He said Turkey no longer trusted its former ally, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. The UN says more than 3,500 people have died since the start of the protests against Mr Assad in March. The Syrian authorities blame the violence on armed gangs and militants. On Monday, at least 20 people died including two women and a child, with the highest number of deaths near the flashpoint city of Homs, activists from the Local Co-Ordination Committees said in a statement.

Mr Gul said that the Syrian regime had now reached a "dead end" and that the country was prepared for the worst-cast scenario. "[In] this age, authoritarian regimes or one-party rule are no longer acceptable, first by the people of that country, and of course, [by] the region and the world." His comments echo those of the country's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has said Syria's future cannot be built on "the blood of the oppressed" and come as European states launched a fresh attempt to bring Syria before the UN Security Council.

The UN General Assembly's human rights committee is expected to vote on Tuesday on a resolution condemning the crackdown on protesters. The resolution, proposed by Germany, France and Britain, sparked accusations from the Syrian government envoy to the UN that Europe was suffering from "Syria-phobia," AFP reports.

"We don't want to interfere in Syrian domestic issues but since this is happening in our neighbourhood, since the Syrian people are our friends and since we wish them well, we cannot be indifferent." But he said Turkey would have no doubts about defending itself from any attacks on Turkish interests in the country.

At least 26 people have been killed and hundreds injured in three days of protests against the military rulers. Amnesty International has criticised the military for failing to keep its promise to improve human rights. Late on Monday some 20,000 people were estimated to have thronged Tahrir Square after the cabinet of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf announced its offer to resign. Their numbers were far short of the hundreds of thousands whose demonstrations in the square earlier in the year led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak as president after 30 years in power.

In a report published on Tuesday, Amnesty International said Egypt's military rulers had "completely failed to live up their promises to Egyptians to improve human rights". Amnesty said the military council had carried on many of the abusive tactics of the Hosni Mubarak era, including torture of suspects, targeting critics and banning critical media. "The euphoria of the uprising has been replaced by fears that one repressive rule has simply been replaced with another," Amnesty said

Analysis by Jon Leyne - BBC News, Cairo: "This situation is going in almost no direction now. Both sides continue to do what they are doing. The demonstrators go for the police, and the police fire back at least with tear gas and buckshots, if not live ammunition, so the casualty toll continues to increase. This is almost a rudderless situation. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, says the state is collapsing, and I think that's a very perceptive analysis."

The outcome means automatic cuts outlined in the bill that created the committee should take effect from 2013. The US national debt has just risen above $15 trillion. The panel was set up in August, the result of a last-minute deal between the two sides in Congress to raise the debt ceiling and avert a default on US debt payments.

Adam Brookes, BBC News, Washington, writes:- "America is not about to default on its debts, but we've just seen default of a sort - by Congress, on its responsibilities. Americans are already aghast at their elected representatives' inability to agree on how to heal the nation's finances. The spectacle of the super-committee's failure will only cause them to slump deeper in their seats."

"Now, supposedly, the so-called sequestration cuts kick in. They start in 2013, more than a trillion dollars worth, half of which will come from the military budget, the rest distributed across the federal government. These cuts are a sort of fiendish Plan B. They were designed to come into effect only if the super-committee failed. Nobody really wants them. Some in Congress are already muttering about undoing them. President Obama says he will force them through."

"So look for fierce clashes over the future of those tax cuts enacted by President George W Bush. Look for ferocious lobbying by the defence industry. Look for howls of anger at cuts in federal education funding, and medical and welfare benefits for the elderly and poor. And much, much more. The deficit battle has been joined, and on this terrain will the presidential election be fought."

Now, the cracked marble tombstone engraved with the date October 15, 1882, which is normally covered by 20 to 30 feet of water, has been eerily exposed as a yearlong drought shrinks one of Texas' largest lakes. Across the state, receding lakes have revealed a prehistoric skull, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to contain the graves of freed slaves. Some of the discoveries have attracted interest from local historians, and looters also have scavenged for pieces of history. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at one site.

"In an odd way, this drought has provided an opportunity to view and document, where appropriate, some of these finds and understand what they consist of," said Pat Mercado-Allinger, the Texas Historical Commission's archeological division director. "Most people in Texas probably didn't realize what was under these lakes." Texas finished its driest 12 months ever with an average of 8.5 inches of rain through September, nearly 13 inches below normal. Water levels in the region's lakes, most of which were manmade, have dropped by more than a dozen feet in many cases.

The vanishing water has revealed the long-submerged building foundations of Woodville, Oklahoma, which was flooded in 1944 when the Red River was dammed to form Lake Texoma. A century-old church has emerged at Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border on the Rio Grande. Other depleted lakes across Texas are revealing much older artifacts. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at Lake Whitney, about 50 miles south of Fort Worth, for removing Native American tools and fossils that experts believe could be thousands of years old.

"I don't think that that is a subject for public discussion," he said. "But I can tell you that the IAEA report has a sobering impact on many in the world, leaders as well as the publics, and people understand that the time has come." The International Atomic Energy Agency published a report on November 8 saying there was "credible" information that Iran was carrying out "activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device."

On Friday the IAEA's board passed a resolution condemning Iran's nuclear activities, but stopped short of reporting Tehran to the United Nations and issuing no deadline for compliance. "People understand now that Iran is determined to reach nuclear weapons," said Barak. There is "no other possible or conceivable explanation for what they have been actually doing. And that should be stopped."

The IAEA report - based on "broadly, credible" intelligence, its own information and some input from Iran itself - said that Iran had examined how to fit out a Shahab 3 missile, with a range capable of reaching Israel, with a nuclear warhead.

Michele Bachmann (Republican for Minnesota) has introduced a similar federal bill, The Heartbeat Informed Consent Act, in Congress. When the Supreme Court decided Roe, critics of abortion vowed to get it overturned. They have not succeeded in that. But they have managed to pass a wide array of laws - some upheld by the courts, others struck down - making access to abortion more difficult. The Supreme Court has ruled that states can impose some restrictions, such as 24-hour waiting periods and parental consent requirements, but has struck down others, such as laws forcing women to notify their spouses. The heartbeat laws are the latest effort in a decades-long campaign that - as conservatives gain strength at the state level - appears to be gaining ground.

Recently, abortion opponents have been pushing some tough new restrictions - and prompting lawsuits over whether they go too far. Five states - Indiana, Kansas, Alabama, Idaho, and Oklahoma - have adopted laws that ban almost all abortions after the five-month mark. Meanwhile, Ohio is considering enacting the most extreme anti-abortion law in the nation. Its House of Representatives has voted for a bill that would ban all abortions once a heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks. That is a frontal assault on Roe, which recognized a right to abortion until "viability," the point - around the 22nd week - when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The new heartbeat bills don't go quite as far - they would simply require abortion providers to make the fetus's heartbeat audible to a woman seeking an abortion. Supporters argue that making the woman listen to the heartbeat - or look at an ultrasound image of the fetus, as Bachmann's bill also requires - is important for true "informed consent." They also believe that women who are provided with this kind of information are less likely to end their pregnancies. One thing seems inevitable: more fights over how far the states can go to rein in the constitutional right to abortion.

The immediate destiny of this country lies entirely in the hands of Germany, the AAA creditor core, the EU authorities, and the European Central Bank, the nexus of policy-making power that together dictates whether Spain will be thrown a lifeline or be pushed further into depression and social catastrophe. What can the quiet Galician do to stop Spain's 22.6 per cent unemployment rate - or 46 per cent for youth - from ratcheting higher this winter as the combined effects of fiscal austerity and a credit crunch together do their worst? How can he stop real M1 deposits contracting at a 5 per cent rate.

Spain is a disquieting story for northern neo-Calvinists, still clinging to their morality tale of what went wrong with monetary union, a belief that feckless Greco-Latins borrowed their way to disaster, and that Teutonic virtue for all is the path to redemption. Philip Whyte and Simon Tilford argue in a paper for the Centre for European Reform (CER) that this is a "damagingly partial and self-serving" version of events.

"It wrongly assigns all the blame for peripheral indebtedness to government profligacy; it makes no mention of the far from innocent role played by creditor countries in the run-up to the crisis. The result was an explosion of current-account imbalances inside the eurozone. As a share of GDP, these imbalances were far bigger than those between the US and China," they said. More than any other country, Spain exposes the lie behind this German narrative. It did not cheat, like Greece. It did not breach the Maastricht Treaty's 60 per cent debt ceiling like Italy (or Germany itself). Its public debt was 36 per cent of GDP before the Great Recession. It ran a budget surplus of almost 2 per cent of GDP in 2007 and 2008.

We can all agree that Spain has been far too slow to dismantle its Franco-era apparatus of labour privileges, or to end the inflation-linked wage rises eating away at intra-EMU competitiveness. But that is just one aspect of the story. "The eurozone crisis is as much a tale of excess bank leverage and poor risk management in the core as of excess consumption and wasteful investment in the periphery," said the CER paper.

Indeed, Spain has been the biggest victim of cheap capital from German, Dutch, and French banks. It was further destabilized by the loose policies of the European Central Bank. If Germany genuinely wishes to save Spain and Italy, it must allow EMU-wide reflation and mobilize the ECB as a lender of last resort to halt the bond crisis, since the EFSF rescue fund does not exist. In the meantime, one can only watch with grim foreboding as the fifth successive government collapses in Europe's arc of depression, to be replaced by saviours who can save nothing.

He also criticised plans, backed by the Government, for the 17 countries in the eurozone to move closer towards fiscal union as undemocratic. He said: 'What I don't think you can do is pretend that you can create an economic government of Europe, effectively run by Germany.' Mr Johnson also condemned the recent replacement of elected leaders in Greece and Italy with governments led by technocrats as 'completely mad'.

Mr Cameron has called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to use the European Central Bank to prop up struggling southern European economies - potentially by printing money. But in a newspaper interview, Mr Johnson said: 'This idea that if we can find a big enough bazooka, we could blow away the problem by creating a euro government in which there will be shared fiscal responsibility, I'm afraid that really will, in the long-term, simply exacerbate the problem.'

Instead, he proposed that the eurozone should split - one part including stronger economies such as Germany, and the other weaker, mainly southern states. Alternatively, struggling economies should be allowed to leave the eurozone, devaluing their currencies, before deciding whether to try to rejoin. Mr Johnson's remarks come just weeks after he goaded Mr Cameron by saying a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU would be a 'good idea'.

In a landmark judgment, Mr Justice Bean upheld the appeal of a foul-mouthed thug who was convicted for repeatedly using the f-word while being searched by police. The ruling paves the way for scores of other louts to challenge their convictions for public order offences - and could force police to pay them compensation for wrongful arrest. The decision, which provoked outrage among police, comes just weeks after the London Mayor Boris Johnson and Britain's most senior policeman called for a zero-tolerance crackdown on those who abuse officers.

The case was brought by Denzel Harvey, who was fined 50 pounds at Thames Youth Court for repeatedly swearing at officers while he was being searched for cannabis in 2009. Mr Harvey was arrested for the outburst, and magistrates found him guilty of a public order offence after hearing that the expletives were uttered in a public area while a group of teenage bystanders gathered round. But the conviction was quashed at the High Court, with Mr Justice Bean saying the 'rather commonplace' expletive is heard 'all too frequently'.

He claimed it was 'quite impossible to infer that the group of young people who were in the vicinity were likely to have experienced alarm or distress at hearing these rather commonplace swear words used'. Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, said yesterday: 'It's astounding that you can use every swear word to abuse a police officer and they have got to accept it just because it is common. This gives the green light for everyone to swear and use disorderly behaviour with police.'

Letting the youngsters dress up in 'mini-me' sexy clothing is a sign of our society's eroded moral values, Dr Helen Wright will say today. Treating girls in this way is 'intensely wrong', according to Dr Wright, head of the Girls' Schools Association. But she will point out that mothers and fathers are not solely to blame for the sexualisation of their daughters.

Parents are subjected to a barrage of near-pornographic images - such as those on ITV's X Factor. And, because they have been failed by a poor education, lacking in the teaching of moral standards, they are unable to see that it is wrong. Furthermore she will say many parents, who themselves have no respect for their elders, have 'no idea' how to bring up their own children. The comments come just weeks after Sir Michael Wilshaw, incoming head of Ofsted, warned that schools were being forced to act as 'surrogate families' to some children because mothers and fathers lacked parenting skills.

Dr Wright will tell delegates at the GSA conference in Bristol today: 'There are all these images in magazines and TV - if you're bombarded with that, you're going to think it's normal, and actually it's not. It's becoming twisted. Some parents have been so deprived in their own lives of education and values that they no longer know right from wrong, and that they are, as a result, unwittingly 'indulging' children in some parallel universe where it is acceptable to let young children wear make-up and provocative clothing.'

"It hits me not only financially but emotionally," Simone De Vos, 84, the widow of a forced labourer told the Gazet Van Antwerpen. "My late husband had anxiety attacks for decades after his time in Germany. It is outrageous that the Germans now want money back." According to media reports in Belgium, the German authorities last year passed a law stating that pensions for former slave labourers would be taxed at the rate of 17 per cent.

The tax has been applied retroactively from 2005 meaning those Belgian survivors of Nazism or their widows awarded pensions by Germany as a form of compensation now face large bills.

In late 1942 the Nazis launched a programme of forced labour in the occupied countries in order to keep the German war industry going. Millions of people were forced to work in Germany, including 200,000 Belgians, in slave labour conditions. It is not known if French, Dutch, Italian, Polish or other survivors will face tax bills on their pensions.

Spain's new leader vowed to battle "against the crisis" but warned there "would be no miracles" as his conservative party swept to victory in Sunday's general election. "We are facing a decisive moment for Spain," Mariano Rajoy, the next prime minister, said in a televised acceptance speech in front of jubilant supporters in downtown Madrid. "We are at a crossroads that will shape the future of this great country not just in the next few years but the next few decades."

Victorious crowds gathered outside PP headquarters turning the street into a sea of blue party flags, their cheers drowning out the euro-pop being blasted out over loudspeakers. The socialists suffered their biggest defeat since Spain became a democracy more than 30 years ago, punished by an electorate for their perceived bungling of the economic crisis that has left 5 million unemployed.

Analysts welcomed the result as a positive step for Spain. "The fact the PP has won by a large majority is a very good sign for the markets," said Teresa Sadaba, professor of economics at Spain's IESE Business School. "It means stability. The best scenario now would be for Spain to announce some new emergency austerity measures but I am not sure whether this will happen or not."

Remember Henry Kissinger's domino theory? The former US secretary of state feared that the neighbors of a state that was under the control of the Soviet Union would also fall into Moscow's sphere of influence. Today, the theory that used to be applied to communism can be seen on the bond markets of Europe. The sovereign bonds of more and more euro-zone countries are coming under attack. Soon, one country after another might topple.

The reason for this desperate situation is the catastrophic crisis management in Europe. The German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said that only fools learned from their own mistakes - he preferred to learn from the mistakes of others. At the moment, no politician or adviser in Europe has bothered to learn the lessons of the Argentine or Asian debt crises. Indeed, in Europe, they aren't even learning from their own mistakes.

The public chatter about a possible Greek exit from the euro zone is one example of how they are repeating their mistakes. In the summer, the impact of the participation of private investors in a debt restructuring was recklessly underestimated. Now, they are underestimating the consequences of Greece's leaving the common currency. In Germany, these matters will continue to be debated, commented upon and processed. Meanwhile the dominos will continue toppling. And that's the point when there will no longer be any alternative in Germany but to accept the unpopular euro bonds as well as the much more unpopular price guarantees via the ECB.

Indeed, one of the most important lessons to be drawn from the policies that Argentina followed during its currency crisis at the turn of the millennium is that - one way or another - crises have to be solved early and decisively. The longer one waits, the more expensive things get for everyone involved. But this lesson doesn't seem to be one that has been internalized by the German government, the European Union or the ECB. In fact, Chancellor Merkel and her colleagues only take action when the markets have already started to panic. When that happens, all of the entreaties and pledges don't help a bit. And, once the last domino falls, we can all kiss the euro goodbye.

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called "near poor" and sometimes simply overlooked - and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people - one in three Americans - either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood - quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.

Fear that the single currency may break up now risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Banks and investors are beginning to act as if the single currency might fall apart. Politicians and the European Central Bank need to restore belief that the single currency is here to stay. Otherwise, it could unravel pretty fast. Until a few weeks ago, the idea that the euro wouldn't survive the current debt crisis was a fringe view. Since the euro summit on October 26-27, it has become a mainstream scenario. So much so that last week risk premiums on the bonds of even triple-A rated countries such as France and Austria rose to record levels, while Spain became the latest country to be sucked into the danger zone.

The summit itself made two technical decisions which have had damaging, unintended consequences. First, banks underwent a stress test that marked their sovereign bond exposures to market whereas previously regulators maintained the fiction that these positions were risk-free. This meant that lenders suddenly had to start holding capital to back their sovereign debt investments. Not surprisingly, they have become more reluctant to buy bonds. This, in turn, has made it harder for governments to fund themselves.

Second, the summit decided to strong-arm the banks into agreeing to a "voluntary" debt restructuring for Greece. Because the deal is supposedly voluntary, credit default swaps (CDS) - a type of insurance policy that pays out if an entity goes bust - won't be triggered. This arm-twisting has convinced lenders that CDSs are a useless way of hedging the risk of investing in euro zone government bonds. Without a hedge, many prefer not to hold the bonds at all - again making it harder for states to fund themselves.

After the summit, things went from bad to worse with Greece's disastrous plan to call a referendum on its latest bailout plan. That idea was withdrawn - but not before Germany and France suggested that Athens might need to be kicked out of the euro unless it came to heel. The snag is that it would be very hard to isolate the Greeks. If one country could leave the single currency, why not two, three or all 17? As if this wasn't bad enough, banks are also suffering from a liquidity squeeze. It's not just investors who are getting jittery about putting their money in banks; lenders are reluctant to lend to each other because they are not totally sure that their peers will survive.

The logic of making countries sweat so that they address problems they have shirked for years, and sometimes decades, is a good one. But the ECB and Germany should remember that carrots are useful incentives, as well as sticks - and, if they don't provide the carrot soon, the euro may not survive.