All that reading, surfing and listening will occupy 3,518 hours of the average American adult's year - the equivalent of almost five months. But such indolence doesn't come cheap. The average American, says the survey, will spend $936 (£475) on media in the coming year.

The information comes in the 126th statistical abstract, which collates data from census bureau studies as well as international organisations, non-profit-making groups and the private sector. The abstract, which has been published most years since 1878, makes comparisons with previous years as well as providing forecasts.

Internet boom

Thus the survey shows that 97 million adult internet users looked for news online in 2005, 92 million bought a product online and 91 million made an online travel reservation. About 16 million Americans used a social or professional networking site such as MySpace, and 13 million created a blog in 2005, with 39 million reading someone else's blog.

The information on internet usage is based on telephone surveys of 2,500 US adults carried out in September 2005 by the Pew Research Centre. The survey also showed that 25 million Americans downloaded videos to their computers, and 24 million remixed material found online to make their own creation.

Despite much speculation about the death of old media and the rise of the new, reading a newspaper and surfing the internet will each consume the same amount of the average American adult's time next year, the census bureau says.

Nevertheless, a week spent reading the news on the internet represents a significant change in habits. Ten years ago, according to a Pew report in the summer, one in 50 Americans regularly got their news from the internet. Today the figure is one in three. But the figures show that the rate of increase in online news readership has slowed since 2000, suggesting, says the report, that "online news has evolved as a supplemental source that is used along with traditional news media outlets. It is valued most for headlines and convenience."

"This new census bureau material highlights just how dramatically we have moved into the information age," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew internet and American life project. "Pick any metric you like and you'll see that the volume of information and media in people's lives has grown, the velocity of that information as it circulates in their lives has increased, and the variety of information has exploded."

Elsewhere the census bureau statistics showed that people in US households drank an average of 88 litres of bottled water in 2004, compared with 10 litres each in 1980. But while some were enjoying mountain-fresh water, others were struggling to get enough food. Out of 112m households, 11.9m were deemed "food insecure" in a 2004 survey by the US department of agriculture. Food insecure is defined as having "limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways". The figures do not include homeless people.

The lives of those with homes were often made uncomfortable by nasty smells. In 2005 residents of 3.7m housing units said that they were bothered by odours in the neighbourhood.

At the other extreme, the US has more millionaires than ever before, 3.5 million of them, according to internal revenue service figures published at the end of last year. More than half a million live in California.

And as the ranks of the rich have increased, so the beliefs and aspirations of the young have evolved. In 1970, 85% of university entrants thought abortion should be legalised, 59% thought capital punishment should be abolished and 57% aimed to keep up with political affairs. By 2005, those figures had fallen to 55% in favour of legalised abortion, 33% against capital punishment, and 36% who aimed to follow politics.

And while in 1970, 79% of university entrants said they had a personal objective of "developing a meaningful philosophy of life", by last year 75% defined their objective as "being very well off financially".

- The first survey of 1878: Aliens, postmasters and budding industry

The US census bureau issued its first statistical aggregate in 1878. "Sir," wrote the treasury secretary, John Sherman, in a letter to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Samuel Randall, "I have the honour to transmit ... a statistical abstract ... this abstract embraces tables in regard to finance, coinage, commerce, immigration, tonnage and navigation, the postal service, public lands, railroads, agriculture and mining."

The 160-page document goes on to catalogue a very different world from this week's study.

The lists of Alien Passengers Arrived in the United States from Foreign Countries between 1861 and 1870 shows that the largest group, 1.1 million, came from the British Isles. A further million came from the rest of Europe, mostly from Germany, although three Corsicans and eight Maltese also made it across the Atlantic. Unlike today, Asia and Latin America made modest contributions, with 363,000 arriving from the "Americas" and 68,000 from Asia.

Of the 38.5 million population recorded in the 1870 census, the bulk lived in the eastern states, with New York having the largest population, 4.4 million. Pennsylvania, with 3.8 million, was close behind.

The population figures show the country before the huge expansion to the west. Outside California - misspelled as Caliofrnia in the official table - which had a population of 500,000, the most populous of the western states was New Mexico, with 96,000.

That population relied on the postal service to communicate. In 1790, the data shows, the postal service had 75 post offices in the entire nation, offering 1,875 miles of post routes and taking almost $38,000 in revenue. By 1878 there were more than 39,000 post offices serving 300,000 miles of post routes and taking in $29m.

Some of that mail and much of the population would travel by railway, with the number of miles of railway in the country rising from 22 in 1830 to 79,000 by 1879.

The year also saw the births of a number of figures who would help to define America's transition into the modern age: the poet Carl Sandburg, the African-American boxer Jack Johnson (left), the film actor Lionel Barrymore, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the writer and social activist Upton Sinclair were all born in 1878.

At a meeting this past Sunday representatives from Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority agreed to examine the feasibility of building a canal to channel seawater north from the Red Sea into the Dead Sea.

The 112-mile-long (180-kilometer-long) Two Seas Canal project would cost the equivalent of two to four billion U.S. dollars. The canal would send between 317 and 396 gallons (1.2 and 1.5 billion cubic meters) of water into the Dead Sea annually.

"This project will help ease the shortage of water for all of us," Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said at the Sunday summit, according to the Reuters news service.

"A peace agreement is a piece of paper that can be cemented only though economic projects."

But Eilon Adar, director of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, warned that major natural engineering projects inevitably create negative impacts.

Leaky Canal?

The principle problem with the Two Seas Canal, Adar said, is its location in the Arava Valley, part of the earthquake-prone Syrian-African rift.

A canal rushing with seawater in a seismologically volatile valley could spell disaster for the area's underground freshwater aquifers.

The busts dated from the second half of the 19th century and were made by well-known artists of the time. Each is worth between €5,000 and €10,000.

The Paris city hall, which oversees the oldest cemetery in the French capital, has lodged an official complaint with police, Le Parisien reported yesterday.

"It's the work of an expert," a source familiar with the case told the newspaper. The source added that the robberies were probably carried out to order for a collector.

Hugues de Bazelaire, who works on the restoration of funeral monuments, said there was a thriving black market in pieces from French graveyards.

Jean-Claude Hitz, a trade union representative for Paris cemetery workers said that although efforts had been made to provide security for the Père-Lachaise, "20 or so wardens were not enough ... at a site whose five gates are open to the public, where the landscape is hilly and where someone can hide behind a cross or a tombstone, out of sight".

Flag-waving Flemish nationalists outside the parliament illustrated the story which was then driven home to alarmed viewers with the news that King Albert II had fled the country, possibly to the former Belgian colony of Congo. Grainy pictures from a military airfield showed the royals, who hail from the Francophone tradition, boarding a plane.

Within seconds of the broadcast thousands of concerned viewers bombarded the television station with phone calls and its website crashed. Nervous embassies called the Belgian government to find out whether their job had been split in two.

"Ambassadors who were worried asked what they had to tell their capitals," the senate chair, Anne-Marie Lizin, told AP. "This fiction was seen as a reality and it created a catastrophic image of the country."

The panic persuaded RTBF to reassure viewers. At 8.50pm it flashed the message: "This is fiction."

This failed to calm political leaders in both halves of Belgium, who condemned RTBF.

Yves Thiran, the head of news at RTBF, said he wanted to provoke a debate before next year's general election.

A couple of former students from the Yarm School in Stockton-on-Tees - an elite school whose tuition is $5,700 a term - "hopped over the school fence on a weekend and went unnoticed by guards," a former student told London's Sun newspaper.

"They managed to get on the roof of the Friary building and somehow mark on the willy," the student continued. "They also burnt a manhood into the grass."

The shape on the roof has been scrubbed off, but it could still be seen on Google Wednesday.

"If users spot something offensive, we would consider having it removed," Google said.

First, they airbrush Cheney's bunker, now, they'll do the same for "willies" and "manhoods"-what next?

Seriously:

Suppose somebody stamps a huge defaced cross into a snow field, somewhere up in the frozen north, and the Christianist "War on Christmas" loons go nuts. Will Google "consider" censoring this image?

What about Chinese characters that the Chinese government might not like?

What about "Fuck Bush"?

Where does Google's "consideration" stop?

Joseph, the senior arms control official at the State Department, said nations cannot all be counted on to use space purely for peaceful purposes.

"A number of countries are exploring and acquiring capabilities to counter, attack, and defeat U.S. space systems," Joseph said

9/11 invoked
He also said terrorists "understand our vulnerabilities and have targeted our economy in the past, as they did on 9/11." He said terrorists and enemy states might view the U.S. space program as "a highly lucrative target," while sophisticated technologies could improve their ability to interfere with U.S. space systems and services.

Joseph did not identify terror groups or nations that might have such motives. An aide to Joseph, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, said that information was classified.

"For our part, we must take all of these threats seriously because space capabilities are essential" to the U.S. economy and government, Joseph said. He said the U.S. is more reliant on space than any other country.

"No nation, no state-actor, should be under the illusion that the United States will tolerate a denial of our right to the use of space for peaceful purposes," he said.

Claims challenged
Wade Boese, a spokesman for the private Arms Control Association, challenged the adminstration's policy. He said rejecting additional international arms controls for space runs counter to U.S. security interests "because the United States has the most to lose from an unregulated space arena."

Boese said he believes the administration wants to avoid negotiations in order to preserve the possibility of deploying space-based missile defense systems, such as interceptors.