Egypt is due to hold parliamentary elections in September and the group is likely to emerge with the largest bloc in the assembly. It said this week that its candidates would compete for half the seats in parliament. The Brotherhood, banned for most of its 80-year history, has begun to set up a political party to be named the Freedom and Justice party.

"We should now raise our voice to ask for: an end to normalisation [with Israel] which has given our enemy stability; an end to [Egyptian] efforts to secure from infiltrators the borders of the Zionists; the abolition of all [joint] economic interests such as the Qualified Industrial Zones agreement and the export of Egyptian gas to Israel," said Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhood's leader.

The QIZ agreement allows Egypt to export manufactured goods to the US duty-free as long as they have Israeli inputs to a value of 10 per cent. Egypt has just mediated a reconciliation between Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza. Attempts to broker the same agreement under Mr Mubarak had failed, largely because Egypt was seen to be partial to Fatah and biased against Hamas, which shares the same Islamist credentials of the Brotherhood.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits). Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached. On Sunday, Ahmadinejad returned to his office after an 11-day walkout in an apparent protest over Khamenei's reinstatement of the intelligence minister, who the president had initially asked to resign.

Ahmadinejad's unprecedented disobedience prompted harsh criticism from conservatives who warned that he might face the fate of Abdulhassan Banisadr, Iran's first post-revolution president who was impeached and exiled for allegedly attempting to undermine clerical power. Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a hardline cleric close to Khamenei, warned that disobeying the supreme leader - who has the ultimate power in Iran - is equivalent to "apostasy from God".

Emergency officials in Millington near Memphis were "going door-to-door, asking people to leave," according to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. Large amounts of rain and melt from the winter snow has caused a chain reaction of flooding from Canada and the Dakotas through Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. It is expected to soon hit Mississippi and Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

"The flood is rolling down, it is breaking records as it moves down and it is one of those wait-and-see type of things as to how massive it is going to be when it's all said and done," said Charles Camillo, historian for the Mississippi River Commission and the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project. In Arkansas, westbound traffic on a section of one of the nation's major trucking arteries, Interstate 40, was closed for a second day due to flooding.

The White River was expected to crest at its highest ever level of 40 feet at Des Arc, Arkansas on Thursday night, breaking a 1949 record. A levee overflowed near the White River, forcing a mandatory evacuation of the town of Cotton Plant, the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management said. Officials at the Shelby County Office of Preparedness, that includes Memphis, predicted that the flood could affect 2,832 properties if it crests at 48 feet this coming weekend.

A crest of 48 feet would be the river's highest level since 1937, according to the National Weather Service.

Until now, vets had assumed animals could be infectious while they carried the virus that causes foot-and-mouth, which may be for between four and eight days. However, by exposing calves to infected cattle and closely monitoring them, researchers from the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey and Edinburgh University discovered that the period of infection was less than two days.

Perhaps more importantly, the researchers also discovered that animals were not infectious until they showed symptoms of the disease. Scientists had previously thought animals were infectious for hours or even days before manifesting any symptoms. These results suggest that any future outbreak could be brought under control by closely monitoring animals and slaughtering them as soon as they become ill. This approach is in contrast to the policy adopted to bring the 2001 epidemic under control.

"We think, though," he added, that "now there is a real opportunity - with the end of Bin Laden, with the Arab Spring, with all that's happening in the world - we think this is a moment of opportunity... to push forward the process of peace between Israel and Palestine." Palestine, of course, does not exist - the Oslo Accords recognize the Palestinian Authority - but this "slip" was apparently a harbinger of true British intentions to recognize a unilaterally-declared Palestinian state this coming September.

The Guardian reported yesterday that British government officials are holding this threat very distinctly over Israel's head. The paper quoted a "diplomatic source" implying a self-righteous British position of, "This will hurt me, but I may have no choice."

Prior to his meeting with the British leader, Netanyahu told reporters in London that the Fatah-Hamas agreement signed in Cairo was a "tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism. Three days ago, terrorism was dealt a resounding defeat with the elimination of Osama bin Laden; today, in Cairo, it had a victory."

The cost of living in the US rose at its fastest pace since December 2009 in the 12 months ended in March, the same month in which Chinese consumer prices rose by the most since 2008. The European Central Bank raised interest rates on April 7, joining China, India, Poland and Sweden in a bid to control inflation partly blamed on food costs. Costlier food also contributed to riots across northern Africa and the Middle East that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia this year.

World grain stocks will probably slide for a second year in the 12 months through June 2012 as corn consumption outpaces production and dry weather hurts wheat prospects in the US and the European Union, the International Grains Council said in a report April 20. "With demand continuing strongly, prospects for a return to more normal prices hinge largely on how much production will increase and how much grain reserves are replenished in the new season," David Hallam, the director of FAO's Trade and Market division, said in a statement.

The FAO's food-price index fell for eight months in a row after reaching its previous peak in June 2008, a situation that probably won't be repeated this year, Concepcion Calpe, an economist at the UN agency, said last month. "Very strong demand for food, feed and biofuel may mean prices will climb in coming months," she said. "A sliding dollar and increased oil prices are contributing to high food-commodity prices," Hallam said.

Activists, meanwhile, have vowed to stage a "Day of Defiance" on Friday. More than 500 Syrians are thought to have been killed since the protests started seven weeks ago. At least 2,500 others have been detained, although rights groups say the figure could be much higher. Foreign journalists are not allowed to enter the country, so it is difficult to verify the reports. The protests, which began on 15 March, pose the most serious challenge to four decades of rule by the Assad family in one of the Arab world's most repressive countries.

The military official said the army had completed its mission to "chase elements of terrorist groups... and to restore security, peace and stability". Since the weekend, almost 1,000 men have reportedly been rounded up in Deraa alone. Rights groups say that security officials conduct house-to-house raids, carrying lists of wanted people. If they do not find those listed, they arrest relatives instead. The government's position is that the demonstrators are militant criminals and not ordinary civilians calling for political reform.

A Syrian blogger who lives in Canada has told the BBC that Deraa is a "special case" and that protests in other parts of the country have been relatively small - drawing less than 1,000 people. Camille Otrakji says the majority of Syrians want serious change, but not regime change, and that President Assad himself is still very popular with large segments of the population. "Even those who want regime change know that it is not doable [because] we're going to end up with civil war or fundamentalism," Mr Otrakji told the BBC World Service by phone from Montreal.

But the government's use of violence - including live fire - against peaceful protesters has drawn international criticism. Speaking during a visit to Rome on Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Europe and the US had to work together in the interests of the Syrian people.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes "from a deep slumber" sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like "a bolt of lightning" and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services' systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to "everyday" items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs. Due to humans' heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and "potentially devastating" problems for governments.

"We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be," Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. "It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world. Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time." Dr Fisher added: "Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar effect."

Robin Scagell of the Society for Popular Astronomy said: "It's rare we get the chance to see an asteroid up close." If it were to hit the earth, the asteroid, named YU55, would have an impact equivalent to 65,000 atom bombs and would leave a crater more than six miles wide and 2,000ft deep. Passing by at a distance of just 201,000 miles, the asteroid will be the largest object ever to approach the earth so close. Nasa has officially labelled it a Potentially Hazardous Object, but have stressed there is no danger of impact while on its current course.

YU55 orbits the sun every 14 years and last passed the earth in April 2010 at a distance of 1.5 million years. There are currently 874 near earth asteroids which are considered to be potentially dangerous. They are closely monitored and the list is being constantly added to as astronomers discover new objects in near space. Scientists estimate that there is usually one large collision with earth every few hundred thousand years.

And now bin Laden's death, unarmed, at the hands of American troops has brought a new wave of contrasting emotional responses across the Atlantic. Jubilant Americans poured into Times Square to chant "USA, USA, USA!" and hit the Internet to snap up T-shirts reading "We Got Him" and "Hey Osama, Tell Hitler We Said Hello."

Europeans, also targeted by al Qaeda, kept satisfaction more contained, even if tabloid headlines - "Bin Bagged" and the like - were no less triumphant than in the United States. And, crucially, not a few began to question the legality and morality of the killing and the risk of revenge attacks. That attitude has simply outraged many Americans.

When Tony Metcalf, the British editor-in-chief of the Metro newspapers in the United States, ran a Reuters story on European qualms over what a former German chancellor called a breach of international law, "we knew it would cause a reaction." Writing on his blog on Wednesday, Metcalf said: "Given the celebrations around the US on Sunday evening, the objections from France, Germany, Spain and parts of the UK came as no surprise, and fitted neatly into many Americans' view of Europeans as a bunch of, well, cheese-eating surrender monkeys."

The country's unemployment rolls are shrinking fast, after expanding sharply last year as the government extended benefits to ease the pain of a deep economic slump. As of mid-March, about 8.5 million people were receiving some kind of unemployment payments, down from 11.5 million a year earlier, according to the Labor Department.

To some extent, the shrinkage reflects a desirable reality: Some people are leaving the unemployment rolls because they're finding jobs. The number of employed in March was up nearly 1 million from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department's household survey. That's the biggest year-over-year rise since late 2007.

Many Americans, though, are simply running out of time. As of March, about 14 million people were unemployed and looking for work, according to the household survey. At the time the survey was done, about 8.5 million were receiving some kind of unemployment payments, according to the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration. That leaves about 5.5 million people unemployed without benefits, up 1.4 million from a year earlier.

In the coming months, hundreds of thousands more will drop off the unemployment rolls. The number of people using up their regular 26 weeks of unemployment payments peaked in August 2009 at nearly 800,000 a month. That means a lot of people should be hitting their 99-week limit right about now. And unless Congress does something unexpected, more people with shorter bouts of unemployment will start joining them as the government phases out extended benefits next year.

"Because it appears that Congress will not act by May 16, it will be necessary for the Treasury to begin implementing these extraordinary measures this week," Geithner said in letters to House and Senate leaders. The latest steps will buy politicians more time than initially anticipated. Instead of running out of room July 8, Geithner said the Treasury Department now expects to be able to continue borrowing funds until August 2.

"While this updated estimate in theory gives Congress additional time to complete work in increasing the debt limit, I caution strongly against action," Geithner said. Geithner has repeatedly asked Congress to raise the $14.294 trillion limit, warning that failure to act would force a US default and an economic catastrophe.

Many Republicans and some Democrats first want a commitment to rein in spending and cut mounting budget deficits. "I am not going to vote for any long-term extension of the debt [ceiling] unless there is a credible and serious plan to deal with the debt," Senator Kent Conrad (Democrat for North Dakota), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said on Fox News Sunday.

The food stamp program ballooned during the recession as workers lost their jobs or saw their hours and income reduced. The rise in recipients has begun to flatten in recent months, which may mean that as the economy is improving fewer Americans are seeking to join the program. Enrollment in the program is still high though, with 11.6% more people tapping benefits in February than the same month a year earlier.

Food stamp numbers aren't seasonally adjusted though, meaning a variety of factors could influence the monthly tallies and the program could grow again in coming months. Mississippi and Oregon were among the states with the largest share of the population utilizing food stamps in February: At least one in five residents in each state were receiving benefits.

Gene Rench with the National Weather Service said all eyes are on the Mississippi. The tributaries flowing backwards are a big problem for the adjacent communities. "Right now the Mississippi river is in the process of going through what we call an epic flood, meaning it's more than historic, it's more than a 100 year flood, it's more like a 500 year flood," he said. "We could flood many homes, businesses, close down factories, people could drown."

The river is more than two feet past flood stage; it rose two feet in the 24 hours following the storms. It's expected to crest at 45 feet around May 10th, right when Barbecue Festival teams are setting up their tents. The Army Corps of Engineers is trying to out smart it by shutting down the Tennessee River and closing all other tributaries and dams that feed into the Mississippi.

According to Rench, "we're hoping and praying that with the plans and actions that the Corp has taken, this strategy is going to work." As the Mississippi River rises to near-record levels, Tunica's nine casinos will shut down indefinitely, displacing about 10,000 workers and costing millions in lost dollars. The closure orders were issued Wednesday to ensure the safety of visitors and workers.

Fires - fanned by strong winds and fuelled by dry wood and grass - also struck at the Queen's Balmoral Estate. Flames leapt 40 feet in the air as crews from Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire fought ferocious blazes that came close to Broadmoor top security hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire. Ramblers fled for their lives as the inferno swept across dry heath and forest land in Crowthorne Woods, Berkshire, with the smoke so thick it blotted out the sun. Some are thought to have been sparked by barbecues and careless disposal of matches. But arsonists are also being blamed.

The wildfires follow two of the driest spring months on record. Rivers are 'exceptionally' low for May across England and Wales. In Berkshire, three schools were closed and homes evacuated as fires ripped through Swinley Forest, driven by up to 45mph gusts. Choking smoke poured over nearby roads as 150 firefighters tackled the 750-acre forest fire just a few hundred yards from Broadmoor top security hospital, which houses dangerous patients including Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.

Fierce flames were whipped up by strong winds as two separate blazes took hold - one covering an area of one square mile. The fires have since spread to four areas, police said. Roads were closed and hundreds of residents were advised to keep their windows shut because of the dense smoke. A spokesman for the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service said: 'We expect to be fighting this fire for a couple of days and believe it will be the weekend before the land is handed back. This is the biggest forest fire we have had this early on in many, many years and we have called in all officers who were on holiday or on leave.'