For Irving Kahn it was the start of his career. He worked on Wall Street at the time of the stock market crash in 1929.

But as he recalls, he was one of the luckier ones."I got my pay cut to 60 dollars a week. And I remember my rich employer saying to me 'Why are you smiling?'. And I said 'I thought you were going to fire me'."

At the age of 103, Mr Kahn may be the oldest working financial analyst on Wall Street.

He is chairman of Kahn Brothers, a New York investment firm, and still goes to the office every day searching for undervalued stocks.

So what does he make of recent events?

Mr Kahn warns against drawing close parallels between what the US went through then and the present financial problems.

A campaign to link the island of Iona and St Andrews in Fife via a new public footpath has been launched.
The SNP's Roseanna Cunningham said the so-called Pilgrim Way, following the path of St Columba's monks, would attract religious and walking tourists.

The Perth MSP said it would also offer an opportunity to support business and promote Scotland's countryside.

Three people listed as"disappeared" in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet's military rule have been found or died in other circumstances, it has emerged.

Their names surfaced as investigators looked into a previous non-victim who has lived in Argentina for 35 years.

Gen Pinochet's supporters have long said reports of the missing, officially put at more than 1,183, are false.

President Michelle Bachelet, who was detained the 1970s, said these cases must not cast doubt on Chile's missing.

"Speaking as a woman who herself suffered this pain and as president of the nation, I am not going to accept that the suffering of families who are still awaiting truth and justice be taken advantage of nor much less played with," said President Bachelet.

She said she hoped all political forces would oppose any attempt to manipulate or score points over a subject that Chilean society had confronted with "responsibility and maturity".

The cases have given ammunition to supporters of the late Gen Pinochet who have long argued that cases of the "disappeared" are ficititious, says the BBC's Gideon Long in Santiago.

They have also embarrassed the state which has handed out thousands of dollars in compensation to the victims' families, he adds.

BUENOS AIRES -– Workers digging to lay the foundation of a luxury apartment complex in Argentina uncovered a Spanish ship believed to be from the 18th century.

It was found in Buenos Aires' upscale Puerto Madero neighborhood, on the banks of the Plata River. The area used to be the city's old port, but was eventually filled in and developed.

WASHINGTON -— Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.

"Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

Their comments are a part of an oral history of the Bush White House that Vanity Fair magazine compiled for its February issue, which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, and nationally on Jan. 6. Vanity Fair published comments by current and former government officials, foreign ministers, campaign strategists and numerous others on topics that included Iraq, the anthrax attacks, the economy and immigration.

For millions of ordinary readers, as for conservative politicians and pundits, Samuel Huntington was the man who predicted the grand narrative of the 21st century. But long before bloggers and book groups were discussing The Clash of Civilizations (1993), Huntington had been among America’s most influential political scientists for decades. In an era when many academics were content to hoe narrow specialties, he bestrode whole disciplines; writing seminal works on international relations, comparative government, political theory and American politics. In the early 1990s a colleague asked the Harvard professor, then writing the work that would make him a household name, why he had chosen to focus on civilisation. Huntington shrugged: “It was simply the biggest thing I could think of.”

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was a hard-headed look at what political scientists had traditionally dismissed as a soft subject: culture. Originating as a 1993 article in the policy journal Foreign Affairs, and published three years later as a book, it argued that the key sources of post-Cold War conflicts would not be national or ideological, but cultural. Clash was Huntington’s riposte to those who thought the fall of communism meant the universal triumph of Western values. The West’s arrogance about the universality of its own culture would blind it to the ascent of “challenger civilisations”, particularly Islam and China. Shot through with cautions about Western decline, the book counsels Europe and America to unite: “The prudent course of the West is not to attempt to stop the shift in power, but to learn to navigate the shallows, to endure the miseries, moderate its ventures, and safeguard its culture.” Exporting American pop culture and trainers was easy, exporting values of freedom and democracy far harder. “Somewhere in the Middle East,” Huntington wrote, “a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.”

After 9/11, Huntington was hailed as a seer. The Clash of Civilizations was translated into 33 languages and seized on by Western and Muslim hawks, who read in it the historical inevitability of conflict between Islam and the West. When a pirated translation appeared in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards ordered half the 1,000-copy print run. Huntington’s critics attacked it as a crude Manichean world view, penned by an old Cold Warrior in need of new enemies.