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Treasury head Alistair Darling eliminated the tax that buyers are required to pay on home purchases of less than 175,000 pounds ($312,565) to encourage first-time buyers to jump on the property ladder.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown also unveiled plans to spend 1 billion pounds ($1.8 billion) to help buyers hit by a cut in bank mortgage lending in the face of the global credit crunch.

Property prices have fallen by 10.5 percent in the last 12 months, according to Nationwide Building Society.

The Treasury said that for the next year, people buying homes worth 175,000 pounds ($312,565) or less would not have to pay the 1 percent “stamp duty” tax, saving them as much as 1,750 pounds ($3,126).

Brown’s 1 billion pound ($1.8 billion) housing scheme, which he and communities secretary Hazel Blears will formally announce later Tuesday, will target first-time buyers and families at risk of having their homes repossessed.

Under the plans, first-time buyers with an annual household income of less than 60,000 pounds ($107,000) will be entitled to a free five-year loan worth up to 30 percent of a home’s value.

The government promised to help vulnerable families, hit by higher mortgage rates and rising fuel and food costs, from having their homes repossessed.

In some cases, the government will give money to families to help with mortgage payments in exchange for an equity stake in the homes.

In others, the government will buy the home from the mortgage company and then rent it back to the family at an affordable price.

The measures are aimed at keeping the stagnating British economy from falling into a recession, and boosting the popularity of the ruling Labour Party, which is currently lagging 20 points behind the opposition Conservative Party.

Critics said the scheme is encouraging a Big Brother society where friends and neighbours will be encouraged to “snoop” on one another.

The recruitment drive follows news that the Home Office is granting police powers to council staff and private security guards, allowing then to hand out fines for low-scale offences and ask for personal details.

Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Snooping on your neighbours to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi’s copybook.

“With council tax so high, the last thing people want to pay for is an army of busybodies peering through their net curtains at their neighbours as they put out their rubbish.”

Gustav was downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane before it crossed the coast and is weakening as it heads inland. Royal Dutch Shell Plc will begin checks today and may restore full output in three to five days. ConocoPhillips said there was no significant damage to a platform in the area.

“It’s a big surprise that Gustav wasn’t as powerful as people thought,” Jonathan Kornafel, a director at Hudson Energy Capital in Singapore, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We’ve seen this before with hurricanes, where the market comes off strongly once the storm makes landfall.”

Crude oil for October delivery was at $108.72 a barrel at 2:47 p.m. Singapore time, down 5.8 percent from the close of Aug. 29 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It fell as much as 6.1 percent to $108.33 a barrel earlier. Yesterday’s trading is combined with today’s for settlement purposes because of the Labor Day holiday in the U.S.

Natural gas for October delivery was at $7.502 per million British thermal units, down 5.6 percent, while October gasoline was at $2.6850 a gallon, down 5.9 percent.

“The worst of the fears have been calmed,” said David Moore, a commodity strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia Ltd. in Sydney. “The fact that prices are so quickly reverting back to these levels shows that maybe the underlying bearishness in the market is still there.”

The Hutton inquiry heard that he died after making several cuts to his left wrist, which severed the ulnar artery, buried deep in the tissue on the side of the hand nearest the little finger.

An earlier coroner’s inquest was halted when the Government used an obscure law to turn the investigation over to Lord Hutton. His inquiry concluded that ‘there was no involvement by a third party’ in the scientist’s death, which was said to be caused primarily by the cut artery and hastened by the painkillers.

Ms Pederson, a US Air Force officer, met Dr Kelly when she was assigned to work in 1998 as a translator for the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq.

And she revealed in an interview with The Mail on Sunday that, in the months leading to his death, the right-handed scientist was unable to use his right hand for tasks requiring strength because of a painful injury to his right elbow.

According to Ms Pederson, when she dined with Dr Kelly at a Washington restaurant in the spring of 2003, the hand’s grip was so weak that he struggled to get a knife through a steak he had ordered.

The linguist, who counselled Dr Kelly during his conversion to the Baha’i religious faith that she follows, says he had begun to favour his left hand for even relatively minor tasks, a tendency she observed on numerous other occasions.

‘David would have had to have been a contortionist to kill himself the way they claim,’ she said.

‘I don’t know whether he was born right-handed but by the time I first met him he favoured his left hand for any task that required strength, like opening a door or carrying his briefcase.

‘When he embraced friends at the beginning and end of Baha’i meetings, it was his left arm that you felt hugging you and you could tell his right arm hurt him because he rubbed the elbow a lot.

‘I didn’t want to pry but he finally told me the reason in the spring of 2003. It was the last time I saw him before he died. He was visiting America on business and we went out to dinner.

‘He ordered steak and he was holding his knife very oddly in the palm of his right hand, with his wrist crooked, trying to cut the meat.

‘He told me that some time ago he had broken his right elbow and it was never fixed properly, so he had real problems with it. It was painful and it never regained its strength.

‘I just don’t see how he could have used his right hand to cut through the nerves and tendons of his left wrist – especially as the knife he supposedly used had a dull blade.’

Ms Pederson said she believed she was familiar with the knife Dr Kelly is said to have used.

‘He always wore a Barbour jacket and he kept a knife in his pocket,’ she said. ‘It had a folding blade and I remember him telling me he couldn’t sharpen it because his right hand didn’t have the strength to hold a sharpener.

‘It would have taken him a long time to reach the artery that was severed and it would have been very painful.

‘As a scientist, David had no need to kill himself that way. I don’t understand why the British Government isn’t thoroughly investigating this. Logically, he cannot have committed suicide.’

Ms Pederson, 48, whose military duties have included intelligence assignments, has avoided the spotlight since Dr Kelly’s death. But she says she is perturbed by mounting evidence that he may have been murdered.

The Mail on Sunday revealed last week that after his disappearance, a heat-seeking search helicopter flew over the exact spot where his corpse was later discovered. Yet the thermal-imaging equipment picked up no sign of a body – which some experts say suggests he was killed elsewhere.

Moreover, a group of doctors, surgeons and anaesthetists has called for a new inquiry into his death, contending that a cut to the ulnar artery would not cause catastrophic bleeding. Little blood was found at the scene.

They also maintain that the 29 or so painkillers Dr Kelly supposedly swallowed were only one-third of the dosage normally considered as lethal.

Even more mysteriously, there were no fingerprints on the knife he allegedly wielded nor on the bottle from which he supposedly drank water to wash down the tablets.

But perhaps most key is the information that Ms Pederson provided to Thames Valley Police, who were assisting the Hutton inquiry.

When officers flew to meet her in America in August 2003, she says she told them during two days of interviews that she was baffled about how Dr Kelly could have killed himself.

‘The facts just don’t add up,’ said Ms Pederson. ‘The more I have heard about this, the more I have thought about the significance of his weak right hand. I told the police about it when they interviewed me. I said, “How could David have cut his left wrist using a dull knife with his weak right hand?”

‘They said, “It wasn’t a straight cut. It was jagged.”

Put simply, what “Moving to the Center,” means is: moving towards power and money.

“Moving to the Center” is not a move to where the center of public opinion is, but it is a move to the center of where elite consensus is. Once the boundaries of that elite consensus are understood, then we can comprehend the limits of our public choices and more importantly what will be allowed within the confines of our electoral system.

Officials at the special needs evacuation site said things were going pretty smoothly, due in large part to the 211 system that lets them keep track of people who need assistance leaving, and a much more organized system for equipment. About 2,000 people have been helped, authorities said.

Beaumont public transit buses are shuttling residents from neighborhood schools to evacuation centers. Once there, they register with city fire and rescue personnel, who give them a yellow identification bracelet. The bracelet is stamped with the state seal, a barcode and a toll-free phone number.

Guard troops scan the bracelets as evacuees board busses headed north. They’ll be scanned again when evacuees reach shelters. If evacuees are separated from their families, they can call the phone number to find them.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the ingushetiya.ru site, was a vocal critic of the region’s administration.

The Russian prosecutor’s office said an investigation into the death had been launched, Russia media report.

A post on Yevloyev’s site says he was detained by police after landing at the airport of the main town, Nazran.

The website owner was taken to hospital but died from his injuries.

Reports quoting local police said Yevloyev had tried to seize a policeman’s gun when he was being led to a vehicle. A shot was fired and Yevloyev was injured in the head.

Fierce critic

Yevloyev was a thorn in the side of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general.

His website reported on alleged Russian security force brutality in Ingushetia, an impoverished province of some half a million people, mostly Muslims, which is now more turbulent than neighbouring Chechnya.

President Zyazikov had been on the same flight as Yevloyev.

Ingushetia borders Chechnya and has suffered from overflowing unrest.

There is a low-level insurgency, with regular small-scale ambushes against police and soldiers.

In June 2008, the Human Rights Watch group accused Russian security forces there of carrying out widespread human rights abuses.

I wanted to see if they would scan my 11-year-old daughter as she walked by so I walked over to the desk with the computer monitor on it. I got a peek at the monitor for a second or two before one of the bald guys to the left of the TSA agent jumped in front of me and said I wasn’t allowed to look. I couldn’t tell which person was undressed on the monitor.