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The cables, obtained by the New York Times from the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, document several incidents in which diplomats were involved in haggling over the billion-dollar deals seen as key to US economic growth.

One cable describes Saudi King Abdullah responding favorably to a personal request from then-president George W. Bush in 2006 that he buy as many as 43 Boeing jets for Saudi Arabian Airlines and another 13 for the royal fleet.

The huge figures are a 57.8 percent increase over 2009, cementing the city as the world’s biggest gaming hub, thanks largely to the millions of mainland Chinese punters who descend on the former Portuguese colony each year.

But the governments in China and Macau are growing more worried about the impact of vast sums of money flowing into the city’s economy and they have already imposed several restrictions to stop it running out of control.

“The plan had been to stay in Spain, bring over our children and obtain residency papers,” she said as she left a government-run soup kitchen set up by the regional government of Madrid specifically for immigrants.

Spanish visa rules deny renewal requests if immigrants become unemployed and fail to make social security payments. So without jobs the couple are no longer living legally in Spain, putting an end to their hopes of having their three other children to join them in the country.

With the European single currency facing its greatest challenge since it entered into general circulation in 2002 in the wake of the bailouts of eurozone members Greece and Ireland, his posts are now read by thousands of bankers, financial analysts and other policymakers around the world.

The 62-year-old is regularly invited to speak at economic conferences across the continent and the International Monetary Fund asked him to fly to Madrid in April to give his input on the state of the Spanish economy.

A path next to the greenhouse leads to an orchard with plum and cherry trees, melon patches in between and a flock of sheep grazing peacefully throughout.

“I came to this via my husband, otherwise I would still think food was grown in supermarkets,” Zorana, a lawyer who works for the World Bank and the Serbian government, told AFP.

Financial analysts disagree on the likelihood of such a Spanish sovereign debt crisis but they agree the risk is real and that existing European and international rescue mechanisms would be unable to cope.

In part to avert just such an outcome, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s Socialist government is slashing spending to lower the public deficit from 11.1 percent in 2009 to 3.0 percent in 2013.

“So far, people do not see the costs that might be associated with what politicians have agreed to, namely some nation states underwriting the debt of others,” Barclays Capital economist Thorsten Polleit told AFP.

“It is an open question whether the crisis is over or whether we are just in the eye of the storm.”

As a spectacular fireworks show lit up the sky over Tallinn, the 2004 EU entrant — which broke free from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991 — bade a reluctant farewell to its kroon, adopted in 1992 to replace the Soviet ruble.

At the stroke of midnight, Estonia’s centre-right Prime Minister Andrus Ansip symbolically withdrew a crisp new euro banknote from a bank machine at the national opera as onlookers braved subzero temperatures.

Vice President Alvaro Garcia issued the decree on Sunday removing subsidies that keep fuel prices artificially low but cost the Bolivian government an estimated 380 million dollars per year.

As a result fuel prices went up by as much as 83 percent in the sharpest increases since 1991.

Akerson replaced Ed Whitacre as chief executive in September, but the straight-talking Texan who came out of retirement to lead GM through a government-backed bankruptcy and back to profitability remained chairman until the end of the year.

Akerson has built on Whitacre’s success, leading GM through a 23.1-billion-dollar initial stock offering — the largest in history.

CES attendance in Las Vegas should top the 126,000 figure from the annual event last January and the roster of exhibitors has climbed 2,000 to 2,700.

Internet software will fuse with televisions, cars and even household appliances at CES, where an army of tablets will be unleashed to challenge Apple’s winning iPads.

The Conservative-Liberal coalition led by Prime Minister David Cameron insists on the need to tighten government spending to quickly slash the country’s record public deficit inherited from the previous administration.

“The national interest dictates that we do the right thing, which is to act, not the easy thing, which would be to delay,” Cameron said in his New Year’s message.

The challenges currently facing the 27-nation bloc are daunting enough: the eurozone debt crisis, the integration of the Roma minority, and tough negotiations over the EU’s long-term budget.

But — as the German government put it recently — Hungary “will have a particular responsibility for the image of the whole union in the world” as it raises hackles both at home and abroad with a series of controversial reforms.

Purchasing managers’ indexes in both China and India fell but also showed that the pace of factory output was still expanding solidly. The sectors in both countries have been growing for close to two years.

South Korea’s factories posted their strongest growth in December in seven months.

Hyundai, the world’s No.5 auto maker along with Kia, is expected to outperform its peers and gain more market share, driven by new models and its strength in compact cars.

“Hyundai will post lower volume growth this year, but still outperform the market. Hyundai does not want to be another Toyota which was hit by quality issues following fast volume expansion,” Lee Sang-hyun, an analyst at NH Investment & Securities, said.

Technical indicators are pointing to a strained market, though recently stocks have been maintaining the momentum of late 2010.

The potential is certainly there for shares to derail this week with some important economic reports due. A repeat of last month’s disappointing U.S. jobs number could spark a sell-off.

Once the premier showcase of consumer technology’s cutting edge, in recent years the Consumer Electronics Show has wallowed in the shadow of the one company that never attends: Apple Inc. The iPad maker famously snatched the spotlight from the show in 2007 when it unveiled the first iPhone at a rival convention. This year, the specter of a new iPad awaits.

Still, legions of executives, journalists and geeks will make the annual pilgrimage to the Nevada desert’s glittering oasis to pore over what they did last year: fancier televisions and tablets.

Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros Digital Distribution and other studios plan to offer high-definition movies to consumers whose computers use the chips, code-named Sandy Bridge, at the same time as they are released on DVD, Mooly Eden, Intel’s vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group, told Reuters last week.

“We have been able to develop an end-to-end solution that will allow the premium content to be streamed to (computers with Sandy Bridge chips)”, Eden said in an interview. “We are striking all the deals with the (studios and content distributors) to make it available.”

The growth in crude production surprised many analysts, who had expected 1.1 percent on average, when polled just before the start of 2010.

Energy Ministry data on Sunday showed the country extracted 10.145 million barrels per day last year, a record since the collapse of the Soviet Union, up from 9.93 million bpd in 2009 and 9.78 million bpd in 2008.

As Fiat Industrial began its trading life as an independent entity, opening at euro9 ($12.03) on the Milan Stock Exchange, Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne anticipated his next moves, saying that Fiat could take a majority stake in Chrysler this year.

“I think it is possible, I don’t know whether it is likely, but it is possible that we go over the 50 percent if Chrysler decides to go to the market in 2011,” Marchionne told reporters at the stock exchange. “There will be an advantage if that happens.”

The International Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off this week in Las Vegas.

The elephant is Apple Inc. It won’t be at the show this year, but its tablet computer, the iPad, is the most important new product for an industry that needs to once again excite consumers. Sales of the iPad have been strong since its April debut, and the whole industry is now trying to mimic Apple’s success.

The rules that went into effect Saturday apply to tractors, construction vehicles and other so-called nonroad equipment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the vehicles are major sources of particulate-matter emissions – the stuff that makes smoke black and air difficult to breathe.

Federal air standards have been tightening since the mid-1990s. The 2011 regulations are the latest step, requiring that diesel engines built starting this year produce even fewer of the nitrous oxides that can cause acid rain.

So says feng shui expert Danny Cheong, who has seen demand for his skills soar thanks to last year’s opening of the city-state’s first two casino resorts.

“Before I would occasionally get clients who asked for help with playing the horses or the lottery,” said Cheong, a 50-year-old Singaporean trained in Hong Kong. “Now everybody wants advice about the casinos.”

If the forecast is correct, North Dakota could leapfrog in a few years from the fourth-biggest oil producing state to No. 2, trailing only Texas.

“It’s a pretty rosy picture,” said Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. “We have a huge amount of drilling still in front of us.”

Her yen for savings isn’t out of necessity. The 32-year-old software testing engineer is relatively well off. She says, simply, “I’ve never come across a good deal I didn’t like.”

More than a craze, discount shopping is becoming a way of life for young Chinese. Known as the “coupon generation,” they are changing the way business is done in the world’s second largest economy.

Not all of the bickering in the 112th Congress that convenes Wednesday will be between Republicans and Democrats. House Republicans, back in power after four years in the minority, will include numerous freshmen whose unyielding stands on the deficit, in particular, could severely test soon-to-be Speaker John Boehner’s ability to bridge differences and pass major bills.

His first big challenge will come in February, when Congress must pass a huge spending bill to keep the government running. Many House Republicans – veterans and newcomers alike – have pledged to cut discretionary domestic spending by up to $100 billion.

Hunt Valley, Md.-based Sinclair and the two cable providers – Time Warner Cable Inc. and Bright House Networks – have been locked in an acrimonious tug-of-war over the fees that the cable companies pay to air programs from 33 of Sinclair’s television stations. Their previous contract was scheduled to expire at midnight Friday. If the companies hadn’t reached a temporary two-week extension late Friday night, local Sinclair stations – including affiliates of NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox – would have been dropped from channel lineups for roughly 4 million Time Warner customers and an unknown number of Bright House subscribers.

Chip Corbin, a Penn State alumnus in Ohio, had planned to go to a sports bar to watch the Outback Bowl if his ABC affiliate had blacked out. Sports bars typically subscribe to satellite services, which are unaffected by the Sinclair dispute.

The small nation’s decision to change from the Estonian kroon to the euro was the final step in a two decade-long effort to integrate its economy with Europe after it achieved independence in 1991. It is the first former Soviet republic to join the single currency club.

Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip was the first person in the country of 1.3 million to withdraw euro notes from a cash machine specially installed for the midnight changeover at the opera house in central Tallinn.

The new year may be just as eventful, but one where higher rates are likely.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to a yearly high of just under 4 percent in April and then plunged as low as 2.38 percent in October. That contributed to a historic drop in mortgage rates that brought 30-year fixed-rate loans to a low of 4.17 percent early in November.

“By all rights, the dollar should be declining in value, but it’s not,” says Eswar Prasad, economics professor at Cornell University. “For the dollar to decline in value, you must have currencies on the other side that will” rise.

Bad as things are in the United States, they look worse in Europe and Japan, making the yen, the euro and the British pound riskier bets in 2011. A notable exception is the Chinese yuan, which is likely to rise next year as Beijing fights inflation.

GM sold between 250 and 350 Chevy Volts this month and Nissan’s sales totaled less than 10 Leaf sedans in the past two weeks. Production for both is slowly ramping up.

It will be well into 2012 before both the Volt and Leaf are available nationwide. And if you’re interested in buying one, you’ll need to get behind the 50,000 people already on waiting lists.

Growers in tropical Assam state, India’s main tea growing region, say rising temperatures have led not only to a drop in production but to subtle, unwelcome changes in the flavor of their brews.

The area in northeastern India is the source of some of the finest black and British-style teas. Assam teas are notable for their heartiness, strength and body, and are often sold as “breakfast” teas.

By the end of the year, construction could be under way on two new casinos, gamblers could be allowed to place bets online and voters will have weighed in on whether they want New Jersey to offer legalized sports betting.

A new state-run tourism district is expected to be up and running, taking responsibility for making the area around the casinos and boardwalk safer, cleaner and better-run. The 11 casinos themselves could be subject to much less regulation and oversight by the state.

Fearing his company would be next, Curtis Melone restructured his business to offer what he felt people needed most: help with their crushing mortgage debt.

Melone re-christened his company Green Credit Solutions, a loan modification firm dedicated to aiding people facing rapidly ballooning payments on loans many of them couldn’t afford in the first place.