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The explosive charges are made by a former senior Ikea executive Johan Stenebo, a Swede who started working for the company at one of its German outlets outside Hamburg over 20 years ago and rose to a senior management position. He resigned last year.

His book, entitled Sanningen om Ikea (The Truth about Ikea), contains wide-ranging allegations about a company which has become a global household name. Justifying the book to Gemany’s Der Spiegel magazine, he said: “I did not want to go along with it any more, but I could not stay silent.”

Mr Stenebo claims that Ikea, which employs 135,000 staff in 44 countries, is run with an iron fist by founder Ingvar Kamprad and his two sons Mathias and Peter, who were promoted to top management five years ago.

He describes Ikea as “one of the most secretive companies in the world” and claims that senior management were expected to show fanatical loyalty and devotion to Mr Kamprad. “There was an unwritten law for Ikea upper management: loyalty to Ingvar unto death,” he writes.

He alleges that Ikea used methods normally associated with former Communist East Germany’s hated Stasi secret police to spy on its staff and keep them in line. He claims that a close-knit network of company informers kept Mr Kamprad constantly updated on personal gossip about employees and the prevailing atmosphere in each office.

Foreigners who work for Ikea have been referred to by Swedish executives as “niggers”, he writes, and have no chance of being promoted to senior positions. In fact, most of the top Ikea jobs, he claims, go to employees from the town of Älmhult, in the Samaland region of Sweden, where Mr Kamprad grew up. Mr Stenebo claims Ikea has elaborately manipulated the image of its 83-year-old founder, now the world’s fifth-richest man, portraying him as “an ascetic, slightly dim geriatric” with alcohol problems and dyslexia, and confecting for him a typical Ikea lifestyle of modest, affordable simplicity, with a Klippan range sofa and the bog-standard Billy bookcase.

In reality, he writes, these stories were made up by Mr Kamprad (who actually drove a Porsche), then disseminated by media which fell for their quaint charm. There was good business sense to the strategy, he says: the company’s homely image “helped to push down prices with suppliers”.

His book also alleges that the company makes claims to being an eco-friendly concern, while in reality its huge market share means that it can dictate the lowest prices to its suppliers. “The key to Ikea’s low prices is the supply of cheap raw materials,” Mr Stenebo writes. “Instead of using the best they use the cheapest.”

Mr Stenebo insists that he chose to write his open denunciation of Ikea after a furious row with Mr Kamprad’s son Peter. “Economic power means a responsibility towards people and the environment, but Peter does not understand that,” he claimed.

The book has attracted enormous media attention in Sweden, with its unprecedented attack on a national institution by one of its former senior executives. The last time the furniture giant came in for such negative publicity was more than a decade ago when Mr Kamprad senior was unmasked as having been a wartime member of a Swedish pro-Nazi organisation.

He managed to survive that stain on his reputation by publicly apologising and writing personally to all of Ikea’s Jewish staff. This time around, Ikea has dismissed the book as “the author’s personal opinion on Ikea and the Kamprad family. Ikea sees no reason to make a comment on someone’s personal view on the company.”

The $176.36 billion gap is more than $20 billion wider than the shortfall recorded in October 2008, driven up by lower tax receipts, stimulus-related revenue reductions and consistently high government outlays.

Treasury’s monthly budget statement shows receipts were $135.33 billion in October, down 18% from a year earlier and at the lowest level since October 2002. Meanwhile, outlays were $311.69 billion, down 3% from a year earlier and at their second-highest monthly level on record.

The October deficit figure is wider than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate for a $175 billion deficit in the month and wider than the $165.9 billion expected by analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires.

The Treasury on Thursday also revised September’s deficit to a slightly narrower $46.57 billion, from a previously reported $46.61 billion. Even with the revision, the U.S. in fiscal year 2009 posted a record total budget deficit of near $1.4 trillion — three times its previous record.

At the equivalent of 9.9% of gross domestic product, the figure is the widest U.S. deficit as a share of GDP since 1945.

In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court against the Alavi Foundation, seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets.

The assets include bank accounts; Islamic centers consisting of schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than 100 acres in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower in New York.

Confiscating the properties would be a sharp blow against Iran, which has been accused by the U.S. government of bankrolling terrorism and trying to build a nuclear bomb.

A telephone call and e-mail to Iran’s U.N. Mission seeking comment were not immediately answered. Nor was a call to the Alavi Foundation.

It is extremely rare for U.S. law enforcement authorities to seize a house of worship, a step fraught with questions about the First Amendment right to freedom of religion.

The action against the Shiite Muslim mosques is sure to inflame relations between the U.S. government and American Muslims, many of whom are fearful of a backlash after last week’s Fort Hood shooting rampage, blamed on a Muslim American major.

The mosques and the skyscraper will remain open while the forfeiture case works its way through court in what could be a long process. What will happen to them if the government ultimately prevails is unclear. But the government typically sells properties it has seized through forfeiture, and the proceeds are sometimes distributed to crime victims.

Prosecutors said the Alavi Foundation managed the office tower on behalf of the Iranian government and, working with a front company known as Assa Corp., illegally funneled millions in rental income to Iran’s state-owned Bank Melli. Bank Melli has been accused by a U.S. Treasury official of providing support for Iran’s nuclear program, and it is illegal in the United States to do business with the bank.

The U.S. has long suspected the foundation was an arm of the Iranian government; a 97-page complaint details involvement in foundation business by several top Iranian officials, including the deputy prime minister and ambassadors to the United Nations.

“For two decades, the Alavi Foundation’s affairs have been directed by various Iranian officials, including Iranian ambassadors to the United Nations, in violation of a series of American laws,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

There were no raids Thursday as part of the forfeiture action. The government is simply required to post notices of the civil complaint on the property.

During a regular Wheeling-Ohio County Health Board meeting Tuesday, health department Administrator Howard Gamble told board members about the student’s attempt to flee Wheeling Middle School during a vaccination clinic held there last Friday.

He noted the boy’s mother could not bear to watch the scene and left the gymnasium. Out of apparent fear of receiving the injection, the student ran out of the building. The school’s resource officer, Ohio County Sheriff’s Deputy John Haglock, coaxed the boy back inside. Once at the shot station, however, Haglock apparently needed some help keeping the boy still, and another deputy assisted.

“He tried to run. I looked over and saw two sheriff’s deputies holding a kid down,” Gamble said. “Mom took off, she couldn’t take it. You had one nurse with the needle, two deputies holding him, one nurse is grabbing hands – because that’s what they want to do, to go after the needle. And that’s the last thing you want.”

Gamble said as soon as the nurse gave the boy his injection and told him he was done, he hopped up like nothing had happened.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department’s subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward “promoting social and economic justice” and “social change.”)

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

“I didn’t think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention,” Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.

Under long-standing Justice Department guidelines, subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that “no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media” without “the express authorization of the attorney general” – that would be current attorney general Eric Holder – and subpoenas should be “directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter.”

“Maybe you don’t know about us, about simple cops, who live and work and love their work. I’m ready to tell you everything. I’m not scared of my own death,” Dymovsky says in a YouTube message addressed to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“I will show you the life of cops in Russia, how it is lived, with all the corruption and all the rest – with ignorance, rudeness, recklessness, with honest officers killed because they have stupid bosses.”

Jordan McFarland, a high school athlete from Alexandria, Va., left Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children Tuesday night in a wheelchair nearly a week after developing severe headaches, muscle spasms and weakness in his legs following a swine flu shot. He will likely need the assistance of a walker for four to six weeks, plus extensive physical therapy.

“The doctor said I’ll recover fully, but it’s going to take some time,” the teenager said.
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Jordan is among the first people in the nation to report developing the potentially life-threatening muscle disorder after receiving the H1N1 vaccine this fall. His alarming reaction was submitted via msnbc.com’s reader reporting tool, First Person, by his stepmother, Arlene Connin.

Increased cases of GBS were found in patients who received a 1976 swine flu vaccine, but government health officials say they’ve seen no rise in the condition associated with the current outbreak.

So far, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have received five reports of GBS in people who received the H1N1 vaccine since Oct. 6, not including Jordan’s case, said Dr. Claudia J. Vellozzi, deputy director for immunization safety.

Out of about 40 million doses of H1N1 vaccine available to date, that’s a far lower rate of GBS than the 1 case that develops in every 1 million people who receive the regular flu vaccine.