce that he is opening up the seas around Britain to wind farms in the biggest ever renewable energy initiative. Only weeks ago he was resisting a major expansion of renewable sources, on the grounds that it would interfere with plans to build new nuclear power stations.

The revelation rounds off an unprecedented week in the battle against global warming in Britain and the United States. On Wednesday and Thursday measures to boost US use of renewable energy for electricity and motor fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions were approved in Congress. The move comes as 190 nations meet in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate what is seen as the world’s “last chance” of avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in 86 countries across the globe to demand urgent action from the Bali meeting. Several thousand campaigners marched in torrential rain through London to rally at the US embassy. Some posters carried a picture of President George Bush and the words “Wanted for crimes against the planet”.

Mr Hutton’s announcement, which will be made at a conference in Berlin tomorrow, will identify sites in British waters for enough wind farms to produce 25 gigawatts (GW) of electricity by 2020, in addition to the 8GW already planned – enough to meet the needs of all the country’s homes.

“The convenience is great,” Danny Manzon, a busy, 53-year-old restaurant consultant, said after getting vaccinated Tuesday at a kiosk in front of an AirTran gate at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. He said he had wanted to get a flu shot for three months but never had the time.

For years, some airports have been offering flu shots to airline passengers before they cleared security. But many travelers were too afraid of missing their flights to stop.

So this year, airports in such cities as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Newark, N.J., and San Francisco are setting up “airside” health stations close to the gates, past the security checkpoints.

The shots typically take just a few minutes and cost $15 to $35. So far, the airports in the five major cities have given out about 15,000 shots this season.

“It’s helpful being on the airside because people don’t know how long it’s going to take getting through security so they don’t want to take a risk of waiting in a medical clinic or being stuck in security and not making their plane,” said Maureen Zampella, director of nursing and general operations manager of a service that is offering flu shots at the Newark airport.

The vaccinations are seen as particularly convenient for those who travel frequently on business.

“They don’t have time to go to the physician,” said Dr. Dominic Mack, chief medical officer of the service offering shots in Atlanta.

Airline passengers receiving the shots won’t be protected right away. It takes about two weeks for a shot to offer full protection.

Getting vaccinated now offers plenty of time for the shot to take full effect before the peak flu season begins, typically after December.

Airport health officials said eventually they may offer other vaccinations, too, as well as cholesterol tests and screening for high blood pressure.

“We’re finding that’s where people are,” said Michelle Smith, spokeswoman for Denver Health, which operates a clinic at the Denver airport.

Last year, Chicago’s O’Hare Airport dispensed about 5,000 flu shots to passengers and employees from kiosks next to gates.

“It went over great,” and the idea was expanded this year to Chicago’s Midway, said Dr. John Zautcke, medical director for the University of Illinois Medical Center at O’Hare. So far, O’Hare and Midway have vaccinated a total of about 9,500 people this year.

Police in Cleveland, in northern England, charged John Darwin, 57, with making false statements to obtain a passport and using deception to make money transfers. Police said that Darwin would be held until a court appearance Monday and that they wanted to interview his wife, Anne, 55, who recently moved to Panama.

Police provided no other details of Darwin’s five-year odyssey, but his wife laid out an extraordinary tale in a lengthy interview published Saturday in two British newspapers, the Mirror and the Daily Mail. The newspapers said Anne Darwin spoke to a reporter in Miami during a stopover on her return trip to Britain.

According to her account, Darwin began planning to fake his death in early 2002 because he believed it was the only way the couple could escape growing debts related to their apartment rental business.

She said she doubted he would go through with the plan and initially believed he had died when he disappeared in March 2002. But she said he returned to their family home in northern England in February 2003, looking dirty, thin and “disheveled.”

For the next three years, she told the newspapers, Darwin lived with her in their family home, spending most of his time in a small room in an apartment building they owned next door. She said his secret room was connected to their bedroom by a passageway that was knocked into the wall and hidden behind a large wardrobe.

“I was always on eggshells when friends and family came to stay in case someone wandered into John’s room and saw him,” she said, adding that he would often take walks disguised in a woolly hat and faking a limp.

He was hiding in his secret room, she said, on the day in April 2003 that she and their two grown sons returned home from the coroner’s inquest at which John Darwin was officially declared dead, she said.

“Minister Dichter has cancelled this trip following threats of him being arrested in Great Britain. This is an intolerable situation,” Barak Sari said.

Dichter was due to travel to Britain to participate in an “after Annapolis” conference to focus on the aftermath of the November US conference at which Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were revived.

But he cancelled the trip on the recommendation of the foreign ministry, which said it was possible that a leftist organisation could file a complaint against him that could lead to an arrest warrant, the Haaretz daily reported.

The ISNA news agency did not give a direct quote from Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari. A senior oil official last month said “nearly all” of Iran’s crude oil sales were now being paid for in non-U.S. currencies.

For nearly two years, OPEC’s second biggest producer has been reducing its exposure to the dollar, saying the weak U.S. currency is eroding its purchasing power.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West, has called the U.S. currency a “worthless piece of paper.”

Foes since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Tehran and Washington are also at odds over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme as well as over policy in Iraq.

“In line with the policy of selling crude oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, currently the sale of our country’s oil in U.S. dollars has been completely eliminated,” ISNA reported after talking with Nozari.