The Londoner

American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. "It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's only luck that she's not homeless outright. "One thing

SEOUL, South Korea —   President Obama , marking the start of a summit meeting that has already tested the limits of international cooperation, implored other world leaders on Wednesday to shift global economic demand away from its historic reliance on American consumption and borrowing. In a letter to other leaders of the Group of 20  economic powers, released shortly after he arrived here, Mr. Obama tried to calm the currency tensions that have roiled global economic relations, though he did not mention by name the two most prominent sources of the tension: China’s foreign-exchange interventions and the  Federal Reserve ’s recent decision to inject $600 billion into the economy. “We all now recognize that the foundation for a strong and durable recovery will not materialize if American households stop saving and go back to spending based on borrowing,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Yet no one country can achieve our joint objective of a strong, sustainable and balanced recovery on its own.” In

Struggling to recognise the city of his childhood,  Barack Obama  today returned to Jakarta on a heavily curtailed trip to  Indonesia . The US president, who spent four years living in the Indonesian capital, said it was "wonderful" to return to the city of his boyhood, even if it was unfamiliar. "I have to tell you that when you visit a place that you spent some time in as a child, as a president, it's a little disorienting," Obama told journalists at the Indonesian presidential palace. "Much has been made of the fact that this marks my return to where I lived as a boy. I barely recognise it. The landscape has changed completely," he said of Jakarta's radical transformation from a developing city into a global metropolis. "When I first came here in 1967 everyone rode on becaks [cycle rickshaws], you stood in the back and it was very crowded. Now, as president, I couldn't see any traffic because they had blocked off all the streets."

KABUL: An overwhelming majority of Afghans support the government’s efforts to negotiate peace with Taliban insurgents, according to a poll released Tuesday that ranks insecurity as the top concern among citizens, followed by unemployment and corruption. Some 83 per cent of Afghan adults back efforts to secure the country through negotiations with armed, anti-government groups, the survey conducted by the Asia Foundation said. That’s up from 71 per cent last year. The report also said that 55 per cent of Afghan adults had no sympathy at all for the armed opposition groups — up from 36 per cent last year — and another 26 per cent had only a little sympathy. Moreover, 81 per cent — 10 per cent more than last year — support programs to lure Taliban foot soldiers off the battlefield by providing assistance, jobs and housing to those who lay down their arms and reintegrate into society. President Hamid Karzai has made reconciliation a top priority and recently formed a 70-member High Peace

The president said his efforts to improve the relationship between Muslims and the West have been "earnest" and "sustained". Still, he said the progress is "incomplete" and there is more work to do. Though issues of terrorism and extremism often dominate the tensions between the Muslim world and the West, Mr Obama said the relationship must expand beyond security issues. "What we're trying to do is make sure that we are building bridges and expanding our interactions with Muslim countries," Mr Obama said during a joint news conference with Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The president, at a news conference in the world's largest Muslim country, also criticised Israel's plans to build new apartments in disputed East Jerusalem. "This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations," Mr Obama said. Mr Obama's visit to Indonesia , the second country on his 10-day Asia trip, is a home

In an interview publicising his new book “Decision Points”, Mr Bush vigorously defended waterboarding, a kind of simulated drowning that was known as an “enhanced interrogation technique” by the Bush   administration   but regarded as “torture” by many opponents, some allies and a few internal dissenters. “Three people were waterboarded and I believe that decision saved lives,” said Mr Bush, who denied that the practice amounted to torture. When asked if he authorised waterboarding to gain information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the captured al-Qaeda leader, he responded: “Damn right!” In his book, Mr Bush writes: “Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack  American   diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States.” He writes that although the procedure was "tough", it was legal. The British Government has long viewed waterboarding as torture. Last month, Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, said i

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