banks around the world, and especially in Europe, have access to dollars at cheap rates."

So while Americans were sitting down for their turkey dinners, US bankers were talking turkey with their counterparts in Europe, telling them what to do as covertly as possible. That's why this Thanksgiving encounter went largely unreported.

American politicians have try to play crisis manager too. As far as we known, President Obama has made nine calls to European leaders that we know about using his bully pulpit to strong arm them.

"I'm spending an awful lot of time making transatlantic calls", he disclosed at a New York fundraiser.

In addition, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been meeting regularly with European Central bankers in Basel, Switzerland, and elsewhere. He has been burning up the phone linesvaccinate their children against the disease. The Associated Press says that another new development may also have contributed to last year’s record outbreak: the arrival of a vaccine-resistant strain of the Bordetella pertussis bacterium, the microbe that causes whooping cough, in the United States.

Health officials are looking into whether cases like the dozen found in Philadelphia might be one reason the nation just had its worst year for whooping cough in six decades.

The AP, reporting on a letter published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, says that similar bacteria were previously found in Japan, France and Finland, but that 12 cases of whooping cough in children treated at a hospital in Philadephia were the first instances of a vaccine-resistant strain appearing in the U.S.

The new study