In the Russian capital, Moscow, temperatures dropped to -23.6C (-10.5F), the lowest on record for 1 December since 1931. In Poland it was even colder, with the eastern city of Bialystok registering temperatures of -26C (-14.8F). Police in the country appealed to the public to get in touch if they found any homeless people living outdoors after eight homeless men were found frozen to death.

In Britain, thousands of schools were closed and police in the southern county of Surrey described conditions as the worst they had ever seen. The Met Office has issued heavy snow warnings for much of the eastern side of Britain and some central areas. Passengers faced delays of up to an hour on Eurostar services linking London with Paris and Brussels. One of Britain's busiest airports, Gatwick, was closed, as was Edinburgh airport. Geneva airport in Switzerland and Lyon-Bron airport in southern France were also closed as staff struggled to clear runways of snow.

There were severe flight delays reported in Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Prague. In France, 12 regions in the frozen east and centre banned the use of lorries, forcing more than 7,000 of them to park overnight. Thick snow across Germany blocked roads, and caused flight cancellations and school closures. Bild newspaper said it was the coldest start to December for centuries, with some areas reporting temperatures as low as -18C (-0.4F).

While the north of the continent shivered, though, it was a different picture in parts of southern Europe, with Cyprus enjoying an unseasonably warm start to December and clocking temperatures close to 30C (86F).

The legislation, which passed by a vote of 73 to 25, would greatly strengthen the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that in recent decades focused more on policing medical products than ensuring the safety of food. The bill is intended to keep unsafe foods from reaching markets and restaurants, where they can make people sick - a change from the current practice, which mainly involves cracking down after outbreaks occur.

Among the Senate bill's last major sticking points was how it would affect small farmers and food producers. Some advocates for small farms and organic food producers said the legislation would destroy their industry under a mountain of paperwork. Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, pushed for a recent addition to the bill that exempts producers with less than $500,000 in annual sales who sell most of their food locally.

The bill gives the agency more control over food imports, including increased inspection of foreign processing plants and the ability to set standards for how fruits and vegetables are grown abroad. As food suppliers grow in size, problems at one facility can sicken thousands of people all over the country. The bill would give the FDA the power to demand immediate food recalls.

Interpol placed Julian Assange on its most-wanted list after Sweden issued an arrest warrant against him as part of a drawn-out rape probe - involving allegations Assange has denied. The Interpol alert is likely to make international travel more difficult for Assange, whose whereabouts are publicly unknown. In Washington, the State Department severed its computer files from the government's classified network, officials said, as US and world leaders tried to clean up from the leak that sent America's sensitive documents onto computer screens around the globe.

By temporarily pulling the plug, the US significantly reduced the number of government employees who can read important diplomatic messages. It was an extraordinary hunkering down, prompted by the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of those messages this week by WikiLeaks, the self-styled whistleblower organization.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates played down the fallout from the leaks, calling them embarrassing and awkward but saying they would not significantly complicate US foreign policy. "The fact is governments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us and not because they think we can keep secrets," Gates said Monday.

Congress could take up the issue as early as Tuesday. Even if both houses of Congress move quickly, there will still be administrative odds and ends that will likely delay checks for at least a few weeks. "There aren't any jobs out here. People come out here everyday. Half of these people don't have any money to buy their kids any Christmas. They didn't even have Thanksgiving. It's pitiful," said Izile Leucas, who is unemployed.

"Going into the holiday season, they're all concerned. They're wondering how they're going to provide for their kids over Christmas and that's a sad story. It's a sad situation. We can just stress to them that we will do everything we can to help them find a job," said Gary Wise with the Office of Employment and training. A rushed effort to fund extended benefits failed in Congress earlier this month.

The National Secular Society said "zealots" were wrong to claim the faith was being deliberately undermined. The day, organised by Christian Concern, will kick off a campaign to urge Christians to "wear their faith with pride". Lord Carey will launch a leaflet that warns Britain's Christian culture is "under attack". Later in the day copies will be delivered to Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, followed by a lobbying event in Parliament. Lord Carey said hostility towards the religion came from a combination of "well-meaning" political correctness, multiculturalism and "overt opposition to Christianity".

Lord Carey said the attempt to "airbrush" the Christian faith "out of the picture" was more obvious as Christmas approaches. He cited cards bearing "season's greetings" messages, school nativity plays being "watered down" and local councils switching on "winter lights" in place of Christmas decorations. "Even Christmas has become something of which some are ashamed."

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said, " "Apparently 'multiculturalism' 'secularism' and 'political correctness' are seen as the culprits, but in reality people are walking away from Christianity because it has become unpleasant and authoritarian. Nobody is forcing them not to go to church, they simply don't see its relevance. The people behind this campaign are determined and well-financed, but that doesn't make what they say true,"

On Tuesday, traffic to the site went to Amazon.com's server-for-rent service, based in the US. The site, which distributed a trove of US diplomatic documents on Sunday, said in a Twitter message on Tuesday morning that it was under a "distributed denial of service attack," a method commonly used by hackers to slow down or bring down sites. WikiLeaks didn't identify the attackers. "We are currently under a DDOS attack," according to one tweet early Tuesday. Shortly after 9am, another tweet was sent, saying, "DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second."

The site, which is devoted to releasing anonymously submitted documents, also came under attack Sunday, but Tuesday's attack appeared to be more powerful.

Calls to Amazon.com were not immediately returned. Bahnhof, the Swedish Internet company that has been WikiLeaks' main host, had no immediate comment on Tuesday. In a typical denial-of-service attack, remote computers commandeered by rogue programs bombard a website with so many data packets that it becomes overwhelmed and unavailable to visitors. Pinpointing the culprits is difficult.

WikiLeaks said the malicious traffic was coming in at 10 gigabits per second on Tuesday, which would make it a relatively large effort. According to a study by Internet security company Arbor Networks, the average denial of service attack over the past year was 349 megabits per second, 28 times slower than the stream Wikileaks reported.

Two days after the bloc approved an 85 billion euro ($111.7 billion) emergency aid package for Ireland, worries about Portugal and Spain persisted and the borrowing costs of countries like Italy, BELGIUM AND FRANCE SHOT HIGHER. Markets are already discounting an eventual rescue of Portugal although, as Ireland did, it says it requires no outside help.

Should its much larger neighbor Spain require assistance, it would sorely test the resources of the bloc and raise questions about the integrity of the 12-year old single currency area. "Markets are very nervous and may even target situations that do not warrant such excessive worrying, hence no one can really predict," Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa, a former Italian finance minister and ECB member, told a Greek newspaper when asked whether the EU would be able to save Spain.

"In my opinion, conditions in Spain are such that there is absolutely no reason to expect that it will be targeted. I repeat, however, that markets are in a very nervous mood." Italy, which most analysts see as at lesser risk, is now being referred to as "TOO BIG TO FAIL" AND "TOO BIG TO BAIL."

The EU-IMF rescue for Ireland has failed to restore to confidence in the eurozone debt markets, leading instead to a dramatic surge in bond yields across half the currency bloc. The euro fell sharply to a two-month low of 1.3064 against the dollar, while bourses slid across the world. The FTSE 100 fell almost 118 points to 5,550, while the Dow was off 120 points in early trading.

"The crisis is intensifying and worsening," said Nick Matthews, a credit expert at RBS. "Bond purchases by the European Central Bank are the only anti-contagion weapon left. It needs to act much more aggressively." Yields on 10-year Italian bonds jumped 21 points to 4.61 per cent, threatening to shift the crisis to a new level. Italy's public debt is over 2 trillion euros, the world's third-largest after the US and Japan.

"The EU rescue fund cannot handle Spain, let alone Italy," said Charles Dumas, from Lombard Street Research. "We we may be nearing the point where Germany has to decide whether it is willing take on a burden six times the size of East Germany, or let some countries go."

But the cost to any country of leaving the euro zone would be so high, and the damage that an exit would inflict on the currency and the remaining members so great, that no government would rationally choose to secede, or to push another out. Argentina's 2001-2002 economic crisis and $100 billion bond default, which reduced millions of people to poverty, would pale in comparison with the likely chain reaction across Europe.

"There would be chain bankruptcies. A run on the banks would be certain. It would be far worse than Argentina," said Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the Brussels economic think-tank Bruegel. The "costs of the non-euro," as they are sometimes called by Brussels insiders, would be multiple: political, economic, social, reputational and strategic.

It is hard to imagine the EU's single market in goods, services, capital and labor - the foundation stone of European prosperity - remaining intact if countries quit the euro, triggering disorderly devaluations and chaotic financial flows. The exit of a state such as Greece, Ireland or Portugal, or the imagined departure of economic giant Germany, would cause immense bitterness and could revive national conflicts that European unification was meant to bury forever.

Germany, which sells more than 50 percent of its exports to the euro zone, would lose vital markets and likely end up with a overvalued currency that would impede its international economic competitiveness. "The political consequences would be dreadful. There would be almighty recriminations. A country that left the euro would no longer be friends with the others," Pisani-Ferry said.

The euro's respite rally was brief in the early hours of Monday's trading and European shares closed at a seven-week low, with banks among the losers as investor optimism over Ireland's debt bailout faded.

Yields on Irish government bonds were higher than Friday's close and off their lows seen in early trade after the agreement was sealed on Sunday. The spreads between Spanish and Italian bonds versus their German equivalent widened to euro-lifetime highs as optimism for the Irish deal waned.

Credit default swap costs on Portugal and Spain both hit record highs on Monday on fears they may be next in line to struggle with their debt. "The benefits to Portugal and Ireland can be seen, but they're marginal. On the other hand, there is concern about the rest, with the spreads for Belgium, Italy and Spain all widening," Monument Securities strategist Marc Ostwald said.

"It just goes to reinforce the point that the market says 'when is the next problem going to occur?' And that is not going away," he added.

The justices without comment Monday rejected a challenge from Charles Kerchner Jr, a Pennsylvania man who sought a trial in federal court forcing the president to produce documents regarding his birth and citizenship. Kerchner's attorney, Mario Apuzzo, had argued in a petition with the Supreme Court that Obama did not fit the definition of a "natural-born citizen" required for the nation's highest office, as defined by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.

That clause states, "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

Kerchner, a retired military officer who describes himself on his website as a "genetic genealogy pioneer," argues the framers of the 1789 document intended a "natural-born" citizen to mean someone born in the US to parents who were both American citizens. The high court and other courts had dismissed earlier, unrelated lawsuits from individuals questioning Obama's citizenship.

"We have one related to a bank coming up, that's a megaleak. It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it," Assange said in the interview posted on the Forbes website. He declined to identify the bank, describing it only as a major US bank that is still in existence.

Asked what he wanted to be the result of the disclosure, he replied: "I'm not sure. It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume." He compared this release to emails that were unveiled as a result of the collapse of disgraced energy company Enron Corp.

"This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos... and that's tremendously valuable," Assange said. "You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest," he said.

Julian Assange, the Australian who heads the secret-sharing Web site, told ABC News today he believes his safety and freedom are in danger. He responded to questions by email from a clandestine hideout. He was undaunted by vows from the US and Australia to prosecute him and said the forthcoming diplomatic cables are aimed at "lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil."

"We're only one thousandth of the way in and look at what has so far being revealed. There will be many more," he wrote defiantly. Assange also dismissed a warning today by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who said the dump of secret documents "puts peoples lives in danger," particularly those sources who provided the US with information about abuses in foreign countries.

"US officials have for 50 years trotted out this line when they are afraid the public is going to see how they really behave," Assange said in his email. "The facts are that we wrote to the State Department asking for a list of any specific concerns that they might have. They refused to assist, and said they demanded everything, including those documents that revealed abuses, be destroyed."

News of the Chinese shift comes at a crucial juncture after the North's artillery bombardment of a South Korean island last week that killed four people and led both sides to threaten war. China has refused to condemn the North Korean action. But today Beijing appeared to bow to US pressure to help bring about a diplomatic solution, calling for "emergency consultations" and inviting a senior North Korean official to Beijing.

China is sharply critical of US pressure tactics towards North Korea and wants a resumption of the six-party nuclear disarmament talks. But the Guardian can reveal Beijing's frustration with Pyongyang has grown since its missile and nuclear tests last year, worries about the economic impact of regional instability, and fears that the death of the dictator, Kim Jong-il, could spark a succession struggle.

China's moves to distance itself from Kim are revealed in the latest tranche of leaked US embassy cables published by the Guardian and four international newspapers. Tonight, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said the US "deeply regrets" the release of the material by WikiLeaks. They were an "attack on the international community", she said. "It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems," she told reporters at the state department.

King wrote in a letter to Clinton, which has been seen by the website. "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States." Senator Joseph Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has likewise called for WikiLeaks to be shut down. "By disseminating these materials, WikiLeaks is putting at risk the lives and the freedom of countless Americans and non-Americans around the world. It is an outrageous, reckless and despicable action."

Over 1,700 of the newly released documents originated in the US Embassy in Berlin, and many of them are no less complimentary of German politicians than they are of Berlusconi. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is referred to as "risk averse and rarely creative." She also, one of the Berlin dispatches makes clear, "seems uncertain at times" in her relations with Obama. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is described in a September 18, 2009 cable as being short on substance, lacking in "gravitas," vain, arrogant, critical of America and "too opportunistic to be trusted as foreign minister." He is, one of the dispatches says, an "enigma" who faces a "steep learning curve" on foreign policy issues.

Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer, head of the Christian Social Union, the sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats, is seen as having "only shallow foreign policy expertise" and is "uninformed about basic things." A cable notes that he has "natural instincts to utter populist pronouncements."