The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill to raise the country's debt ceiling, allowing it to borrow more money to cover spending commitments. If it fails to extend the current limit of $14.3 trillion dollars, the federal government could find itself struggling to make payments, and risks the loss of its AAA credit rating. The United States is currently spending around $200 billion more than it collects in revenue every month.

Apple, on the other hand, is making money hand over fist, according to its financial results. In the three months ending 25 June, net income was 125% higher than a year earlier at $7.31 billion.

Security forces killed dozens in the city of Hama, the hardest-hit area. The government said troops were sent to Hama to remove barricades erected by the protesters. But an official at the US embassy in Damascus dismissed those claims as "nonsense", saying the government had launched "full-on warfare" against its own people.

Mr Obama said the reports from Hama were horrifying and demonstrated the true character of the Syrian regime. "Once again, President Assad has shown that he is completely incapable and unwilling to respond to the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people," he said. Mr Obama said he was appalled by the government's use of "violence and brutality against its own people". Ministers from France and Germany also condemned the day's violence. Germany, currently a UN Security Council member, has requested emergency discussions in New York on Monday.

Hama - a bastion of dissidence - occupies a significant place in the history of modern Syria. In 1982, then-President Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, sent in troops to quell an uprising by the Sunni opposition Muslim Brotherhood. Tens of thousands were killed and the town flattened. The city, which has a population 800,000, has seen some of the biggest protests and worst violence in Syria's 2011 protests. It was slow to join in, but has now become one of the main focuses of the revolt, and is largely out of government control.

But Congress still has to approve the deal, and with votes in both houses expected on Monday. The parties face a Tuesday deadline to raise the $14.3 trillion (8.7 trillion pounds) debt limit. "I want to announce that the leaders of both parties in both chambers have reached an agreement that will reduce the deficit and avoid default, a default that would have had a devastating effect on our economy," Mr Obama said. The US president said it was not the deal he would have preferred, but noted that the compromise plan would make a "serious downpayment" on the US deficit.

Jane O'Brien, BBC News, Washington writes:

"The president says it's not the perfect deal. But he and the leaders of both parties now believe they have the framework for something they can put to their party rank and file. It's still likely to be a tough sell. The Republican Tea Party members are unlikely to support it because the cuts don't go far enough, and many Democrats will be furious that it doesn't include tax hikes.

Both sides will hold further discussions on Monday before the agreement is drafted into legislation that can be put to a vote. America's credit rating may still be downgraded, but it now looks more likely that the world's most powerful economy will be spared the humiliation of not being able to pay its bills on Tuesday."

Once you have signed up via the link on Page 5 we will add your signature to our exclusive "Britain wants a referendum to leave the EU" petition, registered yesterday on the Government's new directgov e-petitions website. The Government has said it would consider any public campaign backed by 100,000 signatures for a debate in Parliament.

Joining our petition will force the country's politicians openly to discuss an issue that is gathering momentum as Britain bails out failing eurozone states and our laws are increasingly adversely affected by EU human rights restraints. This newspaper's historic crusade - the first to demand that Britain must quit the EU - has already been backed by almost 400,000 people in a postal coupon campaign earlier this year.

Now our readers can force the issue direct to the heart of Government again via the e-petition. Senior Tory ministers and MPs have expressed their support for us in driving the issue of winning freedom from Brussels interference to the forefront of national debate. Mark Reckless, Tory MP for Rochester and Strood, said last night: "I am extremely supportive of the wonderful campaign by the Daily Express which has helped push the debate on to the national stage. I would urge as many people as possible to sign up to this petition so we can push the debate for a referendum into Parliament once and for all."

Another staunch supporter of our crusade, Tory backbencher Douglas Carswell, said: "I for one will be signing up. The Government has said they want more direct democracy and I hope they welcome the Daily Express's efforts to give us a chance to debate whether there should be a referendum on the EU." The eurozone crisis has only heightened the sense of urgency for a referendum that will give people the chance to decide if we are better off out of the EU altogether."

In the past year the UK has stumped up 12.5 billion pounds to help rescue Greece, Ireland and Portugal with bail-outs. As further economic disasters loom in Spain and Italy, the financial noose on Britain from Europe could tighten even further. Opponents of the EU are also angry about the threat to Britain's democracy by meddling Brussels bureaucrats. Critics claim we have lost control of immigration due to EU freedom of movement laws. And they complain that our law and order system - and basic common sense - are being undermined by the European Convention on Human Rights.

The latest chance to push the issue on to the agenda follows a relentless Daily Express crusade urging the UK to cut ties with Brussels. Our battle, launched with an unprecedented 24-page pull-out edition in January, has been backed by hundreds of thousands of people. We were instantly deluged with overflowing mailbags packed with our special coupons CALLING ON DAVID CAMERON'S GOVERNMENT TO LAUNCH AN ORDERLY WITHDRAWAL FROM THE EU.

He suggested the high winds and waves of a recent storm had exhausted the predators, which are normally good swimmers. And in a scientific paper, he and colleagues argued that the increased incidence of storms caused by global warming, and the loss of ice for polar bears to walk on, could lead to more deaths in the future.

While the findings were seized upon by environmentalists as another peril of climate change, sceptics and some other scientists questioned the conclusions. Yesterday it emerged Dr Monnett - who works for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement - has been placed on leave and is being investigated for 'integrity issues' apparently linked to the polar bear report.

Dr David Whitehouse, science adviser to the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: 'The dangers of climate science is that once you passionately believe in man-made global warming, you see connections everywhere when you should be scientifically cautious about drawing conclusions.' Dr Monnett is in charge of a 30 million pounds project researching the Arctic's wildlife. A BOEMRE spokesman declined to comment on an 'on-going internal investigation'. The organisation is believed to have barred Dr Monnett from talking to reporters.

In 2008, the US classified the polar bear as a threatened species, the first with its survival at risk due to global warming. Last year scientists working for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came under fire for exaggerating the threat of global warming. The body falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 after lifting claims from an unsubstantiated report written by the green charity WWF.

They are worried the courts' decisions may run against the law of the land, particularly in divorce settlements for women. The scrapping of the inquiry comes in a week when Islamic extremists have launched a campaign to declare 'Sharia-controlled zones' across Britain. Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed responsibility for the scheme, which has so far seen posters put on lampposts in several London boroughs declaring that within the 'zones' there should be 'no gambling', 'no music or concerts', 'no porn or prostitution', 'no drugs or smoking' and 'no alcohol'.

The Daily Mail has previously published photographs of Choudary in his student days breaking all but one of the zone laws - holding a cannabis joint, downing a pint of cider, playing cards and leering at porn. But the abandonment of the Government's Sharia inquiry has fuelled fears that such radicals will be able to continue their intimidating activities unchecked.

The number of Sharia courts here is unknown, although an estimate of 85 made by the Civitas think-tank in 2009 is widely accepted. But the abandonment of the Government's Sharia inquiry has fuelled fears that such radicals will be able to continue their intimidating activities unchecked. The Ministry of Justice had launched an inquiry into the operation of Sharia courts in Britain because of rising fears that the secretive system has undue influence.

The amount of money placed in investment funds by savers has fallen by up to 90 per cent in recent months, figures show, as investor confidence hits lows not seen since the depths of the recession three years ago. Instead, savers are rushing to put their money in perceived "safe havens", with sales of gold funds rising by nearly 60 per cent last week.

Increasingly, people are opting to invest simply in cash, even though rising inflation means that they are effectively losing money. The growing uncertainty in the safety of the stock market came as the FTSE 100 index dropped by one per cent - wiping 15 billion pounds off the value of Britain's most successful companies after poor economic data from the United States. The index has fallen two per cent in the past week.

Such is the growing uncertainty in the markets that Moody's, the credit rating agency, yesterday threatened to downgrade Spain as the eurozone's troubles continue. In Europe, Moody's said it was reviewing Spain's credit rating and would probably downgrade it by one level. Shortly after this warning, the Spanish government called a surprise early election for November.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul moved quickly to appoint General Necdet Ozel as the new army chief. General Ozel is widely expected to be swiftly elevated to chief of the general staff in place of General Kosaner. Tradition dictates that only the head of the army can take over the top job.

There has been a history of tension between the secularist military and the governing AK party, with the two sides engaged in a war of words for the past two years over allegations that parts of the military had been plotting a coup. Investigations into those allegations, known as the "Sledgehammer" conspiracy - appear to be the root cause of today's resignations, says the BBC's correspondent in Istanbul, with the senior military wanting to go ahead with scheduled annual promotions for some of the officers implicated - and the government refusing.

General Kosaner portrayed his resignation as a protest at the jailing of military officers in a variety of court cases. "It has become impossible for me to continue in this high office, because I am unable to fulfil my responsibility to protect the rights of my personnel as the chief of general staff," General Kosaner told the Hurriyet news group.

"It's time for them to tell us what they're for," echoed Boehner, repeating the Republican canard that suggests Obama, who's endorsed Majority Leader Reid's latest bill and put forward a series of proposals himself behind closed doors, has no plan. "It's time to tell us how they're going to get us out of the cul-de-sac they've driven our country into."

The spin session, which came just hours after word leaked that McConnell was turning away overtures from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and demanding to negotiate directly with the President, marked an escalation in an already fraught standoff that has the US Treasury preparing drastic measures should the debt ceiling not be raised by Tuesday.

McConnell announced that he had contacted the White House on Saturday and had held initial phone conversations with Vice President Joe Biden, as well as Obama himself. But the Republicans' message seemed more like maneuvering than outreach. "We are now fully engaged... with the one person in America out of 300 million who can sign a bill into law," McConnell said. Boehner made sure to repeat his line about the President driving the country into a cul-de-sac before concluding the brief session with reporters.

The Republican leaders did offer one sunny note. "I'm confident and optimistic we're going to get an agreement in the very near future," McConnell said. But after Saturday's recriminations and delays, that future seems less certain than ever.

Thorbjorn Jagland, a former prime minister of his country, said leaders such as the British premier would be "playing with fire" if they continued to use rhetoric that could be exploited by extremists. Four months ago in Munich, Cameron declared that state multiculturalism had failed in Britain, a view immediately praised by Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, as "a further huge leap for our ideas into the political mainstream". Marine Le Pen, vice-president of the far-right National Front party in France, also endorsed Cameron's view of multiculturalism, claiming that it corroborated her own party's line.

Jagland's comments come in the wake of the Oslo bomb and the massacre on Utoya Island that left 77 people dead. The killer, Anders Behring Breivik, said he was inspired by the right-wing English Defence League. Breivik sent his manifesto, published online hours before the attacks, to about 250 British members of the BNP, the EDL and the Stop Islamisation of Europe group. Jagland, who is also secretary general of the Council of Europe, told the Observer: "We have to be very careful how we are discussing these issues, what words are used."

"Political leaders have got to defend the fact that society has become more diverse. We have to defend the reality, otherwise we are going to get into a mess. I think political leaders have to send a clear message to embrace it and benefit from it. We should be very cautious now, we should not play with fire. Therefore I think the words we are using are very important because it can lead to much more."

Jagland has also urged leading politicians to change their terminology. He said the word "diversity" was better than multiculturalism because the latter had become defined in different ways by different groups. "We also need to stop using 'Islamic terrorism', which indicates that terrorism is about Islam. We should be saying that terrorism is terrorism and not linked to religion," said Jagland.

This morning the last remnants of the storm passed into Mexico, leaving behind a hot and sunny weekend with only a few scattered showers expected in southern Texas. While it means there was no respite for cattle farmers, who are selling off their livestock because their pastures are barren, it was a huge relief for cotton growers, who are in the middle of this year's harvest.

Yesterday residents along the coast filled up their cars and moved off the islands to take refuge inland, including about 500 students who were evacuated from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, which has an island campus. Earlier yesterday, storm preparations in South Texas were light, with some people seeing it as a drill for things to come.

Luis Canales, of McAllen, said: 'In a way, this tropical storm is a pre-test for an actual hurricane. It helps sharpen us up for what we need.' While many people were tying down possessions and preparing for the winds, more were out on the beach, looking forward to the storm waves. But by this morning, Don had fizzled out into a depression. All tropical storm warnings along the Texas coast were lifted at 4am.

Barry Goldsmith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said: 'There's really not much left of it. It's a done deal.'

He added: 'That great beach weather we had last week is coming right back.' Almost all of Texas is in extreme drought, and even Don's projected few inches of rain wouldn't have cured that, but farmers were hoping for at least a few inches. Carlo Cascos, the top elected official in Cameron County, at Texas's southernmost tip, said: 'It was somewhat of a dud. It looked huge and powerful on the radar. We have another one out there that we'll be watching as well.'

Before the storm, Texas State Climatologist John Nielson-Gammon told MSNBC: 'We're looking at five inches of rain, and that is about a month and a half's worth of rain for these areas. Texas has seen the driest nine months in its history, and many areas are 15 inches below where they would usually be this time of year.'

Traders told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that Frontier bought all available May Futures contracts on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe) in the period running up to the tender date in the last week of April. Feed wheat sets the benchmark price for wheat used in food. In recent weeks, Frontier is believed to have taken physical delivery of approximately 225,000 tonnes of feed wheat now worth in the region of 40 million pounds in what has been described as an attempt to corner the market.

Frontier strongly rejected any suggestion of an attempt to manipulate the market. It did not confirm or deny it made the unusually large trades and refused to reveal its position. The company's trading director, Jon Duffy, stated that all the wheat contracts it took physical delivery for were made to secure enough grain to fulfil customers' orders. "We are not speculators," said Duffy. "We are physical grain traders. We buy about 5 million tonnes of grain. We buy it, move it, transport it and deliver it." The spectacular grain raids, which are not illegal, were confirmed by three leading wheat traders who spoke to the Bureau.

Duffy stresses that Frontier is independent of its powerful shareholders, Cargill and Associated British Foods. Both shareholders own a number of major food processing and biofuel facilities in Britain. This, suggest farming insiders, has the potential for Frontier to exert significant control on farmers and rival grain suppliers.

Anders Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto is nothing if not thorough. Pages and pages of text outline in excruciating detail the ideological underpinnings of his worldview - one which led him to kill 76 people in two terrible attacks in Norway last week.

It is a document which has led many to question Breivik's sanity. But it has also, due to its myriad citations and significant borrowing from several anti-immigration, Islamophobic blogs, highlighted the deeply entwined network of right-wing populist groups and parties across Europe - from the Front National in France to Vlaams Belang in Belgium to the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO).

But recently it has become clear that Europe's populist parties aren't merely content to establish a network on the Continent. They are also looking further east. And have begun establishing tight relations with several conservative politicians in Israel - first and foremost with Ayoob Kara, a parliamentarian with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party who is also deputy minister for development of the Negev and Galilee districts.

The reason for the growing focus on Israel is not difficult to divine. "On the one hand," Strache told Spiegel Online in a recent interview, "we are seeing great revolutions taking place in the Middle East. But one can't be totally sure that other interests aren't behind them and that, in the end, we might see Islamist theocracies surrounding Israel and in Europe's backyard."

In other words, in the battle against what right-wing populists see as the creeping Islamization of Europe, Israel is on the front line.

The dangers are almost as great if the US fails to lift the debt ceiling and avoids default by enacting the most drastic fiscal squeeze in modern history. "Default would be an act of collective insanity," said Willem Buiter, Cititgroup's chief economist. "Even if a default were cured promptly, it would severely dent the credibility of the US as a global financial player and the provider of the world's leading reserve currency. There would be an immediate repricing of the dollar and an increase in medium and long-term nominal and real interest rates. Asset, credit, and funding markets in the US and the world as a whole would likely suffer and a global recession would likely result, centred in the US, but not restricted to it."

Mr Buiter said brinkmanship on the US debt ceiling had reached a point where tail risk had "morphed" into a serious possibility, with a 5 per cent likelihood that Washington will pull the trigger on a technical default. Stephen Roach, head of Morgan Stanley in Asia, said Chinese officials are disgusted by the "astonishing recklessness" of Washington as default looms. "Coming so shortly on the heels of the sub-prime crisis, the debate over the debt ceiling and the budget deficit is the last straw," he said.

Andrew Garthwaite from Credit Suisse said a default would be catastrophic, causing 5 per cent contraction in the US economy and a 30 per cent drop on Wall Street, with "massive" ramifications for the world. "It is almost unthinkable to believe the US would miss a coupon payment [$29 billion are due on August 15]. If the US does default, the repo market would probably cease to work. It is hard to imagine money market funds operating under this scenario. The inter-bank market would freeze up. The fallout would be far worse than after Lehman's default," he said. "It would be horrible to think what happens to the dollar if the Fed hints it would offset the growth damage with QE3."

Mr Garthwaite said it might not be that much better if the US fails to lift the debt ceiling and enacts a draconian fiscal squeeze equal to 11 per cent of GDP (annualised) to stave off default. Such an outcome would at first lead to a 10-15 per cent drop in equities and a fall in 10-year Treasury yields to 2.75 per cent. The dollar would slide. The longer it went on, the worse it would be. Each month would mean fiscal tightening equal to 0.9 per cent of GDP.

Some experts fear that variants of this scenario would spiral out of control. It would drive a string of US states and municipalities into bankruptcy if it lasted more than a few weeks, while the multiplier effect would tip the economy into a self-defeating downward spiral with echoes of 1931.

Following the horrific attacks that left 76 dead in Norway last week, many European leaders have been asking questions about the dangers of right-wing radicalization in the region. In recent years European Union member countries have seen growing support for right-wing populist groups - but the attacks confessed to by Anders Behring Breivik took their anti-Islam, xenophobic ideology to an entirely new and deadly level.

As if to confirm such fears, members of both a British right-wing group and an increasingly populist Italian party bucked the initial trend of rejecting Breivik's ideology, expressed their understanding for certain sentiments. Stephen Lennon, leader of the English Defense League, a far-right British group to which Breivik has claimed ties, said the attacks proved the desperation of those with populist leanings in Europe.

"It's a ticking time bomb," he told news agency AP. "If they don't give that frustration and anger a platform as such - and a way of getting emotion out in a democratic way - it will create monsters like this lunatic." A member of Italy's Northern League Party, the populist junior partner in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government, went as far as praising some of Breivik's ideas. In an interview with an Italian radio station, Mario Borghezio, a member of the European Parliament with the party, said: "Some of the ideas he expressed are good - barring the violence - some of them are great."

France's National Front party, known for its nationalistic, far-right policies, has also shifted into the spotlight. Anti-racism initiative MRAP accused the party of nurturing conditions for such an attack, while the left-wing news magazine Le Nouvelle Observateur said Breivik was the "EMBODIMENT OF A NEW SPIRIT IN EUROPE." National Front politicians denied any role in encouraging terrorism with their policies.