The European single currency hit $1.4653 in morning trade, the highest point since mid-December 2009, as many dealers returned from a long holiday weekend. It later stood at $1.4619, compared with $1.4572 late in New York on Monday. The dollar meanwhile tumbled to an all-time low point of 0.8745 Swiss francs. Investors moved to adjust positions ahead of the US Federal Reserve's two-day policy meeting, which was to open later on Tuesday, dealers said.

The central bank's Federal Open Market Committee is widely expected to maintain interest rates at between zero and 0.25 percent, where they have stood since December 2008.

The risk of some sort of incident is not easy to calculate. The police must take into account not only the likelihood of something happening but also the impact, should it happen. For example, the chance of someone in the crowd being motivated to bring a firearm and to shoot at the procession is unlikely. But the potential threat is something senior officers have to take very seriously.

Or what if an anti-monarchist tried to throw a paint bomb at the royal carriage? This wouldn't cause injury (except to the Met's reputation), but is far more likely to happen, and therefore a threat. Police will also be on the lookout for possible attacks by radical Islamists. Since 7/7 Britain has experienced a series of such threats - and one, the attempt to blow up Glasgow airport in 2007, came close to being carried out.

After the recent discovery of a bomb in Newry, County Down, and the government's decision to raise the threat of an Irish dissident attack from moderate to substantial, this is another cause for concern for the security services. With this in mind, the police have already begun systematic searches of drains, lamp-posts, traffic lights and other street furniture. Once checked, a tamper-proof sticker is applied to any door or cover behind which a bomb could be placed.

There will be snipers on rooftops and a police "eye in the sky" helicopter with a camera capable of identifying faces in the crowd. Police sniffer dogs will check the route and the Abbey in advance. The police have turned down a request by the group Muslims Against Crusades to march outside Westminster Abbey, though discussions continue and a static protest can't be banned.

After the recent wave of street demonstrations, during one of which a group surrounded a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, there are concerns that some radical groups might try to get into the route and close to the royal vehicles. To counter this, Scotland Yard is considering pre-emptive action against known activists, some of whom may be arrested in advance based on the suspicion they may be plotting. About 60 people are banned from entering the area around Parliament under their bail conditions, and will be reminded of the fact.

It comes after David Cameron and George Osborne made clear they would veto any move to make Mr Brown the £270,000-a-year head of the International Monetary Fund, a job for which he has been lobbying. Mr Brown's spokesman was quick to say that his new role will be to 'stop the next financial crisis'. His remarks echoed Mr Brown's assertion that he 'saved the world' after the international credit crunch of 2009.

Tory deputy chairman Michael Fallon said Mr Brown has yet to face up to the legacy of debt that he bequeathed to taxpayers. 'This is a case of putting the arsonist in charge of the fire station,' he said. 'It beggars belief that somebody who is yet to apologise for the mess he made in our finances should be advising the rest of the world.'

After not posting $1 bonds, Jones and his associate pastor, Wayne Sapp, were escorted to jail, said District Judge Mark Somers. Somers said Jones and Sapp would stay in Wayne County jail until posting bond. The men posted the $1 bonds about an hour after initially refusing to. Prosecutors had asked Somers to set the bond at $45,000.

Somers ruled Thursday the city of Dearborn didn't violate Jones' free speech rights by denying him a permit to protest outside the mosque. Somers said Jones rejected four alternative sites listed in a city ordinance. Somers said the jury was very concerned with the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. He said that the juror's concerns were similar to the courts because they were more concerned with the protest's time and location rather than its content.

"We are going to be exercising our First Amendment rights. We have some issues we are going to address, actually several issues," Jones told Local 4 at the airport. "We're going to be addressing the issue of jihad and Sharia. We are going to be talking about our president's intentions for re-election. We will be addressing many issues that, I believe, concern us as a nation."

Hamm-Niebruegge said it could take a "couple of months" to fully repair the damage, with some carriers having to use other airport locations in the meantime. Concourse C is used by American Airlines, Frontier, AirTran and Cape Air.

Wes Browning, a chief meteorologist for the weather service, said Saturday that preliminary estimates were that an EF2 or EF3 tornado - packing winds between 111 and 165 miles per hour - hit the airport. In Bridgeton, the tornado's winds were even stronger, blowing between 166 and 200 miles in what the weather service has preliminarily rated as an EF4.

Governor Jay Nixon estimated that, throughout the region, the tornado caused damage to 750 homes - fewer than 100 of which remained uninhabitable. Yet no one lost his or her life. "It is absolutely amazing that an EF4 tornado can come through an airport and a number of municipalities that are highly populated, at a time when people weren't at work, and have no fatalities," Nixon said. "We're talking property, we're not talking about loss of life because of this. That is nothing short of astounding."

The Government raised the warning to 'high' for most of south, east and central England as glorious sunshine and still conditions prevented any dispersal of the tiny particles of soot, dust, dirt and liquid nitrogen dioxide. The unseasonably warm weather, with temperatures reaching 79F (26C) in central London yesterday, means that Britain is on course for the hottest April on record.

Experts said the vulnerable - such as asthmatics, the elderly, young children and heart patients - would experience more difficulty breathing, and warned that long-term exposure to high pollution could cause lung cancer and heart disease. This is the first 'smog warning' for two years. They are normally issued during the summer. But the prolonged dry spell caused by a high pressure system above the UK, and pollution drifting over from southern Europe, have combined to breach European safety limits.

A year ago, it was Russia that bore the brunt of global warming, and with the price of benchmark wheat futures jumping by more than a fifth since the spring in the global market hub of Chicago, farmers everywhere are busy scanning the skies for soothing signs. Traditional Easter fairs in the east and the north of the Netherlands have been cancelled because of the risk of fires posed by the extraordinarily dry weather affecting northern Europe, Dutch news agency ANP said.

In the eastern half of the country, one of Europe's biggest traders, outdoor family barbecues, smoking and camp fires are a strict no-no. In the Swiss canton of Zurich, officials began moving trout this week from the river Toess before their habitat dried up. This year threatens to bring "one of the most significant droughts since 1864," the year when records began in Switzerland, said Olivier Duding, a climatologist from Swiss weather service Meteosuisse. The drought in western Switzerland over the last 12 months is as severe as those recorded in 1884 and 1921, Meteosuisse said.

While the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic states of northeastern Europe are not reporting drought, the British Met Office warns it has been "incredibly dry in many parts in March and April." Rainfall is at 40 percent of normal levels, and England and Wales had the driest March in more than a century. Beware the ides, as they say. Soon, if the hot, dry spell continues, water use restrictions will be forced on residents and companies there.

Six out of 10 French reservoirs are holding water levels far below what is normal, meaning similar irrigation controls are likely there.

March was already extremely volatile for grains, largely due to growing economic uncertainties and the turmoil in North Africa and parts of the Near East - as well as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the Food and Agriculture Organization said after logging a first, slight drop in raw food prices for eight months.

A spokeswoman for European farmers federation Copa-Cogeca said it was too soon to draw conclusions, but Belgian farmer Guy Franck, who heads a dairy collective in French-speaking Wallonia, says gut instinct tells him worse is yet to come. "I've been in this game for 30 years, I've never seen a month of April like this one," he said. "Everything with short roots is seriously dehydrated," he warned.

Some generated tsunamis that claimed more than 100 lives; and it is thought they occurred because the original earthquake, on 26 December, increased stresses along the tectonic plate boundary that lies to the west of Sumatra and Java. So what is the outlook for Japan now, especially for the great city of Tokyo and the Kanto plain on which it sits?

This is home to one-quarter of Japan's population, as well as being the country's administrative and commercial centre. Big quakes struck the area in 1703, 1855 and 1923, with the last claiming the lives of 100,000 people. Were any one of these events to occur today, the economic losses alone would be expected to top $1 trillion (80 trillion Yen). Seismic activity has definitely increased since the M 9.0 event, with the incidence of small earthquakes registered in some parts of Japan, hundreds of kilometres from the source, increasing by a factor of 10.

Hazard assessment in the region is therefore a pressing priority for researchers; but it is far from easy. "The Kanto region is very complex, and the size of quakes triggered there is probably going to be limited by that complexity," says Chris Goldfinger from Oregon State University in the US, who works in collaboration with Japanese researchers.

The island nation of Tonga is regularly hit by tremors - most recently a 6.4 magnitude quake offshore last month. The research expedition will last about one month. The focus of the study will be an unusual zone on the seabed where undersea volcanoes are being dragged into the fault. Scientists want a better understanding of how the submarine mountains affect the likelihood of earthquakes.

The volcanoes lie on the 4,000km-long Louisville Ridge and either act as a brake on the Pacific plate - or intensify the quakes which follow. The area where they are pulled into the seabed suffers relatively fewer tremors than other stretches of the fault line. The study - funded by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) - will carry out surveys and develop 3D models during seven transits of the region.

One of the lead scientists on the expedition, Professor Tony Watts of Oxford University, told BBC News: "We want to know whether subducted seamounts are holding up earthquakes or whether they cause earthquakes. This is important to find out so that we can learn what controls earthquakes and make better assessments about where they may occur in the future." Subduction zones like the Tonga Trench can trigger tsunamis - as happened off Japan last month and off Sumatra on Boxing Day 2004.

Libyan rebels have been battling Colonel Gaddafi's troops since February but have recently made little headway. "President Obama has said that where we have some unique capabilities, he is willing to use those," Mr Gates told a news conference. He said two Predators were being made available to Nato as needed, and marked a "modest contribution" to the military operations. Mr Gates denied that the drone deployment was evidence of "mission creep" in Libya and said there were still no plans to put US "boots on the ground" in Libya.

His comments come after the Government lost a legal challenge to the ECHR ruling that the UK's blanket ban on prisoners voting was unlawful. "This judicial coup represents a naked usurpation, by a judicial body, of the legislative power that properly belongs to democratically-elected law makers," the MP for Esher and Walton said.

"The judges have assumed a legislative function, fully aware that there are limited means for elected governments subject to their rulings to exercise any meaningful democratic oversight over them." The poor quality of the judges was also "undermining the credibility and value of the court", he added. In a report, Mr Raab also claimed the court's human rights decisions were adding to the pressure on police and the security services.

"The massive expansion of human rights law threatens to frustrate Britain's ability to deport convicted criminals and terrorist suspects," he said. "The goal-posts keep shifting, because of unaccountable judicial legislation - especially the expansion of claims around the right to family life."

He added that more than 1,000 people had been arrested in the city of Kaduna alone, where a 24-hour curfew had earlier gone into effect. The riots started as results showed President Goodluck Jonathan won Saturday's elections. He was declared the winner on Monday night over his northern rival, ex-military ruler Muhammadu Buhari.

Nigeria is roughly split in half between a mainly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. Jonathan is a Christian from the southern oil-producing Niger Delta region.

Texans were today desperately praying for rain, as a second firefighter died from injuries sustained battling the terrible wildfires ravaging the state. Cooler temperatures and calmer winds helped his weary colleagues at last get a handle on the latest wildfire, now spanning three northern Texas counties, but officials warned the let-up was only temporary.

The fires have now been raging for more than a week in Texas, so far burning through 1.4 million acres of land and racking up more than $8 million in containment costs. Dan Byrd, a National Weather Service meteorologist working with the Texas Forest Service, said: 'We really need some rainfall. We expect rain in the next few days, but we don't know if it'll get on the fires or not.'

Although the moister air as allowed firefighters to make 'great progress' in building containment lines, Texas Forest Service spokesman Marq Webb said hot and dry weather is likely to reappear in the next two or three days. He said: 'We're going to have a two or three day reprieve and then things start ramping up again.'

And firefighters continue to battle some 22 separate blazes throughout the state, with some dangerously close to the Oklahoma border. Homes have been gutted, animals killed and hundreds of residents have been forced to leave their homes because of the advancing flames. One of the wildfires in PK West, Stephens County, increased in size by a staggering 87,238 acres in just 24 hours - a 144 per cent increase. There is now growing fear that this wildfire may get as far as Fort Worth - one of Texas' largest cities with nearly 750,000 residents.

NASA has repeatedly raised concerns about the timeframe for building a smaller rocket - but the new law expresses Congress's will for the space agency to make a massive "heavy-lift" rocket that can haul 130 metric tons, like the ones from the days of the Apollo. Congressional approval of the plan - all while $38 billion is being cut elsewhere in the federal government - reflects not only the power of key lawmakers from NASA-friendly states, but the enduring influence of major contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing in those states.

For instance, a series of stop-gap spending laws had kept money flowing to the man-to-moon Constellation program because Senator Richard Shelby (Republican for Alabama) initially tucked a provision into a 2010 budget bill - even though President Barack Obama and Congress agreed last fall to end that Bush-era initiative. An internal NASA audit pegged the cost of that move at $215 million over five months.

While some praise Congress for pushing the United States to remain a world leader in space science, critics say the national space program is effectively run by lawmakers protecting jobs in their home states.

This left the US Treasury with the authority to borrow only an additional $25.635 billion before it hits the statutory debt limit. On April 4, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat for Nevada) in order to warn Congress that the Treasury was approaching the legal debt limit. In an appendix to this letter, Geithner pointed to the rapid pace at which new debt was accumulating.

"On average," Geithner wrote, "the public debt of the United States increases by approximately $125 billion per month (although there are significant variations from month to month)." In a 31-day month, $125 billion in new debt works out to an average of $4.03 billion in new debt per day. At that pace, the $25.635 billion in legal borrowing authority the Treasury had left at the close of business on Tuesday would be exhausted in less than seven days.