In the Queen’s speech this autumn Gordon Brown’s government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and “made accessible” to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and “other public bodies”.

This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised. Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and “other public bodies”.

Climate change could release unexpectedly huge stores of carbon dioxide from Arctic soils, which would in turn fuel a vicious circle of global warming, a new study warned Sunday.

And according to one commentary on the research, current models of climate change have not taken this extra source of greenhouse gas into account.

Scientists have long known that organic carbon trapped inside a blanket of frozen permafrost covering one fifth of the world’s land mass would, if thawed, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Fires in the 47-story office tower at the edge of the World Trade Center site undermined floor beams and critical structural columns, federal investigators concluded Thursday, as they attempted to curb still-rampant speculation that explosives or fuel fires were responsible for the building’s collapse of Sept. 11, 2001

It is the first skyscraper in modern times to collapse primarily as a result of a fire.

Mainstream engineers and government officials have rejected the speculation as ridiculous. But national polls have shown that perhaps as many as 1 in 7 Americans believe that the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was an inside job.

The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world’s biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday.

“The U.S. is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say ‘the worst is to come’,” he told a financial conference.

Parts of the Endangered Species Act, which has protected nature in the United States for 3 1/2 decades, soon may be extinct. The new regulations, which do not require Congress’ approval, would reduce the numbers of mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft first obtained and reported by The Associated Press.