The National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research reported that tremors from the 3am quake lasted for 27 minutes, but caused no damage. The ships had originally been expected to enter the Suez today (Monday), but Egyptian officials announced the delay this morning, without explanation.

Iran inexplicably announced Sunday morning that two of its warships had crossed the Suez, a report that was thoroughly denied by Egyptian authorities. Iranian media did not mention the ships on Monday, and the false report may have been for local consumption. No Iranian ship has been allowed to pass through the Suez Canal since Iran's 1979 overthrow of the Shah and Egypt's signing of a peace treaty with Israel the same year.

The huge plume of grayish smoke shot up to more than a mile (2 kilometers) toward the blue sky, with the ash drifting southwest toward four farming towns in Sorsogon province, where about 1,200 villagers fled to emergency shelters and houses of relatives, said Benito Ramos, who heads the government's disaster-response agency.

Army trucks helped villagers move from communities hit by the ashfall and emergency teams handed out protective masks, Ramos said. There have not been any government orders to evacuate communities near the mountain. While many scrambled to safety, residents streamed out of houses in Irosin town to gaze or take pictures of the mid-morning spectacle using their cellphones.

The House of Representatives voted on Saturday to cut federal spending by $61 billion through September. But the Republican measure will likely die because Democrats who control the Senate oppose it and President Barack Obama vowed to veto it. Obama has outlined his own plan for less severe spending cuts in 2012, and has warned that tightening the belt too much too soon could harm the slow economic recovery.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer criticized House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell over talk among some Republicans that they would rather shut down the government than relent on their spending cut demands. "Unfortunately Speaker Boehner seems to be on a course that would inevitably lead to a shutdown... That's reckless," Schumer said on CNN's "State of the Union" program.

"We have said shutdown is off the table... Boehner, Mitch McConnell, other Republican leaders have not taken it off the table when asked, and there are lots of people on the hard right clamoring for a shutdown." With the government funded only through March 4, the government could run out of money if lawmakers fail to act, but both sides have been urging compromise. That was seen as the likeliest outcome, even by one of the House's new breed of small-government, deficit slashing freshman Republicans.

The message, posted on an overseas website on Saturday, was titled: "The jasmine revolution in China". The swift crackdown underlined the anxiety of authorities in the wake of the Egypt uprising and protests across the Middle East. The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy estimated that more than 100 activists across the country were taken away by police, prevented from leaving home or were missing.

The message linked it to the jasmine revolution and I guess that made the government nervous," she said. "It really shows us how much the government has identified with regimes in the Middle East where people are so aggrieved about social injustice." Despite a huge police presence at the proposed demonstration locations, there were signs that at least a handful of people in Beijing and Shanghai had hoped to protest.

It is not clear who posted the call for demonstrations on the Boxun website, and the message may well have come from abroad. Many mainland activists appeared to have been unaware of it until police contacted them. The message said: "You and I are Chinese people who will still have a dream for the future... we must act responsibly for the future of our descendants." It urged people to shout demands for food, work, housing and fairness.

He admitted that the police and army had made "mistakes", but said the death toll was far lower than reported. He said opposition groups and outsiders were trying to transform Libya into a group of small states. If they succeeded, he said, foreign investment would stop and living standards would drop drastically.

Sayf Gaddafi also criticised the foreign media for what he termed their exaggeration of the extent of the violence in Libya. Earlier reports said Colonel Gaddafi had fled Libya, but his son told state TV viewers that his father remained in Libya "leading the battle". Benghazi, the country's second city, appears to be largely under the control of protesters after four days of unrest. Unconfirmed reports say an army general there has defected to the opposition.

Hospitals in the city are said to be struggling to cope with casualties, with one doctor saying he had received 50 bodies on Sunday afternoon alone.

Protests have spread across the region since popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt forced out leaders. Sunday's rallies in Morocco are organised by groups including one calling itself the February 20 Movement for Change. More than 23,000 people have expressed their backing for its Facebook site. The protesters have not called for the removal of King Mohammed, but for a new constitution curbing his powers.

"This is a peaceful protest to push for constitutional reform, restore dignity and end graft," said Mustapha Muchtati of the Baraka (Enough) group, one of the organisers behind the protest. Moroccan Finance Minister Salaheddine Mezouar had urged people not to march, warning that any "slip may, in the space of few weeks, cost us what we have achieved over the last 10 years".

Analysts say that - unlike other countries that has seen protests - Morocco has a successful economy, an elected parliament and a reformist monarchy, making it less vulnerable to a major uprising than other countries.

"Most of what these people and organisations are calling for has been on the political scene for quite some time - political change, freedom, reform, change in the constitution," political analyst Abdelhay Moudden told the BBC. But beneath the surface real problems are lurking, he adds - with a huge young population, many of them poor or unemployed; a gap between rich and poor described by one commentator as "obscene"; and parliamentary elections said by critics to be a fig leaf for an undemocratic system.

King Mohammed is a member of the Alaouite dynasty that has been ruling Morocco for some 350 years, claiming a direct line of descent from the Prophet Muhammad. It is regarded as almost sacrilegious to question his role as king, our correspondent says.

This means the Flash Crash Advisory Commission that met on Friday has a long way to go in restoring confidence to the point that will bring the individual investor back into a market still ruled by high frequency trading, exchange-traded funds and leveraged hedge funds.

The Yale School of Management since 1989 has asked wealthy individual investors monthly to give the "PROBABILITY OF A CATASTROPHIC STOCK MARKET CRASH IN THE US IN THE NEXT SIX MONTHS."

In the latest survey in December, almost 75 percent of respondents gave it at least a 10 percent chance of happening. That's up from 68 percent who gave it a 10 percent probability last April, just before the events of May 6, 2010. "Even though the market is firing on all cylinders, that fear of big losses still looms large for investors in a way that it didn't prior to the last bear market," wrote analysts from Bespoke Investment Group in a report citing the Yale data. "Clearly, the financial crisis and the collapse it caused has impacted investor psyche in a big way."

The Wisconsin protests are providing one of the first signs that the Midwest could become the primary testing ground for November's tea party revolution. Plans by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (Republican) and the legislature to gut collective bargaining - the tool by which public unions secure pay and benefits - for most public employees could spill into other Midwest states as a wave of small-government conservatives elected last year take on some of Democrats' most cherished ideals.

No region of the country was more comprehensively recast by the 2010 elections than the seven states of the upper Midwest that arc from Minnesota to Ohio. Where before Democrats had held the upper hand, Republicans now have a virtual stranglehold on politics, controlling both houses of the legislature and the governors' chairs in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

The full import of that switch has become apparent on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, this week. At least 25,000 union Wisconsin protesters amassed Friday morning in and around the Capitol to protest the governor's plans. Earlier in the week, there had been as many as 40,000. Schools have been canceled, and one rally lasted a marathon 17 hours.

House Speaker John Boehner (Republican) has backed Governor Walker even as President Obama denounced the Wisconsin bill as an "assault on unions." The AFL-CIO, the country's largest union, vowed a national protest to support Wisconsin public employees. One political scientist has gone so far as to compare the Wisconsin protests with what transpired in Cairo earlier this month.

In a time when large and tense demonstrations have become increasingly rare in America, the Wisconsin protests could provide an Egypt-like moment, says Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "If there's a big tea party demonstration in Madison, we may see a direct clash, just as we had in the streets of Cairo," he says.

As many as 40,000 people, including teachers, students, firefighters and prison guards, swarmed the Capitol on Friday, raising the noise in its rotunda to earsplitting levels as they rallied to block Republican Governor Scott Walker's efforts to ease Wisconsin's budget woes by cutting many government workers' pay, benefits and bargaining rights.

Some say this week's rallies are unmatched in their sustained, impassioned energy - bolstered by Senate Democrats who fled the state to delay action on Walker's proposal and threatened to stay in hiding for weeks if calls for negotiation go unheeded. State troopers were sent to retrieve the Democratic minority leader from his home Friday, but their knocks went unanswered.

"That's jaw-dropping. This is uncharted," said Mordecai Lee, a UW-Milwaukee political scientist and former state lawmaker who said he's been reminded this week of when a motorcycle riders' protest of a helmet law in the late 1970s persuaded legislators to overturn the measure. Simac, a small business owner, says "it's embarrassing for the state of Wisconsin" that half of the Senate has "gone AWOL." Tea Party member Dan Hunt says a similar effort is under way in Kenosha where an exploratory committee will consider recalling Senator Robert Wirch.

Sarah Palin weighed in with a Friday night posting on her Facebook page that urged "union brothers and sisters" not to ask taxpayers to support "unsustainable benefits packages. Real solidarity means everyone being willing to sacrifice and carry our share of the burden," Palin said in her post, which did not indicate whether she would join conservatives in Madison this weekend.

The protests are growing so large that Capitol workers and lawmakers' staff cannot safely move through the halls, Fitzgerald said, calling the situation "a powder keg." The protests have attracted as many as 25,000 teachers, grade school children, college students and other workers over four days. "I'm starting to hold Senator Miller responsible for this," Fitzgerald said. "He shut down democracy." The changes would save the state $30 million by June 30 and $300 million over the next two years to address a $3.6 billion budget shortfall.

The bill passed the legislature's budget committee on Wednesday night and was to have been debated on the floor of the state Senate on Thursday, but several Democratic legislators fled to neighboring Illinois to ensure the lack of a quorum. Republicans hold a 19-14 majority in the Legislature, but without a quorum, no vote may be taken.

According to the Wisconsin senate majority leader, the Governor's office is sending out state troopers to go after Wisconsin's Democratic Senate members to bring in a vote on Governor Walker's budget bill which would dramatically limit government workers union's ability to negotiate many of their benefits.

"They are prepared to dispatch state troopers to go out to some of the residences of some of the senators," said Republican State Senator Scott Fitzgerald on Newsradio 620 WTMJ's 'Midday with Charlie Sykes.'

Egyptian industrialist Shafik Gabr was in Davos, Switzerland, when the revolution began. It was January 26, the second day of protests in Tahrir Square, and from 1,600 miles away at the World Economic Forum - teeming with financiers, celebrities, and heads of state in the crisp, Alpine air - it didn't look much like a revolution. But by the time Gabr arrived in Cairo on Friday the 28th - having cut short his trip to rush home on his Gulfstream 200 - the planet's most populous Arab country had changed forever. And not necessarily for the better

"The stock market is closed, the banks are closed, transfers are delayed. The economy is in paralysis," Gabr told me this week from Cairo, where he is chairman and managing director of the ARTOC Group, a real estate-engineering-consumer products-media conglomerate that employs 3,500 Egyptians. "I am a person who has always believed in the importance of orderly transition with law and order, because the minute you lose law and order is the minute you enter into a dark tunnel, a vicious circle. If we do not have law and order - which as of yet we do not - then Egypt will become a very complex, dangerous, fluid place."

It was obvious to Gabr that there was method to the madness.

"There was a serious plan to scare the populace, no question about it," he said. "There was a huge number of police stations that were torched all at the same time, all in the same manner. I cannot attribute it to any party. I can say very honestly that there were factors playing a major role beyond the youths in Tahrir Square, to torch, attack, break cells in the prisons for prisoners to be released, to steal police uniforms, to steal armaments, in the very same exact manner across Egypt, not just Cairo. And that requires planning. It's almost like one of those movies where you have sleeper cells."

Although Barclays was not directly rescued by the UK government - unlike Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland - it has been able to borrow extremely cheaply because of the Bank of England's decision to slash interest rates, and because markets perceived that the government would not allow any big bank to fail.

Barclays has a legal responsibility to its owner - its shareholders - to keep costs including tax to a minimum. At the same time the Barclays boss himself said that paying tax was one of a bank's key obligations to society. Many members of that society will not be pleased to learn that only 113 million pounds in corporation tax was paid whilst the bonus pool amounted to 3.4 billion pounds.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "Bahrain is a friend and an ally and has been for many years and while all governments have a responsibility to provide citizens with security and stability, we call [for] restraint.'' President Barack Obama on Friday again spoke of universal rights, including the right to freedom of assembly, but American national interests hang in the balance, perhaps even more so than with Egypt.

Hosni Mubarak had been a US ally for the last 30 years, a moderate president of a country with a peace treaty with Israel and a key partner in the peace process. But with the loud, overwhelming demand from the streets of Cairo for Mr Mubarak's departure, it became untenable to continue supporting him while professing to support those universal rights, so Washington took a gamble.

It came to the conclusion it could let go of a president who had failed to implement reforms because the Egyptian army, underwritten by the US, would probably maintain the country on a moderate path that would be mostly acceptable to Washington and, by extension, Israel, at least in the short term.

But when the US looks at Bahrain, it sees Iran and the picture blurs. Tehran and Washington have been foes since 1979 and Sunni kingdoms like Bahrain, but also its bigger neighbour Saudi Arabia, a vital US ally, are a crucial counterweight to Iran's growing influence in the region.

Protesters say they are willing to break the law and face a 1,000 pounds fine and a criminal record by refusing to fill in the 32-page questionnaire. Resistance to the decennial census is growing as a coalition of anti-war groups, pacifists, religious organisations and digital activists begin raising public awareness about the role of Lockheed Martin, America's largest arms manufacturer.

The company, which makes Trident nuclear missiles, cluster bombs and F-16 fighter jets, won the 150 million pounds contract to run the census on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). A spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition said: "We will certainly be calling for a boycott and telling people not co-operate with the warmongers."

"The really worrying thing is the fact that the information being collected in the next census - including new questions on sources of income and place of birth [to help monitor immigration] - would be ideal fodder for the kind of anti-terror analyses being carried out by Lockheed, and could lead to a faraway database identifying thousands of us as potential 'threats'."

Lockheed Martin - which does 80% of its work for the US defence department - assists more than two dozen American government agencies and is involved in surveillance and data processing for the CIA and FBI. It has controversially provided private contract interrogators to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. All US-based companies are subject to the Patriot Act, which allows the US government to have access to any data in the company's possession. Campaigners have warned this could give the US government access to detailed and personal data on the UK's entire population.

Should the strike go ahead, it is likely to lead to petrol forecourts running dry within days, due in part to panic buying. Talks between the Unite union, which represents about 3,000 drivers, and petrol delivery companies are due to take place on Friday in a dispute over working conditions and pensions.

Industry sources have suggested the negotiations have almost no chance of success because of the union demands and the number of private haulage companies involved in the dispute. Unite, which is led by Len McCluskey, will then hold a series of meetings with shop stewards around the country - to take place next weekend - which will gauge grassroots support for a strike.

Any industrial action would take a further four to five weeks to organise, meaning strikes would be likely to begin in early to mid April. An industry source said: "If this goes ahead, parts of the country will grind to a halt very, very quickly. If they begin balloting at the beginning of March that takes us into Easter and the run-up to the wedding."