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On Sept. 9, as it must frequently do, the U.S. government turned to Wall Street to raise a little cash, and Paul Calvetti bet that demand for $9 billion worth of long-term Treasury bonds would be “huge.�?

But at 1 p.m., as the auction opened and the numbers began streaming across his flat-panel screens, the head of Treasury trading at Barclays Capital Inc. slumped in his chair. Foreign investors, who had been voraciously buying Treasury bonds, failed to show up. Bond prices cascaded downward, interest rates rose, and in five minutes, Calvetti, 38, who makes money by bidding on bonds at one price and hoping market demand lets him quickly resell them at a profit, had lost $1.5 million.

“It’s amazing,�? he gasped, after the Treasury Department announced that Wall Street traders, not foreigners, had been left to buy virtually the entire auction. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before.�?

The most recent auction of 10-year Treasury notes may have been a fluke, a momentary downturn in one aspect of the massive world market for U.S. government and private-sector bonds, stocks and other securities — a market so large and diverse that it has long been the world’s safe haven. But a rash of new data, including Treasury Department figures released Monday showing a net sell-off by foreigners of U.S. bonds in August, has stoked debate over whether overseas investors — private individuals, institutions and government central banks — are growingly dangerously bearish on the U.S. economy.

It is a portentous issue. Foreign governments and individuals hold about half of the $3.7 trillion in outstanding U.S. Treasury bonds, for example, and the government has been heavily dependent on continued overseas bond purchases to finance the roughly $1 billion a day it has to borrow to pay its bills. Foreign lending and investment are also needed to finance the country’s roughly $50 billion monthly trade deficit, while foreign capital has been a key prop to U.S. stock prices.

[Quote:]

A French pharmaceutical company will supply 2.6 million extra anti-flu shots to help the United States cope with a vaccine shortage that has sparked public concern, a top US health official said on Tuesday.

Tommy Thompson, Health and Human Services Secretary for the United States, said Aventis-Pasteur, a division of French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis, will raise the number of vaccines available in the US to 58 million in January.

The doses represent more than half of what the United States needs.

AP Poll: Bush, Kerry in Dead Heat

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In the AP-Ipsos Public Affairs poll, the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Sen. John Edwards got support from 49 percent of those who said they were likely to vote, and the Republican team of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney got 46 percent, within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Reuters Poll: Bush Grabs One-Point Lead on Kerry

[Quote:]

President Bush opened a slight one-point lead on Democratic rival John Kerry in a tight race for the White House, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

Bush led Kerry 46-45 percent in the latest three-day tracking poll, a statistical dead heat well within the poll’s margin of error.

So, er… a three point lead for Kerry is a “dead heat” and a one point lead for Bush is a “slight lead”.

Could somebody please ask these pundits to agree on terminology? Those polls are stupid enough as it is without this kind of weirdness going on. I wonder what they would call a two-point difference in favor of any of the candidates…

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Iraqi militants who kidnapped and threatened to kill an Australian journalist did a Google search for his name on the internet to check his work before releasing him unharmed.

John Martinkus, a veteran freelancer who has covered conflicts from East Timor to Iraq, was released yesterday, a day after he was taken hostage by four Sunni militants and ex-Iraqi army officers.

Martinkus was filming a report for SBS’s Dateline program and was preparing to leave Iraq when he was grabbed about 5pm (AEST) on Saturday outside a hotel popular with foreign correspondents.

SBS executive producer Mike Carey today said the journalist’s captors had investigated his background online and saw he was harmless.

“They Googled him, they checked him out on a popular search engine and got onto his own website or his publisher’s website and saw he was a writer and journalist,” Carey said.

“They had thought he was working for the Americans as an informer.”

In this case, modern technology probably saved his life, he said.

“It certainly did help,” Carey said.