By Elizabeth MacDonald, FOX News financial correspondent

No bank on this planet has the balance sheet to merge with or buy Citigroup, bank officials and insiders now say. The other option: Break up the bank.

Right now, Citigroup is too big to fail. If the bank is broken up or even if Citi merges with another bank, depositors should not fear. Here’s why:

• Congress recently enacted legislation that increases deposit insurance on deposit accounts, including IRAs, CDs (and trust accounts, subject to some limitations) to $250,000 per owner, $500,000 on joint accounts.

• However, for all bank accounts, the coverage drops back to $100,000 on January 1, 2010–which means CDs bigger than that sum and with terms expiring past that date would not be covered. You would still have to make your mortgage, credit card and student loan payments, too.

• And analysts say any rescue or merger would make Citi’s stock rise.

Click here for more of Elizabeth MacDonald’s coverage of the Citigroup fallout, and tune in to FOX News Channel for all the latest information.

It’s the oldest excuse in the book. You’re coming out of the store after doing some holdiay shopping- and you’d love to put something in the Salvation Army kettle, but you’re out of cash. Excuse no more. The Salvation Army is going high tech.
“We have the first cashless kettle,” says Major Anthony Baso of the Salvation Army.

In at least 12 spots in Dallas, as well as places in LA, Phoenix and Colorado Springs, you can now charge your donation. That’s because there are new mobile credit card swipers attached to some of the old red kettle stands. Don Brock with Securepointe Technologies is the man behind the program for the machines. He says it’s easy. “You punch in the sale, swipe the card. Enter the amount.” Use debit or credit. Donate whatever you’d like. And, handy bonus, you get a receipt for tax time.

The Salvation Army is hoping this will help them raise more critically needed funds for their holiday campaign, not just because it can target new donors, but also because people donating by credit are more apt to give five or ten bucks- as opposed to cash givers who may just give a couple bucks or change in their pocket.

The new machines are a long time coming. Shoppers have been asking for it for a while. Bellringer Michael Alexander says he hears it all the time - “I don’t have change or no one is carrying cash anymore, can we get a credit card machine?” But the Salvation Army had to make sure any system was secure. With these mobile card machines, no information is stored on the machine, so if someone takes off with it, no one is at risk. The information is triple encrypted when it is sent wirelessly.

If all goes well in the test markets, the Salvation Army will roll it out to other places. So far, so good. We were around when Linus Wright tried it out for the first time. Wright says he liked it and would enourage everyone to give it a try. “I can’t think of a better process,” he says.

With gas prices dropping, the hype surrounding fuel cell/electric/hybrid/hydrogen/fuel efficient cars may not be as  critical as just a few months ago, but it can be said that the makers are still steering in that way. Everyone is here in Los Angeles at the convention center downtown and everyone has their latest fuel concept cars. While many are fantastic looking, the concept is still just that… a dream. Ford did unveil its new Mustang and it looks great, but GM and Chrysler didn’t send any of their main executives to Los Angeles and the theory is, the business climate has them out of the spotlight. The companies say it’s because they had no major unveiling. What do you think and what are you looking for in a car these days? Anything catch your eye?

Here is our behind the scenes look:

done

By David Mac Dougall, Baghdad Bureau

We finally made it to Kentucky Fried Chicken in downtown Fallujah. The quest for KFC is over!

But let me clarify: on closer inspection it turns out this is not one of Colonel Sanders’ officially sanctioned franchises.  In fact, apart from the large “KFC” sign in the window you’d be hard pressed to distinguish this from many other chicken restaurants in Fallujah.  The big difference though, is on the inside.  Iraqis like baked chicken, and it turns out deep fried chicken is something of a novelty, and so they’ve been flocking to the restaurant over the past eight months since it opened - the local newspaper even ran a story about it, so I guess it’s not a FOX exclusive.

Of course, we only made it to KFC with the help of our embed hosts this week - Capt. Dan Micklis and the Marines of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines.  They’ve been showing us all over the north of Fallujah, and we’ll be sad to say goodbye later this evening as we start the journey back to Baghdad.

We were the only customers early Friday evening in KFC, so I bought enough chicken to feed the Marines.  In case you’re wondering, they only have one thing on the menu - a $5 meal which buys 2 pieces of fried chicken, French fries, a soda, bottle of water and 2 bread rolls.

If the official KFC wants to send Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines any free stuff, like t-shirts or hats, vouchers for meals (or pretty much anything really!), then get in touch and we’ll make sure you can link up with the guys.

In the meantime, enjoy some pictures!

By Anita McNaught, FOX News correspondent

You could call it a political hangover. The Iraqi Council of Representatives was all remorse and contrition today.

Chastened Parliamentarians sat around, engaged in muted mutual admonition.

They made quiet speeches. “We regret the behaviour yesterday”.. “This is not how we want the world to see us”.. “We went over the top..”.

Speaker of the House Mahmoud al-Mashhadani (shown below) was presiding again from his big desk at the top of the room. His enormous eyes scanned the delegates. Eyes that look like they have seen too much.

But he wasn’t buying into the communal repentence. Finally, he intervened.

“You’re all wasting time wringing your hands, “ he scolded. “Let’s just get on with passing the legislation, like you are supposed to do.”.

But here we discovered that the Bad Boys of the Sadr Bloc had won their point of order. Yesterday, they had quite persistently pointed out that they couldn’t pass an international treaty until Parliament had passed the law.. enabling it to pass international treaties. And that, pretty much, was where it all came apart.

Today – clearly after some furious back-room consultation – they were allowed that argument, and the session resumed with another reading of the International Treaties and Agreements Bill. Round One to the Sadrists.

But having ticked the boxes, the Speaker then turned back to the burning issue – this US/iraqi agreement. He delivered a speech to his Parliamentary colleagues..

“The Iraqi people have been kept in the dark about this Agreement and what it means. If you vote to approve it, you must explain fully to the Iraqi people why. And if you reject it, you must also fully explain your reasons..”

And, he went on, he wanted to notify Parliament that members of the Tawafic Sunni bloc have a number of demands for the government on detainees and amnesties.. and if those demands were not handled well, the government could not count on Sunni support.

Let’s stop and count the numbers here.

– There are 275 members of the Iraqi Parliament.

– The Sadrists say they won’t support the deal. That’s around 30 votes.

– Another small Shi’a party, Fadilha, came out earlier in the week and said they won’t either – that’s another 17 votes.

– The various Sunni parties control around 74 votes. Tawafic have 44 of those.

– The Kurds, 53 members.

– And the other major Shi’a parties in coalition have 85 between them.

– Then there are independents and one-member parties, which come to about 13.

IF the Agreement comes to a vote on Nov. 24 as was originally intended, then there is another issue to deal with: does it need a 51 percent majority or a two-thirds majority to pass?  That, too, is yet to be decided.

Now if the House were full, which it almost never is, a rough calculation suggests.

Two-thirds means roughly 181 votes in support needed… and 95 votes to defeat it.

Fifty-one-percent means the Iraqi government needs only 138 votes to pass the Agreement. Or the same on the other side for them to dump it.

The Sadr and Fadilha parties alone cannot scupper this Agreement, however much  noise they make. If a significant number of Sunnis decide to bail, then the government could be in trouble.

But  right now, notwithstanding the posturing in Parliament, the government looks like it still has the numbers.

Prime minister Maliki today at a press conference was bullish – defending the Agreement and saying there would be no further tweaking.

And supporters of the Agreement took to the streets yesterday around Iraq. In speeches not entirely flattering to the US, the marchers said ANY deal which got America out of Iraq by an agreed date was better than none.

This afternoon, State TV channel Iraqia engaged in its own act of contrition – running in FULL the coverage of Parliament’s near-riot yesterday, which they had so shyly cut away from just as the situation threatened to get out of control.

You can watch part of it here. done

It was quite reassuring, in a perverse way, to see female opposition MPs pile into the fray with equal gusto. I worry that they are too quiet, most of the time

Actually, we have all seen far worse in debating chambers over the years in places like Korea and Taiwan. There, politicians have actually managed to land a few punches, broken chairs over each other’s heads.

For every Iraqi voter disgusted by what they are seeing this week, there’ll be another pleased their point of view is being defended.

Click here to read more of Anita McNaught’s ‘On the Scene’ blogs!