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The State Department tracks most American homicides abroad but releases few details about the deaths. Most, however, occurred in border cities, including Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo, where violence has spiked with drug cartel feuds in recent years.

The Chronicle analysis showed some American homicide victims were involved in organized crime. At least two dozen American victims were labeled as cartel hitmen, drug dealers, smugglers or gang members. Others were drug users or wanted for crimes in the United States.

The Confidential Intelligence Unit (CIU) has the power to operate across the UK and will mount surveillance and run informers on ‘domestic extremists’.

Its job is to build up a detailed picture of radical campaigners.

Targets will include environmental groups involved in direct action such as Plane Stupid, whose supporters invaded the runway at Stansted Airport in December.

The unit also aims to identify the ring-leaders behind violent demonstrations such as the recent anti-Israel protests in London, and to infiltrate neo-Nazi groups, animal liberation groups and organisations behind unlawful industrial action such as secondary picketing.

The CIU’s role will be similar to the ‘counter subversion’ functions formerly carried out by MI5.

The so-called reds under the bed operations focused on trade unionists and peace campaigners but were abandoned by MI5 to concentrate on Islamic terrorism.

The unit is being set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and will be based at Scotland Yard in Central London.

An internal police job advertisement for the ‘Head of Confidential Intelligence Unit’, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, reveals key details of its wide-ranging powers.

The advert says the unit will work closely with Government departments, university authorities and private sector companies to ‘remove the threat of criminality and public disorder that arises from domestic extremism’.

The CIU will also use legal proceedings to prevent details of its operations being made public.

Its chief will play an active part in obtaining Public Interest Immunity Certificates from Government Ministers, and will attend ‘legal meetings regarding sensitive source material’.

Another vacancy, for an administration officer, states that the CIU will be involved in the collection of ‘secret data’.

The job descriptions indicate that the postholders will have links with MI5.

Details of the senior vacancies were circulated to police forces last year – the closing date for applications was November 14, 2008.

The top job was open to officers of at least the rank of Detective Chief Inspector.

MI5’s counter subversion role led to it compiling files on Left-wing student activists in the Sixties and Seventies.

The U.S. government maintains a list of about a million names of suspected terrorists that is crosschecked with passenger names ahead of airline boarding. The list has been dogged for years by sloppy name matches that have ensnared innocent travelers, children, prominent politicians and government officials, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ secretary of education and all men named David Nelson.

Under the new plan, approved late Tuesday 413-3, innocent victims of the terrorist watchlist must prove to the Department of Homeland Security, through an undetermined appeals process, that they are not terrorists. They would then get their names put on what the legislation calls the “Comprehensive Cleared List.”

The legislation is another attempt to assist wrongly flagged passengers and would supersede the troubled DHS Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, which has been criticized for being slow or unresponsive to flier complaints.

The changes in these mostly unincorporated areas outside cities like Charlotte, N.C., Las Vegas and Sacramento have been swift and vivid. Their best economic times have been immediately followed by their worst, as they have generally been the last to crest and the first to crash.

In Lehigh Acres, homes are selling at 80 percent off their peak prices. Only two years after there were more jobs than people to work them, fast-food restaurants are laying people off or closing. Crime is up, school enrollment is down, and one in four residents received food stamps in December, nearly a fourfold increase since 2006.

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Residents remember the boom for its noise, with dump trucks lining the streets and power tools heard in nearly every neighborhood. Housing prices doubled, then tripled, and jobs were plentiful, nearly all of them tied to real estate.

Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in,” Mr. Elliott said.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged to provide up to $5.7 trillion more if needed. The total already tapped has decreased about 1 percent since November, mostly because foreign central banks are using fewer dollars in currency-exchange agreements called swaps. The Senate is to vote early this week on a stimulus package totaling at least $780 billion that President Barack Obama says is needed to avert a deeper recession. That measure would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

Only the stimulus package to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates approved in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion in commitments are lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the authority of the Fed and the FDIC. The recipients’ names have not been disclosed.

The company expects a net loss of 265 billion yen ($2.91 billion) for the year ending March 31, compared with its October estimate of 160 billion yen in net income. It also scrapped its second-half dividend.

Nissan’s sales in the U.S., its biggest market, plunged 31 percent in January as demand for Altima sedans and Xterra sport- utility vehicles dried up. Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn’s elimination of 9 percent of the workforce caps a month in which all of Japan’s carmakers slashed forecasts and Panasonic Corp. and NEC Corp. cut workers.

“The economic storm is wreaking havoc on everyone,” said Yuuki Sakurai general manager of financial and investment planning in Tokyo at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co., which manages the equivalent of $54 billion in assets. “Things could get even worse.”

Car sales in the U.S. have sunk to the lowest level since the early 1980s amid the highest unemployment since 1992, forcing General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC to seek government aid. Industrywide sales in Japan fell the most in 35 years last month. The country is headed for its worst postwar recession as factory output slumped in December and unemployment surged.

“We are already in depression, at least for advanced economies,” said International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Feb. 7.

“Worst Assumptions”

“Our worst assumptions on the state of the global economy have been met or exceeded,” said Ghosn. Declining consumer confidence and lack of access to credit are “the most damaging factors,” he said.

The carmaker will slash its workforce to 215,000 from 235,000, matching the magnitude of cuts announced by NEC last month. Of the job losses, 60 percent will come in Japan.

“Japan has been used to a private social contract between the biggest companies and their employees,” said Martin Schulz, a senior economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. That social contract is basically being broken.”

Obama will likely need to ask Congress for more money to recapitalize banks, as much as $1 trillion on top of the roughly $300 billion remaining in the current Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to an estimate by former Federal Reserve economist Ward McCarthy. That will be an even tougher sell for the new president than the stimulus plan, which is headed for a Senate vote this week after passing the House with no Republican support.

That package, at least $780 billion of spending and tax cuts aimed at boosting consumer demand and creating jobs, is just a part of what it will take to pull the economy out of the 14- month-old recession. The stimulus will be effective only if credit markets, currently frozen by illiquid assets clogging banks’ balance sheets, begin to function again.

“It will take an enormous effort to build broader public support” for another bank rescue plan, said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Had the stimulus gone through swimmingly it would have made it easier.”

Geithner’s Speech

New steps to be outlined this week by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will include fresh capital injections into banks and ways to deal with toxic securities still on their balance sheets, according to people familiar with the matter.

Geithner’s speech has been pushed back one day to Feb. 10 to avoid distracting attention from the economic-stimulus bill, White House economics director Lawrence Summers said today. That is the same day the Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill.

“There’s a desire to keep the focus right now on the economic recovery program, which is so very, very important,” Summers said today on ABC’s “This Week.”

Treasury will probably propose a combination of buying toxic bank assets, providing guarantees for other assets, and making additional capital infusions to banks, said McCarthy, now a principal at Stone & McCarthy Research Associates, an economic research firm in Skillman, New Jersey.