The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein. It seems that he’s indicated that he’s willing to go into exile if they let him take 1 billion dollars with him, and all the information that he wants about the weapons of mass destruction. [Muammar] Gadaffi has told Berlusconi that Saddam Hussein wants to go. Mubarak tells us that in those circumstances there are many possibilities that he’ll be assassinated.

Saddam Hussein accepted an 11th-hour offer to flee into exile weeks ahead of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion, but Arab League officials scuttled the proposal, officials in this Gulf state claimed.

The exile initiative was spearheaded by the late president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, at an emergency Arab summit held in Egypt in February 2003, Sheik Zayed’s son said in an interview aired by Al-Arabiya TV during a documentary. The U.S.-led coalition invaded on March 19 that year.

A top government official confirmed the offer on Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Saddam allegedly accepted the offer to try to halt the invasion and bring elections to Iraq within six months, according to the official and Sheik Zayed’s son.

“We had the final acceptance of the various parties ... the main players in the world and the concerned person, Saddam Hussein,” the son, Sheik Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, said during the program aired Thursday to mark the first anniversary of his father’s death.

Sheik Zayed’s initiative would have given Saddam and his family exile and guarantees against prosecution in return for letting Arab League and U.N. experts run Iraq until elections could be held in six months, the official said.

“We were coming (to the summit in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort) to place the facts on the table,” said Sheik Mohammed, who is deputy chief of the Emirates armed forces and crown prince of Abu Dhabi.

“The results would have emerged if the initiative was presented and discussed. This is now history.”

The anonymous Emirates official said Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa did not bring the proposal to the summit’s discussion because Arab foreign ministers had not presented and accepted it as league protocol dictated.

At the time, Arab League leaders said the summit decided not to take up the idea, citing league rules barring interference in members’ domestic affairs. . . .

Officials from the Egypt-based 22-member Arab League declined to comment.

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.  

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.  

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.  

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials. . . .  

The millions of travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.  

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used impede their right to travel. 

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society," said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said, "may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent."

"For over five years, the president carried out a warrantless surveillance program that ignored the law and the role of court oversight," Rockefeller said. "Today, the president continues to seek unchecked surveillance powers that many of us in Congress cannot support. The fact is, the Protect America Act did provide authority for collection, but it did not include sufficient protections for Americans. There's no reason we can't do both," Rockefeller said.

ONE ASPECT of the subprime mortgage crisis that deserves special attention is that it was in large part a natural experiment on the role of regulation. And the results are clear: Reasonable regulation of mortgages by the bank and credit union regulators allowed the market to function in an efficient and constructive way, while mortgages made and sold in the unregulated sector led to the crisis.

At every step in the process, from loan origination through the use of exotic unsuitable mortgages to the sale of securities backed by those mortgages, the largely unregulated uninsured firms have created problems, while the regulated and FDIC-insured banks and savings institutions have not. To the extent that the system did work, it is because of prudential regulation and oversight. Where it was absent, the result was tragedy for hundreds of thousands of families who have lost, or soon will lose, their homes and for those who invested in shaky and untested, even though highly rated, securities, and have been forced to take large losses and, in many cases, shut their doors.

There is now a growing danger that global investors will start to shun the US bond markets. The latest US government data on foreign holdings released this week show a collapse in purchases of US bonds from $97bn to just $19bn in July, with outright net sales of US Treasuries. . . .   

Mr Redeker said foreign investors have been gradually pulling out of the long-term US debt markets, leaving the dollar dependent on short-term funding. Foreigners have funded 25pc to 30pc of America's credit and short-term paper markets over the last two years.

"They were willing to provide the money when rates were paying nicely, but why bear the risk in these dramatically changed circumstances? We think that a fall in dollar to $1.50 against the euro is not out of the question at all by the first quarter of 2008," he said.

"This is nothing like the situation in 1998 when the crisis was in Asia, but the US was booming. This time the US itself is the problem," he said. . . .

Jim Rogers, the commodity king and former partner of George Soros, said the Federal Reserve was playing with fire by cutting rates so aggressively at a time when the dollar was already under pressure.

The risk is that flight from US bonds could push up the long-term yields that form the base price of credit for most mortgages, the driving the property market into even deeper crisis.

"If Ben Bernanke starts running those printing presses even faster than he's already doing, we are going to have a serious recession. The dollar's going to collapse, the bond market's going to collapse. There's going to be a lot of problems," he said.

President Bush, voicing optimism for the American economy, declined to speculate today if a recession is coming. 

“I think I got a B in Econ 101,’’ the president said at a White House press conference this morning. “I got an A, however, in keeping taxes low.''

The cost of health insurance in the United States climbed nearly twice as fast as wages in the first half of 2007, with family coverage costing employers around 1,000 dollars a month, a poll showed Wednesday.  

Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose an average of 6.1 percent in 2007, while wages went up by 3.7 percent, the Employer Health Benefits Survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust showed. . . .  

Premiums for family coverage have surged by 78 percent since 2001, while wages have gone up 19 percent. . . .  

"Every year health insurance becomes less affordable for families and businesses. Over the past six years, the amount families pay out of pocket for their share of premiums has increased by about 1,500 dollars," Drew Altman, chief executive of Kaiser, said in a statement. 

Employers in the United States offer health insurance packages as a worker benefit. 

In 2007, 60 percent of US firms offered health benefits.  

That was down by nine percentage points on companies offering health care packages in 2000, the survey showed. 

Low-paid workers were found to have the fewest healthcare options, because the small firms they tend to work for are less likely to offer coverage. 

The high cost of premiums was cited as a main reason firms fail to provide healthcare coverage to their employees.  

A survey released last month by the US Census Bureau showed that 47 million people had no health insurance in the United States last year, up from 44.8 million in 2005.

[T]the number of children without health coverage hit a record 8.7 million last year. In part because of lack of health coverage and preventive treatment, this country ranks near the bottom among developed countries in terms of children's well-being.  

House and Senate leaders agreed on a $35 billion expansion of the U.S. children's health insurance program, defying a threatened veto by President George W. Bush.  

The proposed legislation would add medical coverage for more than 3 million kids, according to a statement today from the Senate Finance Committee. Money would come from raising the U.S. tax on tobacco products.  

Bush warned yesterday he would veto an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or Schip, calling such legislation ``irresponsible'' and ``a step toward federalization of health care.'' The 10-year-old program will expire on Sept. 30 unless it's renewed.

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a "lifelong libertarian Republican," writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb "out-of-control" spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush's failure to do so "was a major mistake." Republicans in Congress, he writes, "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose." . . .  

But Mr. Greenspan discovered that in the Bush White House, the "political operation was far more dominant" than in Mr. Ford's. "Little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences," he writes.

"House Speaker Hastert and House majority leader Tom DeLay seemed readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority," he writes.

According to former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Bush may be the cockiest guy he has ever met, but when it comes to horses, he is just a "Windshield Cowboy".