They may not technically be nobility, but Georg Friedrich Prince of Prussia, 35, and his fiance, Sophie Princes of Isenburg, 33, will still get the royal treatment this weekend in Germany. The great-great grandson of Wilhelm II, Germany's last Kaiser, and the Hessian princess will wed on Saturday in the eastern German city of Potsdam. They have chosen to celebrate their love at the Hohenzollern dynasty's old summer residence, the famed Sanssouci Palace built by Frederick the Great.

Compared to William and Kate the couple are virtually unknown to all but the most dedicated royal-watchers. But if Germany hadn't done away with its monarchy nearly 100 years ago, in 1918, they would be the country's imperial couple. Still, their nuptials will be significantly more modest than April's festivities in London. Although the 700 guests at the event will include members of the international royal set, none will be first-tier nobility.

The prince, who is seldom found on the pages of German tabloids, lists the "remembrance of Prussian history" and the "preservation of tradition" as some of his interests on the Hohenzollern House homepage. Had he chosen to marry a "commoner," as Prince William did with Kate Middleton, he would have lost his role as leader of the Hohenzollern House. But more than just the desire to wed according to their rank binds the couple, an employee within the Hohenzollern family affairs office told news agency AFP.

Mrs Merkel is also facing rebel MPs in her coalition, including one of her own ministers, who are threatening to vote against the EU's bail-out plans. A fund official said: "Hysteria is sweeping Germany." Polish finance minister Jacek Rostowski said: "European elites must decide if they want the euro to survive - even at a high price - or not. If not, we should prepare for a controlled dismantling of the currency zone. We have a simple choice: Solidarity or the collapse of Europe."

But as every country with an appreciating currency knows, there is an ugly flipside. Figures for UK manufacturing show the sector has lost momentum after last year's booming sales. Export growth has slowed dramatically and City experts and IMF policymakers fear that growing imbalances could set off currency and trade wars as countries fight against each other to limit the impact of global forces.

Andrew Wells, chief investment officer for fixed income at fund manager Fidelity International, said recent events in the eurozone and the battle over the debt ceiling in Washington had rattled confidence in world currency markets. "Quantitative easing has been blamed for debasing currencies in the developed world, causing significant distortions in global currency markets. While China has been artificially moderating the strength of the yuan to counter these imbalances, Brazil's real is surging.

"Concerns are growing that this could break out into an all-out currency war; countries like Brazil are becoming increasingly vocal about their displeasure. An obvious side effect has been a surge in commodity prices; its inflationary effects are now being imported into developed economies," he warned. But while prices rise for consumers in the UK and elsewhere in the west, rapidly growing nations fear they will suffer the loss of their manufacturing sectors as the price for a strong currency.

Speaking on Saturday, just as Irene was beginning its raking course up the East Coast, Mrs Bachmann told senior citizens in Poinciana, Florida: 'Washington, DC, you'd think by now they'd get the message. An earthquake, a hurricane. Are you listening?' She added, drawing some laughs from her audience: 'The American people have done everything they can, and now it's time for an act of God and we're getting it. She added: 'I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians.

'We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said: "Are you going to start listening to me here?"

'Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending.'

Responding to criticism of the statement, a spokesperson for the Minnesota congresswoman said: 'Obviously she was saying it in jest.' Mrs Bachmann, who has gained media prominence for her fiery attacks on Democratic President Barack Obama and against big government, is a favourite of the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement and of religious social conservatives.

"The Mayor believes that intolerance of our fellow citizens and hate crimes against specific communities are totally unacceptable, particularly in a city like London and especially in 2012 when the eyes of the world will be on the capital," said a spokesman for Mayor Boris Johnson, the London Jewish Chronicle reported. The spokesman added, "The Greater London Authority will not be authorizing political rallies in Trafalgar Square during the Olympic and Paraolympic Games." The Trafalgar Square rallies against Israel have featured Hizbullah flags.

During last week's demonstration, Booth went on another rant against Israel. "We say here today to you, Israel, we see your crimes and we loathe your crimes. And to us your nation does not exist, because it is a criminal injustice against humanity. We want to see Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt go to the borders and stop this now. Liberate Al Quds! March to Al Quds!" Another speaker claimed, somewhat myopically as far as historical accuracy goes, that "the only time that land has seen peace between Muslim, Christian and Jew living side by side was when sincere Islamic rulers ruled with justice."

During Ottoman Islamic rule, Jews were second-class citizens, called "Dhimmis". The myth of their "peaceful lives" has been debunked by historians, although they were not subject to pogroms as frequently as European Jews. In fact, Jordan, during its occupation of the Old City and other parts of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria between 1949 and 1967, denied Christians and Jews all access to holy sites except for visiting dignitaries. Israel opened up the sites to all religions after it restored the areas under its sovereignty in the Six-Day War in 1967.

Activists say Syrian security forces opened fire in several areas, killing at least seven people, mainly in the south, near Deraa. One was also killed in Homs, they say. More were wounded there and elsewhere. Syrian state television showed President Assad attending prayers in a Damascus mosque and taking coffee and cakes with fellow worshippers before being whisked away, says the BBC's Jim Muir in neighbouring Beirut.

But elsewhere, even in some nearby suburbs of the capital, thousands of people were spilling into the streets demanding the downfall of his regime. Communications were cut in many parts of the country, and security forces moved into the streets around the mosques. Much of the focus was also on cemeteries, where it is customary to visit the graves of relatives on the Eid, our correspondent says. At one, in the Qaboun suburb of Damascus, a crowd was surrounded by security forces who opened fire, according to activists, causing casualties.

The UN says more than 2,000 people have been killed since protests against Syria's president began in March. Most foreign journalists have been barred from Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from local activists and officials.

Insurance claims could top $7 billion (4.3 billion pounds), the Consumer Federation of America estimated. Irene has passed into Canada, after causing havoc on the US east coast from North Carolina to Vermont. Driving rains and flood tides damaged homes and cut power to more than three million people in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York alone.

An Associated Press news agency tally found 40 people had been killed in 11 US states, mostly because of falling trees, ocean waves, downed power lines and raging floods. In the rural state of Vermont, the last to be hit before Irene reached Canada, the storm washed away bridges and swamped the town of Brattleboro. In New York City, which escaped the worst of Irene's fury, the subway network and three main airports all reopened on Monday. More than 300,000 people evacuated from low-lying areas in New York City are now able to return home.

Since Saturday, Irene has been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm and now a post-tropical cyclone. Some Americans who bought candles, canned food and other emergency provisions in recent days have been demanding refunds, claiming Irene's threat was exaggerated.

President Barack Obama has warned that the impact of the storm will be felt for some time and that the recovery effort will last for weeks. Flooding and power cuts are still a risk as swollen rivers could burst their banks, he said on Sunday. The brunt of Irene's impact was felt by towns and suburbs from New Jersey to Vermont. Driving rains and flood tides damaged homes and cut power to more than three million people in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York.

The BBC's Steve Kingstone in New York said insurance and rebuilding costs would run into billions of dollars. Irene was earlier downgraded to a tropical and then a post-tropical storm. At 03:00 GMT, Irene was moving north-north-east at a speed of 26mph (43km/h). An increase in speed is expected over the next couple of days, with the centre of the storm moving over eastern Canada on Monday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami says. Irene brings high winds near 50mph (85km/h) with higher gusts, it adds.

The storm, downgraded from a hurricane, passed New York on Sunday. More than 300,000 people evacuated from low-lying areas in New York City are heading home. New Yorkers will attempt to return to work on Monday, but the subway service will be limited while the tracks are inspected, says the BBC's Laura Trevelyan in New York. Most of the commuter rail services feeding the city were out indefinitely, reports say.

If politicians ignore their pleas - including a blunt call from International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde to "act now" - the slowdown in world growth and debt turmoil in Europe could morph into a deeper crisis, top monetary officials and economists warned at an annual retreat here. "I hope they listen," said Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer.

Alarm over political deadlock was as obvious a backdrop to the annual meeting of policymakers in the wilds of Wyoming as the thunderstorms that rolled over the nearby Grand Teton peaks and dumped rain on the Jackson Lake Lodge. "The governance right now is not going through a very brilliant moment, I have to say, neither in Europe nor in the United States," Angel Gurria, who heads the multi-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Reuters.

"The signals that are coming out of the short-term discussions is, 'We can't even agree on about the time of the day, even if there's a big clock telling us what the time of the day is'." In the United States, the political impasse has thwarted moves to tame massive budget deficits which brought the nation to the edge of a debt default and cost the United States its coveted AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's.

In Europe, leaders are fighting over who should pay for the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, which has a unified regime for monetary policy but whose member nations run their own budget policies.

According to the IsraelDefense website, Israeli defense companies are competing for the nod to develop a robot-based combat solution dubbed "Advance Guard," which the IDF ground forces are keenly interested in.

"The basic idea is for robots to function as a strike force, leading the way in the first stage of engagement with the enemy, in which there is usually a greater danger of casualties," the website explained. "The defense establishment wants the industries to examine a range of possible robotic forms on the battlefield, from micro-robots to large unmanned vehicles. An essential feature of the program is that the robots will be capable of interacting with each other and not only as individual warriors."

Brigadier General (retired) Shmuel Yachin, former director of R&D in the IDF, told IsraelDefense that Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is reviewing different types of robot designs, including "see-fire" systems that can identify a target in the field and zero in on it.

One of the firms competing for the job of supplying the IDF with robot warriors may invest in the development of an unmanned tank.

Robotic tools are already employed in surveillance, including unmanned ground vehicles like "Guardium," produced by a company jointly owned and run by IAI and Elbit Systems. In the past, the IDF revealed a robotic snake that can be used for infiltration of targets.

Mrs Merkel has cancelled a high-profile trip to Russia on September 7, the crucial day when the package goes to the Bundestag and the country's constitutional court rules on the legality of the EU's bail-out machinery. If the court rules that the 440 billion euros rescue fund (EFSF) breaches Treaty law or undermines German fiscal sovereignty, it risks setting off an instant brushfire across monetary union.

The seething discontent in Germany over Europe's debt crisis has spread to all the key institutions of the state. "Hysteria is sweeping Germany " said Klaus Regling, the EFSF's director. German media reported that the latest tally of votes in the Bundestag shows that 23 members from Mrs Merkel's own coalition plan to vote against the package, including twelve of the 44 members of Bavaria's Social Christians (CSU). This may force the Chancellor to rely on opposition votes, risking a government collapse.

Christian Wulff, Germany's president, stunned the country last week by accusing the European Central Bank of going "far beyond its mandate" with mass purchases of Spanish and Italian debt, and warning that Europe's headlong rush towards fiscal union stikes at the "very core" of democracy. "Decisions have to be made in parliament in a liberal democracy. That is where legitimacy lies," he said.

Mrs Merkel's aides say she is facing "war on every front". The next month will decide her future, Germany's destiny, and the fate of monetary union.

The alleged offenses include failing to take her daughter to a car show, telling her then 7-year-old son to buckle his seat belt or she would contact police, "haggling" over the amount to spend on party dresses and calling her daughter at midnight to ask that she return home from celebrating homecoming.

Last week, at which point the court record stood about a foot tall, an Illinois appeals court dismissed the case, finding that none of the mother's conduct was "extreme or outrageous." To rule in favor of her children, the court found, "could potentially open the floodgates to subject family childrearing to... excessive judicial scrutiny and interference."

In 2009, the children, represented by three attorneys including their father, Steven A Miner, sued their mother, Kimberly Garrity. Steven II, now 23, and his sister Kathryn, now 20, sought more than $50,000 for "emotional distress." Miner and Garrity were married for a decade before she filed for divorce in 1995, records show.

"It would be laughable that these children of privilege would sue their mother for emotional distress, if the consequences were not so deadly serious for (Garrity)," Smith wrote. "There is no insurance for this claim, so (Garrity) must pay her legal fees, while (the children) have their father for free."

We are in, right, now ...the right eye wall, no doubt about that ...there you see the surf," he said breathlessly. "That tells a story right there." Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. "This is our protection from the wind," he explained. "It's been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here."

The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past. Across the screen, the "Breaking News: Irene Batters Long Island" caption was replaced by stern advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): "Stay inside, stay safe."

The images summed up Hurricane Irene - the media and the United States federal government trying to live up to their own doom-laden warnings and predictions while a sizeable number of ordinary Americans just carried on as normal and even made gentle fun of all the fuss. Then came the press conferences from the politicians, with Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey insisting that his evacuation of the Jersey Shore was "a pre-emptive measure that I am confident saved lives" and there could still be damage worth "tens of billions" of dollars.

Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief, declared that there was "a ways to go with Irene" but "with the evacuations and other precautions taken we have dramatically decreased the risk to life". Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York seemed thoroughly delighted with himself, as if he personally had calmed the waters and stifled the winds.

The truth is that the dire warning beforehand suited both politicians and journalists. Just as with the minor earthquake that shook the east coast last week causing no loss of life and virtually no damage, Irene became a huge story because it was where the media lived.

Make no mistake, there is fire in the eurozone. And sooner or later, things are going to explode. It might come as a surprise, then, after such turmoil in the financial world and the ugly riots in the streets of Athens, to realise that in the eyes of those Eurocrats who inhabit the Brussels bubble, things are going pretty well.

THAT'S BECAUSE THE PRESENT EURO CRISIS IS AN INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCE OF A DELIBERATE CHOICE. For them it is all part of a greater long-term project: a 'beneficial crisis' that will help hasten their ultimate goal of a federal European state. This is not fanciful mischief making. Would that it were! One powerful Eurocrat, who is today at the epicentre of EU affairs, once described to me the three great crises the EU has experienced since 1991 in exactly these terms.

THE FIRST was the rejection of the EU Constitution in France, the Netherlands and Ireland. Ultimately, of course, the Eurocrats repackaged the document to be incomprehensible (as the constitution's author, former President Giscard d'Estaing, openly admitted). It was then imposed as the 'Lisbon Treaty' with the Irish forced to vote again to give the 'right' answer.

THE SECOND crisis was over the endlessly intrusive EU climate policy. It was intended to make Europeans love the 'Environment Union', but it actually created corruption, bureaucracy, fake markets and the repeatedly collapsing Emissions Trading Scheme.

THE THIRD crisis is the big one: the euro. All three, my Eurocrat suggested, were 'beneficial' in that they had all resulted in 'more Europe'.

The root of our present collective peril lies in the fact that the euro single currency was consciously created to produce just such 'beneficial crises'.

Any competent economic historian will tell you there has never been a successful 'fiat' (non-gold-based) currency unless it is underpinned by a unitary state, with unitary fiscal policies. They will also quote the golden rule: 'Never play politics with currencies: currencies bite back.' The 'Godfather' of the euro, Jacques Delors, and his colleagues knew all this perfectly well. But the euro was always intended - slowly but inevitably - to generate successive crises to force the EU states to override their citizens and surrender sovereign control to Brussels.

Like their predecessors in 1931, they were trying to pretend at all costs that a bust financial system was not bust. But at what cost? History tells us that similar policies in the Thirties caused extreme deflation and the Depression. In Germany, the Nazis thrived. From 1932 to 1938, most of southern Europe went fascist. At the beginning, the post-war EU 'project' was widely and honourably supported, to drive back all these shadows. It was the future, once; but no longer. Are these 'beneficial crises' so cynically fostered, so consistently and for so long, now unintentionally beckoning to the shadows once again? It is not just the euro at stake, but much deeper and darker things too.

A ban on going within 12 miles of the plant remains in place. At a meeting with local officials yesterday, the government said it could take 20 years for residents to return to areas with higher radiation readings and a decade to return to areas with half those levels of radiation. Experts estimate the decontamination fight could cost Japan 80 billion pounds. The Fukushima disaster released about 15 per cent of the radiation that escaped from the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine in 1986.

A vast area is still uninhabitable around the plant. The Japanese government unveiled guidelines this week with the aim of halving radiation in problem areas in two years, but for spots with very high readings it could take much longer to reach safe levels. 'I can't deny the possibility that it could be a long time before people can return to and live in regions with high radiation levels,' outgoing Prime Minister Naoto Kan was quoted by domestic media as telling Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato.