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These days, she’s leading customers around a store that sells sculptured snowmen and Santa figurines.

It isn’t by choice. Until a few weeks ago, Proctor was among the record 5.9 million Americans who have been jobless for at least six months. Now she belongs to a subset of that group: Out-of-work professionals and managers, engineers and teachers who have turned, in desperation, to holiday-season jobs as sales clerks.

Retailers report a surge in applications this year from professionals who had never applied for such jobs before.

“You’ll find Wall Street stock brokers and small business owners trying to find temporary retail jobs during the holidays,” said Ellen Davis, vice president of the National Retail Federation.

The mistrial came after the jury sent two notes — one during its first day of deliberation on Friday and another on Monday — saying it was hopelessly deadlocked over charges Hal Turner threatened to kill or assault a federal judge. A retrial was scheduled for March 1 in Brooklyn, where the case was moved based on a change-of-venue request.

Prosecutors had argued that Turner knew his Internet tirade, which insisted the judges ”must die,” could provoke violence by members of his radical audience. The defense likened Turner to a ”shock jock” and argued he was expressing an opinion protected by the First Amendment.

The only juror to speak to reporters afterward, truck driver Richard Gardiner, said the jury voted 9 to 3 in favor of acquittal, with the majority seeing the government’s case as weak. He said he held out for a conviction because he ”did think it was a threat.”

The Brussels agreement, which will come into force in two months’ time, requires the 27 EU member states to grant requests for banking information made by the United States under its terrorist finance tracking programme.

In a little noticed information note released last week, the EU said it had agreed that Europeans would be compelled to release the information to the CIA “as a matter of urgency”. The records will be kept in a US database for five years before being deleted.

Critics say the system is “lopsided” because there is no reciprocal arrangement under which the UK authorities can easily access the bank accounts of US citizens in America.

They also say the plan to sift through cross-border and domestic EU bank accounts gives US intelligence more scope to consult our bank accounts than is granted to law enforcement agencies in the UK or the rest of Europe.

In Britain and most of Europe a judge must authorise a specific search after receiving a sworn statement from a police officer.

This weekend civil liberties groups and privacy campaigners said the surveillance programme, introduced as an emergency measure in 2001, was being imposed on Britain without a proper debate.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “The massive scope for transferring personal information from Europe to the United States is extremely worrying, especially in the absence of public debate or parliamentary scrutiny either at EU or domestic level.

“No one is saying that allies should not co-operate, but where is the privacy protection? Where are the judicial safeguards in such a sweeping scheme?

“This looks like yet another example of lopsided post-9/11 compromise and of the ease with which temporary emergency measures are foisted on us permanently.”

The 7,100 acres, or 11 square miles, of Crow Creek Sioux tribal land in central South Dakota ranch sold for almost $2.6 million, less than the $4.6 million it was appraised at, said IRS spokeswoman Carrie Resch. She did not say who bought the land.

The tribe filed a lawsuit Monday in U.S. District court in Pierre seeking to block the sale. Judge Roberto A. Lange declined their request but promised to schedule a trial to hear the tribe’s arguments.

The land in question was part of the tribe’s original reservation established in an 1868 treaty, and was held by the federal government in a trust for the tribe. But it was eventually allotted to individual tribal members, who then sold it to non-Indians, putting it outside the tribe’s legal jurisdiction.

The tribe bought the ranch back in 1998 but the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not put the land back into trust, which would have protected it from seizure, Tribal Secretary Tommy Thompson said.

Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue said he hopes the tax dispute can still be resolved in a way that allows the tribe to keep the land.

“It’s very disgraceful, very shameful. It’s devastating to us,” Sazue said after the auction. “Our land is never for sale.”

Lawyers said the tribe can purchase the land back during a 180-day redemption period, and the land will not change possession during that time. A trial is tentatively set for March 29-30, which is within the redemption period.

According to the lawsuit, the IRS was auctioning the land to recover more than $3.1 million in federal employment taxes owed by the tribe. The tribe didn’t pay the taxes because it was told, erroneously, by an official connected to the BIA that federally recognized tribes do not have to pay the taxes, according to the lawsuit.

The auction was unnecessary because the tribe is seeking a loan to pay off its tax bill, the lawsuit said.

The tribe contends the IRS cannot legally seize and sell the land because it is owned by Crow Creek Tribal Farms Inc., a corporation set up by the tribe that is not legally responsible for settling the tribe’s tax debts.

Members of the tribe have used the land and lived on it for a long time, according to the suit. “Members died and were buried on the land. Indeed, the lands were considered so important to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe that the Tribe went into debt to acquire the land as part of its land consolidation effort to enlarge the Crow Creek Indian Reservation,” it contends.

The tribe also argues that the seizure is illegal because the land cannot be taken without congressional approval and the IRS has not followed a federal law requiring an environmental assessment of the sale’s impact.

The tribe’s lawyer, Mario Gonzalez of Rapid City, said the IRS action was unusual. “This is the only instance that I know of where the IRS has levied on tribally owned land on an Indian reservation.”

Resch, the IRS spokeswoman, said she could not comment on the tribe’s legal arguments because the IRS does not comment on pending litigation.

Thompson said the IRS should have negotiated with the tribe, and that the tax bill could have been paid from trust money held for the tribe by the federal government.

“I’m kind of upset and kind of furious with the IRS,” Thompson said.

The land is particularly valuable to the tribe because it has been designated as a site for construction of wind towers to generate electrical energy, Sazue and Thompson said.

Only this month, Britain’s Simon Mann won a pardon for his part in a foiled 2004 coup attempt on Equatorial Guinea, an old-style adventure whose glittering prize was the central African state’s multi-billion-dollar oil riches.

Contrast that to reports last week that a band of South African and other mercenaries had flown into the chaos of Guinea to train up a militia loyal to the incumbent junta leader — on a salary put at barely $3,500 a month.

That’s not bad money in most parts of the world, and there were reports that the company involved would have won extra remuneration in the form of minerals from Guinea’s fecund soil.

But it would have been peanuts to Mann, whose Equatorial Guinea coup was known as the “Wonga Plot” after the English slang for the money they hoped to yield in buckets.

While mercenaries are often seen as in the business of bringing governments down, it is not new that they should be trying to prop one up, as is happening in Guinea.

Mann himself is reported to have worked for the Angolan government in the 1990s to help it wrest back control of a key port from rebels, and again for Sierra Leonean authorities in the 2002 civil war there.

But what has changed since then is the economics. Thanks to the steady flow of new oil and mineral finds on the continent, the private security business in Africa is booming. A lot of the real pros now find there is steady money to made in guarding a gold mine in northern Congo, for example.

The more dubious end of the business is now increasingly the preserve of what some describe as cowboys.

“They couldn’t get enough people to do the job,” Henri Boshoff, a military analyst who served in the South African army, told Reuters of the mercenaries hired by Guinean junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. “(The South Africans) were very desperate. They are not being very well paid.”

The Guinea mercenaries may not be in the same league as Mann and his fellow Wonga plotters, but their capacity to stir up trouble should not be underestimated.

The fact that Camara’s militia is being selected on tribal lines could add an alarming new ethnic dimension to Guinea’s instability.

Security sources also told Reuters that part of their job is to ensure the arrival of arms acquired by the junta in Ukraine in direct contravention of an international arms embargo.

South Africa is keen to get rid of its reputation as a training ground for hired guns and is officially investigating the activities of its nationals in Guinea.

Depending on what it finds, it may have to decide whether they are in breach of its
three-year-old anti-mercenary law that still contains grey areas as to what is mercenary behaviour.

The No B (Berlusconi) Day march was organised by grassroots groups via the internet and social networking sites.

Mr Berlusconi faces separate tax fraud and bribery trials after he lost his immunity from prosecution in October.

As of last Friday, even searchers who aren’t logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a ‘better service’.

Anonymous cookie

The company explained: “What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.”

Rachel Porcaro knows she’s hardly rich. When you’re a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don’t need government experts to tell you how broke you are.

But that’s what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.

It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.

She couldn’t believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.

“I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — ‘I don’t have anything, why are you auditing me?’ ” Porcaro recalled. “I said, ‘Why me, when I don’t own a home, a business, a car?’ ”

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

“They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area,” says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle’s G.A. Michael and Co. “The auditor said, ‘You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”

“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”

Seriously? An estimated 60,000 people in Seattle live below the poverty line — meaning they make $11,000 or less for an individual or $22,000 for a family of four. Does the IRS red-flag them for scrutiny, simply because they’re poor?

I asked the local office of the IRS. They said they couldn’t comment for privacy reasons.

“We can’t give you any kind of broad interview because your request is associated with the case of an individual taxpayer,” IRS Media Relations said in a statement.

…

Driver, the tax specialist, says it’s well-known that the system targets the weak — people with sloppy returns, for example, who don’t tend to be well off.

“It’s the way a wolf goes after the weakest sheep.”

Rachel says an irony of her year in tax hell is that the IRS is right about one thing — you can’t get by in Seattle on what she makes. That’s why she’s living with her parents. To try to make a life in our shimmering city without relying on welfare, food stamps or other public assistance.