Ahead of President Barack Obama's national address Monday to explain his decision to act against the Libyan leader, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in appearances on the Sunday talk shows that the intervention had effectively rendered Gaddafi's forces defenseless against air attacks and created the conditions for opposition advances westward.

In interviews taped Saturday, Gates and Clinton also defended the narrowly defined UN mandate to prevent atrocities against Libyan civilians and said the US had largely accomplished its goals. "We have taken out his armor," Gates said, adding that the US soon would relinquish its leading role in enforcing a no-fly zone and striking pro-Gaddafi ground targets intent on violence. Clinton said "we're beginning to see, because of the good work of the coalition, his troops begin to turn back toward the west - and to see the opposition begin to reclaim the ground they had lost."

Libyan rebels reclaimed an important oil town and kept pushed westward Sunday toward the capital, Tripoli. Brega, a main oil export terminal in eastern Libya, fell after a skirmish late Saturday. Rebel forces also seized the tiny desert town of Al-Egila on their way to the massive oil refining complex of Ras Lanouf.

US-led airstrikes allowed anti-government forces to recapture the key eastern city of Ajdabiya. NATO's top decision-making body was to meet Sunday to expand its enforcement of the no-fly zone to include air strikes against Libyan ground targets. The military progress follows deep criticism against Obama from lawmakers upset that the administration hadn't sought greater congressional input on Libya.

While some were happy to acknowledge them others refer to them as 'pseudepigrapha' - meaning a falsely attributed work - he wrote. In his new book, 'Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are', Professor Ehrman claims The Second Epistle of Peter - or 2 Peter - was forged.

'...scholars everywhere - except for our friends among the fundamentalists - will tell you that there is no way on God's green earth that Peter wrote the book. 'Someone else wrote it claiming to be Peter,' he writes.

Professor Ehrman then goes on to write how the Bible is actually filled with the need for 'truth' but many of its writers were telling a lie. 'It appears that some of the New Testament writers, such as the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy and Ephesians, felt they were perfectly justified to lie in order to tell the truth,' he writes. 'But we today can at least evaluate their claims and realise just how human, and fallible, they were.'

The anti-capitalists started fires and smashed their way into banks, hotels and shops, bringing chaos to Britain's busiest shopping street. Over 200 people were in custody today after the trouble flared following a separate rally where hundreds of thousands protested against the Government's public spending cuts. The Metropolitan Police later said at least 31 police officers were injured during the protests.

The violence began as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, addressed a TUC rally of at least 250,000 peaceful protesters in Hyde Park who had marched from Westminster to demonstrate against government spending cuts. As he spoke, an apparently co-ordinated attack began on shops and police in Oxford Street as a mob tried to storm into shops including Topshop, BHS and John Lewis.

Chris Heaton-Harris, a Tory MP, said Britain's reputation had been damaged by the "mindless thugs". Brendan Barber, the TUC general-secretary, said he "bitterly regretted" the violence but insisted that the march was important.

In 2007, the city lifted a cap on the number of psychics allowed to operate and now some believe the 'Witch City' is getting overrun. Barbara Szafranski is a long-time psychic license holder who conducts readings at her downtown shop Angelica of the Angels. She needed no crystal ball to tell her business would take a hit when more fortunetellers hit the scene.

"It affected me 75%. I lost business because many stores opened up that were not in this field. They just opened up because they wanted to get the money from the readings," said Szafranski. "It just becomes a bunch of gypsies. Maybe I shouldn't say that word because they might be upset by it but those people are not necessarily always qualified." She says Salem city leaders need to do a better job controlling the number of fortunetellers and preventing charlatans from operating.

Christian Day is a Salem warlock who owns two shops in the city, Omen and Hex. He employs psychic readers at both businesses and runs a psychic fair each year. He helped push the Salem city council to lift the cap on psychics and thinks the change offers a positive revenue stream for the area. "I feel like it creates this sort of sparkle effect where everybody's sort of raising the bar on one another and making everything more exciting," said Day.

Others say a major debt sell-off by Tokyo is unlikely, but noted that the mere fact that questions are being raised speaks volumes about the risks involved in relying so heavily on foreign investors to fund US debt.

"This natural disaster in Japan concerns me that it could speed up what's coming, because they are the second leading buyer of our debt," Senator Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, told The Washington Times. "Small degrees of differences in how much they buy of our debt, I think, can make a big difference in interest rates that we have to pay people to buy our debt."

With the federal government having piled up $14.2 trillion in debt, budget experts are warning that the country is on an unsustainable fiscal path. Congress, they say, must find cuts in all areas of the budget, while reforming the entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - that are the biggest drivers of national spending. Concerns about the financial plight facing Japan, which trails only China among foreign holders of US Treasury debt, aren't helping the picture.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.'s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world's best tax law firm. Indeed, the company's slogan "Imagination at Work" fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya". Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries". Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan". He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.

"The Islamists of al-Qaeda took advantage of the pillaging of arsenals in the rebel zone to acquire arms, including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries in Tenere," a desert region of the Sahara that stretches from northeast Niger to western Chad, Deby said in the interview.

"This is very serious. AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region," he said. His claim was echoed by officials in other countries in the region who said that they were worried that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) might have acquired "heavy weapons", thanks to the insurrection.

"We have sure information. We are very worried for the sub-region," a Malian security source who did not want to be named said. AQIM originated as an armed Islamist resistance movement to the secular Algerian government. It now operates mainly in Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where it has attacked military targets and taken civilian hostages, particularly Europeans, some of whom it has killed. "We have the same information," about heavy weapons, including SAM 7 missiles, a military source from Niger said. "It is very worrying. This overarming is a real danger for the whole zone," he added

The UN's nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months. It is believed the radiation at Fukushima is coming from one of the reactors, but a specific leak has not been identified. Leaking water at reactor 2 has been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/hour - 10 million times higher than when the plant is operating normally.

"We are examining the cause of this, but no work is being done there because of the high level of radiation," said a spokesman for the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco). "High levels of caesium and other substances are being detected, which usually should not be found in reactor water. There is a high possibility that fuel rods are being damaged," the spokesman added.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government said that airbone radiation around the plant was decreasing. Four of the reactors are still considered volatile.

The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl. The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside the plant.

"This is not surprising," says a researcher "When the fuel is damaged there is no reason for the volatile elements not to escape," and the measured caesium and iodine are in the right ratios for the fuel used by the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Also, the Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site, and an unknown amount has been damaged. The Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes

The organisation set up to verify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) has a global network of air samplers that monitor and trace the origin of around a dozen radionuclides, the radioactive elements released by atomic bomb blasts - and nuclear accidents. These measurements can be combined with wind observations to track where the radionuclides come from, and how much was released. The amounts being released are "entirely consistent" with the relatively low amounts of caesium and iodine being measured in soil, plants and water in Japan, because so much has blown out to sea. The amounts crossing the Pacific to places like Sacramento are vanishingly small - they were detected there because the CTBT network is designed to sniff out the tiniest traces.

Iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid, and leaves only as it decays radioactively, with a half-life of eight days. Caesium is absorbed by muscles, where its half-life of 30 years means that it remains until it is excreted by the body. It takes between 10 and 100 days to excrete half of what has been consumed.

While in the body the isotopes' radioactive emissions can do significant damage, mainly to DNA. Children who ingest iodine-131 can develop thyroid cancer 10 or more years later; adults seem relatively resistant. A study published in the US last week found that iodine-131 from Chernobyl is still causing new cases of thyroid cancer to appear at an undiminished rate in the most heavily affected regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Contaminated water likely seeped through the containment vessel protecting from the reactor's core, said Hidehiko Nishiyama of the Japan nuclear and industrial safety agency. Three men working inside the No. 3 reactor stepped into water this week that had 10,000 times the amount of radiation typical for that locale, Nishiyama said. That water likely indicates "some sort of leakage" from the reactor core, signaling a possible break of the containment vessel that houses the core.

The containment vessel is designed to prevent radioactive material from escaping into the atmosphere, even if other parts of the reactor are damaged. A rupture in the containment vessel could pose problems for workers who are trying to prevent that, depending on its severity. The three workers who were exposed to radiation by stepping in the contaminated water had the highest levels of radiation recorded so far, said Tokyo Electric Power Co, which owns the plant.

The incident raised questions about radiation control measures at the plant as 536 people - including government authorities and firefighters - continued working there Friday, according to an official with Tokyo Electric.

Soldiers fired in the air to hold back Saleh loyalists when they tried to march on the opposition rally. In his speech, the president - who has been in office for more than three decades - condemned bloodshed but also urged his supporters to "stand firm". He earlier denied that government forces had played any part in the shooting of demonstrators last week. Amnesty International has warned the government against any further use of "deadly force", saying: "The government cannot just shoot its way out of this crisis."

Both the government and opposition have set up checkpoints in Sanaa and the streets are full of armed men. There is real fear of a new confrontation, a BBC correspondent reports from the city. According to an AFP news agency report, Friday's crowds number in the hundreds of thousands.

President Saleh, dressed in a smart suit and sunglasses, took the microphone before a huge crowd. "We don't want power but we need to hand power over to safe hands, not to sick, resentful or corrupt hands," he said. "We are against firing a single bullet and when we give concessions, this is to ensure there is no bloodshed," he added. "We will remain steadfast and challenge them with all power we have."

Some Saleh loyalists were carrying guns and waving traditional Yemeni daggers at Friday's rally, Reuters news agency reports. Amnesty International responded on Friday by saying: "After the horrific killing of dozens of protesters last Friday, it is incredibly disturbing that Yemen's leaders have given the security forces more powers through a new emergency law instead of reining them in."

Yemen is one of a number of countries in the region that have seen unrest since the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia were ousted in popular revolts.

It was not immediately clear how Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz and Israeli lawmaker Danny Danon responded to Palin's puzzler. But the issue of public prayer is touchy at the Temple Mount because the site is holy to both Jews and Muslims. Palin, a failed GOP vice-presidential candidate, arrived in Israel on Sunday after a visit to India.

"Israel is absolutely beautiful and it is overwhelming to see and touch the cornerstone of our faith and I am so grateful to get to be here," said Palin, a Born Again Christian. "I'm very thankful to know that the Israeli and American link will grow in strength as we seek peace along with you."

Palin, who is due to meet later Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is the latest GOP possible presidential candidate to seek an audience with the Israeli leader. The former Alaska governor has been criticized for being a lightweight when it comes to foreign policy.

One of the effects of relatively high inflation is to ease the burden of debt by reducing its real value. For a highly indebted nation such as Britain, inflation therefore seems to make sense as an economic strategy. With no control over their own monetary policy, the Portuguese and other fiscally-challenged eurozone nations don't have that luxury. Without inflation to do the work for them, the austerity required to get public debt under control becomes that much greater, which is one of the reasons why Portugal will soon be following Greece and Ireland into seeking a bail-out. Britain, by contrast, gets a relatively pain-free way out of the mire.

One of the biggest shockers from the detail of Thursday's OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) assessment is the escalating amount of money going straight down the drain of debt servicing costs. As public debt rises, these payments rise from 30.9 billion pounds last year to 66.8 billion pounds in 2015/16, or from 4.6 per cent to 8.8 per cent of all government spending.

Worse, these numbers are an understatement of the true position. According to data aired at a Taxpayers' Alliance seminar on Thursday, once private finance initiative payments, public sector pensions and other off-balance sheet liabilities are taken into account, the true size of the interest bill will be more like 200 billion pounds by the end of the Parliament. I won't trouble you with the projected costs of social security and tax credits, but they are little less alarming.

Still, Buffett said he believes there will be "huge efforts" put forth to preserve the euro. In the meantime, struggling peripheral countries like Portugal must find a way to resolve fiscal crises. "You can't have three or four or five countries that are in effect free-riding on the other countries. That won't work over time - they have to get their fiscal houses in reasonable harmony," he said.

The widely-watched investor spoke as yields on Portuguese bonds soared to new highs and markets remained alert for a potential European Union bailout of the troubled nation. Late Wednesday, Portugal's prime minister stepped down after the country's parliament rejected a fiscal austerity plan proposed by his government. "It isn't the end of the world, but alot of adjustment would be needed if the euro proved to be in real trouble," he said.