His letter noted that there were 15 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases a year in the United States, nearly 4 million of them in teenagers, and that 65 million Americans had incurable sexually transmitted diseases.

The grovelling, nauseating apology offered by the new acting chairman of the Board of Governors was what governments want from the BBC: abject obedience. Thankfully, the man whose mea culpa made us all cringe does not want the job full time (and this may be a clever way of giving Blair his pound of flesh without tainting whoever takes on Gavyn Davies's old role).

The Bush administration said on Thursday that the new Medicare law offering prescription drug benefits and private health plans to the elderly would cost at least $530 billion over 10 years, or one-third more than the price tag used when Congress passed the legislation two months ago. The bill passed narrowly in the House after Republican leaders gave assurances that the cost would not exceed $400 billion.
At the same time, the officials said that the overall budget deficit for the current fiscal year would exceed $500 billion. The deficit for fiscal 2003 was $375 billion, a record amount.
William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said: "The Medicare bill had lots of moving parts. We could not make a final analysis of the cost until it became law."
Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, has estimated that the drug benefit could cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion in its second decade.
Some Democrats suggested that Mr. Bush was predicting a big deficit for 2004 so it would be easier to halve the deficit in five years.

The audit office identified a staggering $575 million worth of errors in seven of 19 accounts it examined in detail - mainly because agencies had under-reported the amount of money they had in the accounts.
In one of the worst cases, $250 million from the sale of the second tranche of Telstra was mistakenly paid twice into the Natural Heritage Trust account, as was $235 million in interest.

THE Howard Government has failed to reduce the tax burden of the poor, despite holding hard evidence for more than a year that low-income earners face marginal tax rates of more than 60 per cent.