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Roskilde will receive 4.5 billion kroner ($890 million) in cash from the central bank and Danish lenders. The purchasers will also assume 37.3 billion kroner of debt, Roskilde said in a statement yesterday. The shares were suspended in Copenhagen trading today, after falling 75 percent this year.

Writedowns on real estate loans led to a pretax loss of at least 1 billion kroner in the first half, double an estimate the bank published on July 14, Roskilde said yesterday. Denmark became the first European economy to enter a recession since the global credit crisis began, as declining property values prompted consumers to spend less. The bailout is the first by the Danish central bank in 15 years.

“The central bank views this matter with great seriousness,” Nationalbanken, as the central bank is known, said in the statement. “This acquisition will contribute to limiting the negative effect on Denmark’s financial system” of Roskilde’s failure.

“Today we are faced with, I’m not afraid to say, a historic decision, to call upon the president of the Russian Federation to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house, said in an address to lawmakers in Moscow today.

South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in wars in the early 1990s, have cited Kosovo’s Feb. 17 declaration of independence from Serbia as a precedent for their aspirations. Medvedev — who alone can decide on whether to recognize the territories — has said previously that Russia supports the regions’ decisions on their future status, while stopping short of formally recognizing them. President George W. Bush has insisted the regions remain a part of Georgia.

Both the lower chamber, the state Duma, and the upper house, the Federation Council, voted unanimously in support of independence.

“Medvedev will recognize both regions,” said Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “There’s no way out,” he said. “This is a consequence of the recognition of Kosovo by the West and Western policy in the Balkans.”

Russian Troops

These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science — and if it’s not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.

“It’s way too early to know which — if any — of these technologies is going to be practical,” said Jonathan Moreno, a Center for American Progress bioethicist and author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. “But it’s important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies.”

Kidnapping jumped almost 40 percent between 2004 and 2007 in Mexico, according to official statistics. Mexico ranks with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia as among the worst countries for abductions.

The recent kidnapping and murder of Fernando Marti, 14, the son of a well-known businessman, sparked an outcry in a country already hardened to crime.

More people, including a growing number of middle-class Mexicans, are seeking out the tiny chip designed by Xega, a Mexican security firm whose sales jumped 13 percent this year. The company said it had more than 2,000 clients.

Detractors say the chip is little more than a gadget that serves no real security purpose.

The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the size and shape of a grain of rice, into clients’ bodies with a syringe. A transmitter in the chip then sends radio signals to a larger device carried by the client with a global positioning system in it, Xega says. A satellite can then pinpoint the location of a person in distress.

Cristina, 28, who did not want to give her last name, was implanted along with seven other members of her family last year as a “preventive measure.”

“It’s not like we are wealthy people, but they’ll kidnap you for a watch. … Everyone is living in fear,” she said.

The chips cost $4,000 plus an annual fee of $2,200.

Most kidnappings in Mexico go unreported, many of them cases of “express kidnapping” where the victim is grabbed and forced to withdraw money from automatic cash machines.

GROWTH INDUSTRY

Official statistics show 751 kidnappings in Mexico last year, but the independent crime research institute ICESI says the number could have exceeded 7,000.

Xega, based in the central Mexican city of Quererato, designed global positioning systems to track stolen vehicles until a company owner was kidnapped in broad daylight in 2001. Frustrated by his powerlessness to call for help, the company adapted the technology to track stolen people.

Most people get the chips injected into their arms between the skin and muscle where they cannot be seen. Customers who fear they are being kidnapped press a panic button on an external device to alert Xega, which then calls the police.

“Before, they only kidnapped key, well-known economically successful people like industrialists and landowners. Now they are kidnapping people from the middle class,” said Sergio Galvan, Xega’s commercial director.

Katherine Albrecht, a U.S. consumer privacy activist, says the chip is a flashy, overpriced gadget that only identifies a person and cannot locate someone without another, bigger GPS device that kidnappers can easily find and destroy.

She said fear of kidnapping was driving well-off Mexicans to buy a technology that had yet to prove useful.

“They are a prime target because they’ve got money and they’ve got a worry and you can combine those two and offer them a false sense of security which is exactly what this is,” she said.

President Felipe Calderon has come under heavy pressure to stamp out violent crime. He hosted a meeting on Thursday of security chiefs and state governors.

Outside of Mexico, U.S. company VeriChip Corp uses similar radio-wave technology to identify patients in critical condition at hospitals or find elderly people who wander away from their homes.

“I don’t want to go to school,” Bolduc told his parents, the crushing reality of his situation having yet to fully dawn on his naïve consciousness. “I want to play outside with my friends.”

While Bolduc stood waiting for the bus to pick him up on his first day of elementary school, his parents reportedly were able to “see the wheels turning in his little brain” as the child, for the first time in his life, began to understand how dire and hopeless his situation had actually become.

Basic math—which the child has blissfully yet to learn—clearly demonstrates that the number of years before he will be released from the horrifying prison of formal schooling, is more than twice the length of time he has yet existed. According to a conservative estimate of six hours of school five days a week for nine months of the year, Bolduc faces an estimated 14,400 hours trapped in an endless succession of nearly identical, suffocating classrooms.

This nightmarish but undeniably real scenario does not take into account additional time spent on homework, extracurricular responsibilities, or college, sources said.

“I can’t wait until school is over,” said the 3-foot-tall tragic figure, who would not have been able, if asked, to contemplate the amount of time between now and summer, let alone the years and years of tedium to follow.

The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight.

The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground.

Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance.

They could also be used to relay battlefield communications.

Chris Kelleher, from UK defence and research firm QinetiQ, said Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer advantages over traditional aircraft and even satellites.

“The principal advantage is persistence – that you would be there all the time,” he told BBC News. “A satellite goes over the same part of the Earth twice a day – and one of those is at night – so it’s only really getting a snapshot of activity. Zephyr would be watching all day.”

…

Zephyr has demonstrated that it can cope with extremes of temperature – from the blistering 45C heat found at ground level in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, to the minus 70C chill experienced at altitudes of more than 18km (60,000ft).

The engineers from the Farnborough-based company are now collaborating with the American aerospace giant Boeing on a defence project codenamed Vulture.

This would see the biggest plane in history take to the sky, powered by the sun and capable of carrying a 450-kilo (1,000lb) payload.

The Guardian can reveal the scale of pharmaceutical company sponsorship following an examination of the registers of gifts and donations to doctors that all hospitals are required to keep. They show considerable largesse – from drug companies regularly picking up hefty bills for travel to international conferences in Europe, Asia and America, to specialist nurses’ salaries, and weekly sandwich lunches for hospital staff training sessions.

Lobbyists for the U.S. automakers — General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler LLC — briefed White House officials, as well as U.S. Rep. John Dingell and other Michigan Democrats, on a possible bailout and plan to unveil the proposal after Labor Day, according to the report.

The plan is for the government to lend some $25 billion to the automakers in the first year at an interest rate of 4.5 percent, or about one-third what the companies are currently paying to borrow, the report said.

Under the proposal, the government would have the option of deferring any payment at all for up to five years, the article said.

“Seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition forces operation in Herat province,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Nineteen women, seven men and the rest children, all under 15 years of age, were killed, the statement said.

The civilians were killed when coalition forces bombarded the Shindand district in Herat Friday afternoon, the ministry claimed.