Insurance claims could top $7 billion (4.3 billion pounds), the Consumer Federation of America estimated. Irene has passed into Canada, after causing havoc on the US east coast from North Carolina to Vermont. Driving rains and flood tides damaged homes and cut power to more than three million people in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York alone.

An Associated Press news agency tally found 40 people had been killed in 11 US states, mostly because of falling trees, ocean waves, downed power lines and raging floods. In the rural state of Vermont, the last to be hit before Irene reached Canada, the storm washed away bridges and swamped the town of Brattleboro. In New York City, which escaped the worst of Irene's fury, the subway network and three main airports all reopened on Monday. More than 300,000 people evacuated from low-lying areas in New York City are now able to return home.

Since Saturday, Irene has been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm and now a post-tropical cyclone. Some Americans who bought candles, canned food and other emergency provisions in recent days have been demanding refunds, claiming Irene's threat was exaggerated.

President Barack Obama has warned that the impact of the storm will be felt for some time and that the recovery effort will last for weeks. Flooding and power cuts are still a risk as swollen rivers could burst their banks, he said on Sunday. The brunt of Irene's impact was felt by towns and suburbs from New Jersey to Vermont. Driving rains and flood tides damaged homes and cut power to more than three million people in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York.

The BBC's Steve Kingstone in New York said insurance and rebuilding costs would run into billions of dollars. Irene was earlier downgraded to a tropical and then a post-tropical storm. At 03:00 GMT, Irene was moving north-north-east at a speed of 26mph (43km/h). An increase in speed is expected over the next couple of days, with the centre of the storm moving over eastern Canada on Monday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami says. Irene brings high winds near 50mph (85km/h) with higher gusts, it adds.

The storm, downgraded from a hurricane, passed New York on Sunday. More than 300,000 people evacuated from low-lying areas in New York City are heading home. New Yorkers will attempt to return to work on Monday, but the subway service will be limited while the tracks are inspected, says the BBC's Laura Trevelyan in New York. Most of the commuter rail services feeding the city were out indefinitely, reports say.

If politicians ignore their pleas - including a blunt call from International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde to "act now" - the slowdown in world growth and debt turmoil in Europe could morph into a deeper crisis, top monetary officials and economists warned at an annual retreat here. "I hope they listen," said Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer.

Alarm over political deadlock was as obvious a backdrop to the annual meeting of policymakers in the wilds of Wyoming as the thunderstorms that rolled over the nearby Grand Teton peaks and dumped rain on the Jackson Lake Lodge. "The governance right now is not going through a very brilliant moment, I have to say, neither in Europe nor in the United States," Angel Gurria, who heads the multi-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Reuters.

"The signals that are coming out of the short-term discussions is, 'We can't even agree on about the time of the day, even if there's a big clock telling us what the time of the day is'." In the United States, the political impasse has thwarted moves to tame massive budget deficits which brought the nation to the edge of a debt default and cost the United States its coveted AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's.

In Europe, leaders are fighting over who should pay for the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, which has a unified regime for monetary policy but whose member nations run their own budget policies.

According to the IsraelDefense website, Israeli defense companies are competing for the nod to develop a robot-based combat solution dubbed "Advance Guard," which the IDF ground forces are keenly interested in.

"The basic idea is for robots to function as a strike force, leading the way in the first stage of engagement with the enemy, in which there is usually a greater danger of casualties," the website explained. "The defense establishment wants the industries to examine a range of possible robotic forms on the battlefield, from micro-robots to large unmanned vehicles. An essential feature of the program is that the robots will be capable of interacting with each other and not only as individual warriors."

Brigadier General (retired) Shmuel Yachin, former director of R&D in the IDF, told IsraelDefense that Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is reviewing different types of robot designs, including "see-fire" systems that can identify a target in the field and zero in on it.

One of the firms competing for the job of supplying the IDF with robot warriors may invest in the development of an unmanned tank.

Robotic tools are already employed in surveillance, including unmanned ground vehicles like "Guardium," produced by a company jointly owned and run by IAI and Elbit Systems. In the past, the IDF revealed a robotic snake that can be used for infiltration of targets.

Mrs Merkel has cancelled a high-profile trip to Russia on September 7, the crucial day when the package goes to the Bundestag and the country's constitutional court rules on the legality of the EU's bail-out machinery. If the court rules that the 440 billion euros rescue fund (EFSF) breaches Treaty law or undermines German fiscal sovereignty, it risks setting off an instant brushfire across monetary union.

The seething discontent in Germany over Europe's debt crisis has spread to all the key institutions of the state. "Hysteria is sweeping Germany " said Klaus Regling, the EFSF's director. German media reported that the latest tally of votes in the Bundestag shows that 23 members from Mrs Merkel's own coalition plan to vote against the package, including twelve of the 44 members of Bavaria's Social Christians (CSU). This may force the Chancellor to rely on opposition votes, risking a government collapse.

Christian Wulff, Germany's president, stunned the country last week by accusing the European Central Bank of going "far beyond its mandate" with mass purchases of Spanish and Italian debt, and warning that Europe's headlong rush towards fiscal union stikes at the "very core" of democracy. "Decisions have to be made in parliament in a liberal democracy. That is where legitimacy lies," he said.

Mrs Merkel's aides say she is facing "war on every front". The next month will decide her future, Germany's destiny, and the fate of monetary union.

The alleged offenses include failing to take her daughter to a car show, telling her then 7-year-old son to buckle his seat belt or she would contact police, "haggling" over the amount to spend on party dresses and calling her daughter at midnight to ask that she return home from celebrating homecoming.

Last week, at which point the court record stood about a foot tall, an Illinois appeals court dismissed the case, finding that none of the mother's conduct was "extreme or outrageous." To rule in favor of her children, the court found, "could potentially open the floodgates to subject family childrearing to... excessive judicial scrutiny and interference."

In 2009, the children, represented by three attorneys including their father, Steven A Miner, sued their mother, Kimberly Garrity. Steven II, now 23, and his sister Kathryn, now 20, sought more than $50,000 for "emotional distress." Miner and Garrity were married for a decade before she filed for divorce in 1995, records show.

"It would be laughable that these children of privilege would sue their mother for emotional distress, if the consequences were not so deadly serious for (Garrity)," Smith wrote. "There is no insurance for this claim, so (Garrity) must pay her legal fees, while (the children) have their father for free."

We are in, right, now ...the right eye wall, no doubt about that ...there you see the surf," he said breathlessly. "That tells a story right there." Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. "This is our protection from the wind," he explained. "It's been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here."

The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past. Across the screen, the "Breaking News: Irene Batters Long Island" caption was replaced by stern advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): "Stay inside, stay safe."

The images summed up Hurricane Irene - the media and the United States federal government trying to live up to their own doom-laden warnings and predictions while a sizeable number of ordinary Americans just carried on as normal and even made gentle fun of all the fuss. Then came the press conferences from the politicians, with Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey insisting that his evacuation of the Jersey Shore was "a pre-emptive measure that I am confident saved lives" and there could still be damage worth "tens of billions" of dollars.

Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief, declared that there was "a ways to go with Irene" but "with the evacuations and other precautions taken we have dramatically decreased the risk to life". Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York seemed thoroughly delighted with himself, as if he personally had calmed the waters and stifled the winds.

The truth is that the dire warning beforehand suited both politicians and journalists. Just as with the minor earthquake that shook the east coast last week causing no loss of life and virtually no damage, Irene became a huge story because it was where the media lived.

Make no mistake, there is fire in the eurozone. And sooner or later, things are going to explode. It might come as a surprise, then, after such turmoil in the financial world and the ugly riots in the streets of Athens, to realise that in the eyes of those Eurocrats who inhabit the Brussels bubble, things are going pretty well.

THAT'S BECAUSE THE PRESENT EURO CRISIS IS AN INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCE OF A DELIBERATE CHOICE. For them it is all part of a greater long-term project: a 'beneficial crisis' that will help hasten their ultimate goal of a federal European state. This is not fanciful mischief making. Would that it were! One powerful Eurocrat, who is today at the epicentre of EU affairs, once described to me the three great crises the EU has experienced since 1991 in exactly these terms.

THE FIRST was the rejection of the EU Constitution in France, the Netherlands and Ireland. Ultimately, of course, the Eurocrats repackaged the document to be incomprehensible (as the constitution's author, former President Giscard d'Estaing, openly admitted). It was then imposed as the 'Lisbon Treaty' with the Irish forced to vote again to give the 'right' answer.

THE SECOND crisis was over the endlessly intrusive EU climate policy. It was intended to make Europeans love the 'Environment Union', but it actually created corruption, bureaucracy, fake markets and the repeatedly collapsing Emissions Trading Scheme.

THE THIRD crisis is the big one: the euro. All three, my Eurocrat suggested, were 'beneficial' in that they had all resulted in 'more Europe'.

The root of our present collective peril lies in the fact that the euro single currency was consciously created to produce just such 'beneficial crises'.

Any competent economic historian will tell you there has never been a successful 'fiat' (non-gold-based) currency unless it is underpinned by a unitary state, with unitary fiscal policies. They will also quote the golden rule: 'Never play politics with currencies: currencies bite back.' The 'Godfather' of the euro, Jacques Delors, and his colleagues knew all this perfectly well. But the euro was always intended - slowly but inevitably - to generate successive crises to force the EU states to override their citizens and surrender sovereign control to Brussels.

Like their predecessors in 1931, they were trying to pretend at all costs that a bust financial system was not bust. But at what cost? History tells us that similar policies in the Thirties caused extreme deflation and the Depression. In Germany, the Nazis thrived. From 1932 to 1938, most of southern Europe went fascist. At the beginning, the post-war EU 'project' was widely and honourably supported, to drive back all these shadows. It was the future, once; but no longer. Are these 'beneficial crises' so cynically fostered, so consistently and for so long, now unintentionally beckoning to the shadows once again? It is not just the euro at stake, but much deeper and darker things too.

A ban on going within 12 miles of the plant remains in place. At a meeting with local officials yesterday, the government said it could take 20 years for residents to return to areas with higher radiation readings and a decade to return to areas with half those levels of radiation. Experts estimate the decontamination fight could cost Japan 80 billion pounds. The Fukushima disaster released about 15 per cent of the radiation that escaped from the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine in 1986.

A vast area is still uninhabitable around the plant. The Japanese government unveiled guidelines this week with the aim of halving radiation in problem areas in two years, but for spots with very high readings it could take much longer to reach safe levels. 'I can't deny the possibility that it could be a long time before people can return to and live in regions with high radiation levels,' outgoing Prime Minister Naoto Kan was quoted by domestic media as telling Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato.

"The stakes are clear; we risk seeing the fragile recovery derailed. So we must act now," she said. Two years after the end of the worst of the financial crisis, growth in the United States and Europe is sputtering as government debt burdens surge. Borrowing costs for European banks are rising as lenders balk at providing any but the shortest maturity funds on fears over bank exposure to shaky euro zone sovereign debts. Sharp swings in global financial markets have intensified strains. Complicating the picture is policymaker indecision on both sides of the Atlantic. European leaders are fighting over who should pay the bill for taming a raging sovereign debt crisis.

In the United States, lawmakers and President Barack Obama fought a contentious budget battle earlier this summer that resulted in the loss of the nation's coveted "AAA" debt rating from Standard & Poor's. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned here on Friday that the fight had shaken confidence and sapped US growth.

Lagarde said the Group of 20 leading economies should use a meeting in November to address the global economy's woes in a convincing fashion, and she used her speech - her first major policy address since taking the helm at the IMF in July - to open a new front in dealing with strains at European banks. She called for a "mandatory substantial recapitalization," through private channels if possible, but otherwise through some form of public, Europe-wide funding, such as the European Financial Stability Facility. Lagarde also warned advanced economies away from tightening their belts so fast that it imperils recovery.

What few in the United States bothered to mention, however, is that the new Chinese carrier was built from an unfinished Ukrainian hull purchased in 1998 - and is the first and only aircraft carrier China has ever had. The United States, meanwhile, has eleven.

The real problem with the US response was not, however, that it exaggerated the Chinese threat. It is that it greatly overestimates the benefits, to America, of the country's continuing quest for global supremacy - politically, economically and militarily. To lament America's decline from a dominant position of unaffordable and unsustainable strategic burdens is, in fact, to mistake an opportunity for a threat. For all of the past decade's concerns around the world about the reach and military assertiveness of US unilateralism, it seems increasingly clear that its principal casualty has been the US itself. America is choking on the edifice of empire and the sooner it's dismantled, the easier will be America's return to a leading - not the leading - position as a dynamic, innovative economy.

Consider briefly what the past decade's economic policies, military interventions and strategic priorities have brought the country: a Great Recession, debts that are fundamentally irrecoverable, a credit crisis, a housing collapse, and two wars with immense costs in lives and treasure. A country that employs more than one million people within its intelligence community, and still is surprised by the Arab Spring, is not being efficient with its resources. Waste and corruption are endemic to any enterprise of this size - and the US military-industrial complex has been no exception.

Rid of the burdens of empire, mentally and physically, the United States will remain a singular country in the world - with its openness, ingenuity, diversity, rule of law, moral purpose and ability to renew itself. An object lesson in the paradox of power, the decline of the American Empire may well be the best thing that can happen to the American Republic - and the sooner the better.

With its enormous cloud band, the typhoon drenched northern provinces with rains for days before pummeling them with fierce winds, setting off landslides and floods and knocking down walls that left at least eight people dead and six more missing, said Benito Ramos, who heads the Office of Civil Defense. Strong winds knocked down a concrete wall, which hit a small eatery in the capital's suburban Quezon City Sunday, killing a man and injuring two others in the latest casualties of the typhoon, police said.

In the northern mountain resort city of Baguio, a garbage dump's concrete wall collapsed and buried three shanties under tons of garbage Saturday, killing two children. Their grandmother remained missing, Ramos said. Five others perished in landslides or drowned, including a fisherman, whose body was found floating Saturday off eastern Catanduanes province after he went missing late last week. A decision by many villagers to flee to safety before the typhoon struck and vigilance helped reduced the number of casualties, Ramos said.

Nanmadol had sustained wind of 121 miles per hour and gusts of 143 mph Friday, becoming the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines so far this year. It weakened after grazing northern Cagayan province Saturday. It would skirt the northernmost Batanes islands with 75 mph winds Sunday before starting to blow away from the country, Philippine government forecasters said. Nanmadol was expected to hit Taiwan as early as Monday, Taiwan's central weather bureau said.

Irene has already hit North Carolina and Virginia, causing damage and the deaths of at least eight people. The eye of the storm, packing winds up to 80mph (130km/h), is due to hit New York in the next few hours. The storm has weakened to a category-one hurricane since it came ashore but is still expected to be destructive, not least because of flooding.

About two million people have been left without power as the 500-mile-wide (800km) storm barrelled up the east coast. The same number have moved out of the danger zone, most from New Jersey. Some 370,000 people living in low-lying areas of New York City had been told to leave, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned those behind to stay put.

"The edge of the hurricane is finally upon us," he told reporters. "The time for evacuations is over. At this point, if you haven't evacuated, our suggestion is you stay where you are. Nature is a lot stronger than the rest of us." The fear is of a storm surge affecting New York's Hudson River, which could potentially inundate the flood defences of Lower Manhattan and cause flooding in the financial district there. Irene has already dumped more than 1ft (30cm) of rain in some places up the east coast and there are reports of storm surges of nearly 10ft

Martin Plaut, BBC Africa analyst writes:- The attack on the UN headquarters indicates a growing sophistication by Boko Haram. The vehicle broke through two security barriers, probably indicating that it was reinforced to withstand the impact. Then its driver detonated the bomb after crashing it into the UN reception area.

Earlier this month, the commander of the US Africa Command, General Carter Ham, said he had several sources of information showing that Boko Haram had contacts with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which operates in north-west Africa. He said it also had ties with al-Shabab in Somalia. There have been other, independent, reports of Nigerians fighting alongside al-Shabab.

Together these reports indicate where Boko Haram is getting the expertise needed to carry out its current wave of attacks. What began as a radical group in northern Nigeria is now part of a much wider Islamist movement.

The way the politically motivated murders of 77 Norwegian children, adolescents and adults by a right-wing extremist were interpreted by the media as an attack on Islam was downright eerie. There were hardly any Muslims among the victims, nor was a mosque in Oslo blown up. It was not the beginning of a crusade against Islam. The victims were overwhelmingly young social democrats, who, if they could be assigned to a religious category at all, were mainly members of the Lutheran state church.

The killer, Anders Breivik, believes that the "Islamization" of Europe is a threat. But what he finds even more threatening is the "cultural Marxism" practiced by his fellow Norwegians. For him, their liberalism is a sign of cowardice and weakness. The term "cultural Marxism" is a reference to "cultural Bolshevism," a concept from the 1920s, when lamentations about a general cultural decline were part of the standard repertoire of conservative political parties. Members of Germany's so-called Conservative Revolution [editor's note: mainly active in the period between World War I and World War II] saw the reasons for that decline in capitalism and consumerism, Westernization and individualization. In this sense, it is entirely correct to identify this mental climate as Breivik's inspiration, as the historian Volker Weiss did in a recent opinion piece for Spiegel online.

But what does one gain from calling the killer a "right-wing brother of the jihadists," as Weiss does, and characterizing the events in Norway as "the Talibanization of the Christian right"? This reinforces the old prejudice of the European left, namely that religion in itself is always and exclusively dangerous. Yet this overlooks the fact that it was political, non-religious worldviews that inflicted endless suffering on humanity in the 20th century. It also suggests that there is a worldwide ecumenical movement of religions that are prepared to use violence, and which have become a threat to the non-religious. In Weiss's mind, the events in Norway represent a "fatal embrace" between "crusaders and jihadists."