The findings come after a report last year by the inspector general which stated that nearly $9 billion (£5 billion) of Iraq’s oil revenue disbursed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which governed Iraq until mid-2004, cannot be accounted for.

The huge sums in cash were paid out with little or no supervision, and often without any paperwork, yesterday’s audit found. The report found problems with nearly 2,000 contracts worth $88.1 million.

In one case, a US soldier gambled away more than $40,000 while accompanying the Iraqi Olympic boxing team to the Philippines. In others, “one contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom”, the report says, “while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker”.

The lack of supervision had tragic consequences. A contract for $662,800 to refurbish the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by a US official, even though the work was not finished. Instead of replacing a central lift, as demanded in the contract, workers only tinkered with the existing mechanism. Three months later the lift crashed, killing three Iraqis.

Cash was stolen during insurgent raids but never reported, the audit found. In another case, a contractor was paid $108,140 to refurbish completely the Hilla Olympic swimming pool. The contractor simply polished some of the pumps and piping to make it look as if new hardware had been installed. The pool has never reopened.

More than 160 vehicles worth about $3.3 million could not be traced because there was no proper documentation. Another project, a $473,000 contract to install an internet service in Ramadi, was cancelled because officials could not oversee it. But the contractor had already been paid.

A separate congressional inquiry has uncovered the sums of cash airlifted into Iraq after the invasion. Desperate for money, and with no banking system to receive wire transfers, the CPA, led by Paul Bremer, received UN approval to fund reconstruction with $37 billion of seized Iraqi oil proceeds, most of it held in the US Federal Reserve in New York.

Soon, large quantities of cash began arriving in Baghdad, shipped in on C17 cargo planes. The cash arrived on pallets loaded with shrink-wrapped bundles of crisp $100 bills. The parcels, which soon became known as “bricks”, were handed out “like candy”, one Democrat congressman said.

In all, $12 billion in cash, weighing 363 tonnes, was flown into Iraq. On December 12, 2003, one single flight to Iraq contained $1.5 billion in cash, the largest single Federal Reserve payout in US history, according to Henry Waxman, the Democrat congressman who is investigated the funding.

The US has so far spent $226 billion on the Iraq war. The CPA was allocated $38 billion in US and Iraqi funds, and spent $19.7 billion of UN-administered Iraqi oil money.

FRITTERED AWAY

$108,140 paid to contractor to refurbish Olympic swimming pool in Hilla. Work never done

$662,800 paid to repair Hilla hospital. Much of work never done, including renewing central lift. Three people later died when lift crashed

$40,000 gambled away by US soldier assigned as assistant to Iraqi Olympic boxing team on trip to Philippines

$2 million locked in a the bathroom safe of a US official

$678,000 stashed away in an unlocked foot locker

$473,000 paid for internet installation in Ramadi. Work never done

"The numbers are much worse than I thought they would be, especially given how Ford beat the estimates earlier this week," Argus Research analyst Kevin Tynan said.

On Monday, Ford Motor Co. reported a surprising 19 percent rise in fourth-quarter earnings.

GM shares dropped 80 cents, or 3.35 percent, to $23.05 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's 8.375 percent bonds due in 2033 were quoted at 72.5 cents on the dollar, down 0.5 cent, according to MarketAxess.

The earnings report came a day after news that billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian had raised his stake in GM to 9.9 percent. Kerkorian has called for sweeping changes at the auto giant, and a key adviser has suggested he might be prepared to organize a fight for control of the GM board.

GM's fourth-quarter loss amounted to $8.45 a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $99 million, or 18 cents a share.

Excluding one-time items, the company posted a loss of $1.2 billion, or $2.09 a share. On that basis, analysts' average forecast was a loss of 12 cents a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

One-time items reduced earnings by $3.6 billion, or $6.36 a share. They included a restructuring charge of $1.3 billion at GM's North American operations, and a preliminary after-tax charge of $2.3 billion related to a benefit guarantee with the

Analysts were expecting charges after GM in October announced plans to slash 30,000 jobs and shutter 12 facilities, but no one knew how large the charges would be.

Fourth-quarter revenue fell to $51.2 billion from $51.4 billion a year earlier.

"It was a year in which two significant fundamental weaknesses in our North American operations were fully exposed -- our huge legacy cost burden and our inability to adjust structural costs in line with falling revenue," Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said in a statement.

GM earlier this month said it expects to cut North American structural costs by $6 billion by the end of 2006.

GM said its automotive operations lost $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter, driven by large losses in North America, where it has been losing market share to foreign rivals such as Toyota Motor Corp.

General Motors Acceptance Corp., the company's finance unit, posted net income of $614 million, down from $683 million a year earlier.

The automaker plans to sell a controlling stake in its finance arm in order to restore the unit's investment-grade ratings. Both GM and GMAC have said talks with potential partners are "ongoing."

Over the past two years, as high-rise fever spread across town, prices for the luxury apartments ballooned, fetching as much as $500 to $1,000 a square foot—or up to $1.5 million for a one-bedroom— at the peak. Buyers, mostly interested in flipping them for quick profits, eagerly anted up five-figure down payments, while developers planned more than 70 luxury towers holding a total of about 43,000 units on or near the Strip and downtown. But the intense competition for the city's limited supply of contractors sent construction costs skyrocketing 30% last year, just as lending policies tightened, interest rates climbed and sales started to slow.

Currently, just 18 projects are under way, and nervous developers have called off three high-profile projects over the past seven months. A number of others, including one backed by a group including George Clooney, are being either revised or postponed. Experts now forecast that only a quarter to half of the seven dozen originally proposed projects will ever be built. Brian Gordon, a principal at Applied Analysis, a real estate research firm, says the developers with experience building luxury high-rises, whose properties are located on or near the Strip and carry a strong and recognizable brand name— such as Donald Trump, Hard Rock and MGM Grand— are the ones playing winning hands in Vegas now.

Back east, the luxury condo markets that have had similarly explosive growth in Miami and New York, where high-end apartments can command from $2,000 to $4,000 a square foot, haven’t slumped yet. Still, experts say the abrupt reversal of fortune in the desert, where the mainstream residential real estate and hotel markets are still quite healthy, shows just how quickly the odds can change in even the most affluent markets if runaway speculation and overzealous development take hold.

“It’s another case of irrational exuberance,” says John Restrepo, head of a Las Vegas real estate and economic consulting firm. “There is a market for high-rise condo hotels here; but it’s not as deep as people thought it was. The days of the two guys from the East Coast or Canada coming into town and promoting a condo development with a website and a dream are over.”

Dow Chemical and Monsanto were ordered to pay compensation to 6,800 people in the first ruling in favor of sufferers from the effects of the defoliant used by US forces during the war, court officials said.

"The plaintiffs will get compensation varying from six million won (6,200 dollars) to 46 million won each," Seoul High Court senior judge Choi Byung-Deok told AFP.

Another official said that the total amount of damages and the proportion to be paid by each firm was unclear.

"It is hard to sum up the total amount in compensation because the damages vary case by case among the plaintiffs," the official said.

Three separate damages suits were filed against the two US firms on behalf of some 20,615 South Korean war veterans and their families. Two were upheld by the court while one case was dismissed.

South Korea sent some 300,000 troops to fight alongside the United States and southern Vietnamese forces during the 1965-1973 war.

Mohamad Jasinto, 22, a resident in South Jakarta, died after being treated for six days at the Sulianti Saroso Hospital for developing bird flu symptoms, hospital spokesman Dr. Ilham Patu told Xinhua over telephone.

"The man was a market vendor who admitted that his work place was located near poultry shops. There is a poultry farming in his neighborhood too," he said.

The hospital, which is specialized in infectious disease, has sent the blood sample to the Hong Kong laboratory for confirmation, he added.

"We should expect that the number of cases will pass 30,000," Brucker said.

Chikungunya is Swahili for "that which bends up" and refers to the stooped posture of those afflicted by the non-fatal disease for which there is no known vaccine or cure.

The disease is "very painful, very crippling for certain persons" and could be "potentially serious for weak and vulnerable patients," Brucker said.

In several death certificates issued since the beginning of the month, the disease was "mentioned as a possible cause of the death," he added.

Local authorities have decided to postpone for one week students' return to high schools and colleges, initially planned for next Monday after the main summer holiday, in order to decontaminate schools.

Mayors throughout the island should decide later on Thursday if the return of primary school students should also be adjourned.

Authorities on the volcanic island east of Madagascar, a French overseas department with a population of 760,000 and a popular holiday destination, have earmarked EUR 600,000 euros to fight the outbreak, including special mosquito-eradication brigades.

Top health ministry official Didier Houssain, accompanying Brucker, called for measures to be stepped up against mosquitoes, particularly by eliminating some 250 unauthorised garbage dumps on the island and installing modern incinerators.

The number of "commandos" tasked to intervene in the field will be increased from 11 to 20, and a special free telephone number for tourists introduced.

Vostok has a surface area of 5,400 square miles. One of the newfound lakes measures 770 square miles in size, or roughly the size of Rhode Island. The other is about 620 square miles.

Both sit under more than 2 miles of ice and are about a half-mile deep based on observed differences in gravity.

"Over the lakes, the pull of gravity is much weaker, so we know there must be a big hole down there," said Robin Bell, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The largest of the two is named 90ºE for its location. The other is called Sovetskaya Lake.

The discoveries will be detailed in the February issue of the journal Geophysical Review Letters.

Bell and Michael Studinger combined data from ice-penetrating radar, gravity surveys, satellite images, laser altimetry and records of a Soviet Antarctic Expedition that unknowingly traversed the lakes in 1958-1959.

The shorelines of the lakes appeared in satellite images as perturbations in the surface. Also, the ice basically floats on the lakes and has slight depressions visible in radar images.

The combination of heat from below and a thick layer of insulating ice above keeps the water temperature at the top of both lakes at a balmy 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers say, despite outdoor temperatures that can drop to –112 in winter.

The lakes are bounded by faults, Bell said, and the evidence suggests there is circulation and that they receive flows of nutrients that could support unique ecosystems.

Yesterday environmental campaigners urged the German government to do more to cut CO2 emissions. German trees were in bad shape, they said, because of freak weather in 2002 and 2003, and because of air pollution; over the past 30 years they had suffered badly because of climate change. "It isn't getting any better," said Rüdiger Rosenthal, of Germany's Friends of the Earth. "The worst affected trees are oaks. They can live for up to 1,000 years. This makes them vulnerable."

The trees are not equally affected: beech has recovered from the scorching summer of two years ago, and most pine trees are still healthy, the report says. But overall, nearly a third of all German forests are damaged. Mr Rosenthal said: "Over the next two decades the oak could die out completely."

The discovery was hailed by scientists not so much as a potential home from home, but as a success for a new planet-hunting technique called gravitational microlensing.

The method uses a network of telescopes to watch for changes in light from distant stars. If a planet moves between a star and a telescope on Earth, its gravity bends the light and magnifies it.

Michael Turner of the US National Science Foundation, said: "The team has discovered the most Earth-like planet yet."