A quarter of the city's 41,000 residents had been facing a 6 pm evacuation order, but emergency sirens blared at 1 pm, warning people that the deadline had been moved up by five full hours. Before making their escape, city crews sandbagged critical structures such as the water-treatment plant, city hall and school buildings.

Minot, the fourth-largest city in North Dakota, is less than 60 miles south of the Canadian border. It was founded in the late 1800s during construction of the Great Northern Railroad. The economy relies extensively on agriculture, as well as Minot Air Force Base and the recent oil boom in the western part of the state. Nearly 500 National Guard soldiers were in town to help with traffic control and the evacuation.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai said it would be best if the United States stayed out of the long-standing disputes, but acknowledged that Washington has an interest in freedom of navigation in sea lanes that are vital to trade.

"If the United States does want to play a role, it may counsel restraint to those countries that have frequently been taking provocative action and ask them to be more responsible in their behavior," Cui said at a briefing. "I believe that individual countries are actually playing with fire, and I hope that fire will not be drawn to the United States."

Decades of recurring tensions over rival claims to islands, shoals and reefs in the South China Sea have flared in recent weeks. Vietnam and the Philippines have cited Chinese incursions and provocations in the areas they claim and Beijing has responded by accusing the others of provocative acts. Cui accused unspecified "other countries" of occupying territory, drilling for oil and gas and endangering fishermen in the South China Sea. But he later suggested he was referring to one country in particular and then said China wanted to avoid conflict with Vietnam.

"China has no intention to get into military conflict with any country, Vietnam included," he said. With centuries of enmity with China, Vietnam has encouraged the United States to take a more active role in the dispute. Washington has carefully tried not to pick sides in the territorial claims, which also involve Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia. But over the past year, shared concerns about a more assertive, powerful Beijing have lent new momentum to Washington's ties with Vietnam.

His demand for a ceasefire echoed comments by Arab League Chairman Amr Moussa on Tuesday. However, British Prime Minister David Cameron played down calls to stop the mission and said it would eventually reach a 'satisfactory conclusion'. Nato's mission - to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's troops - began in March after the tyrant launched a violent crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising.

But despite three months of military action and thousands of airstrikes against Libyan forces the dictator remains in power. Concerns about the credibility of the mission increased after a Nato missile apparently misfired on Sunday striking a residential area and killing nine people, including two young children.

Speaking to the Italian parliament, Mr Frattini called for 'an immediate humanitarian suspension of hostilities' to allow aid corridors to be set up to relieve stricken citizens in areas around the besieged city of Misrata and Tripoli, the Libyan capital. He added: 'With regard to Nato, it is fair to ask for increasingly detailed information on results as well as precise guidelines on the dramatic errors involving civilians.'

All US combat troops are scheduled to leave by 2013, provided that Afghan forces are ready to take over security. The Taliban said the insurgency would continue until all foreign forces left. In a statement it said Mr Obama's announcement was "symbolic". "[The] Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan once again wants to make it clear that the solution for the Afghan crisis lies in the full withdrawal of all foreign troops immediately and [while] this does not happen, our armed struggle will increase from day to day," the statement said.

The US reductions are larger and faster than military commanders had advised. They told the president that the recent security gains were fragile and reversible, and had urged him to keep troop numbers high until 2013. That would have given them another full "fighting season" - in addition to the one now under way - to attack Taliban strongholds and their leaders.

Correspondents say the enormous cost of the deployment - currently more than $2 billion a week - has attracted criticism from Congressional leaders, while the public are weary of a war that seems to have no end and has left at least 1,500 personnel dead and 12,000 wounded. There have also been changes on the ground, notably the killing in May of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden by US forces in Pakistan.

When military strikes against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces began, Chancellor George Osborne estimated that the cost of British involvement would be "in the order of tens of millions of pounds, not hundreds of millions". The Ministry of Defence will set out the most recent financial situation in the Commons. Pressed by shadow chancellor Ed Balls about the issue of costs during Treasury questions in the Commons on Tuesday, Mr Osborne said the cost was being met by the Treasury special reserve and was "very much lower than the ongoing operation in Afghanistan".

The government has clashed with military leaders recently over military operations in Libya. Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant, the RAF's second-in-command, said morale among personnel was "fragile" and their fighting spirit was being threatened by being over-worked. Prime Minister David Cameron said on Tuesday that military leaders were "absolutely clear" the mission could be kept going for as long as necessary.

In a Q&A session with reporters, Bernanke said a disorderly default in Greece would have significant effects on the US economy, while adding that the Fed still had several tools at its disposal to pump up the economy. With markets at a crossroads, amid a cooling economic recovery and a dangerous Greek crisis threatening the euro and the global economy, reporters grilled Bernanke and asked many of the right questions.

Brutally honest, Bernanke admitted that he had no clue what was actually causing the current fragility in the US economic recovery. While the FOMC statement assigned blame outside of the US, pointing at Japan along with rising food and oil prices, Bernanke was put on the spot by a reporter who noted the inconsistency behind that explanation and a lowering of long term forecasts. Bernanke took the hit, admitting only some of the factors were temporary and that he didn't know exactly what was causing the slowdown, but that it would persist. "Growth," said Bernanke, "will return into 2012."

"Bernanke was just summing up what has happened in the markets, what has been priced in," explained Nick Kalivas of MF Global. "But the Fed has taken extraordinary measures to support the economy, they have done what they can and monetary policy isn't a solution for everything," added Kalivas, pointing at problems with the fiscal situation and the debt ceiling debate.

The second post-FOMC press conference saw sharper reporters asking the right questions, as opposed to their soft-ball pitching last time. Bernanke, as usual, avoided asking the uncomfortable questions and was even humble enough to admit he didn't have all the answers. The question is, are we better off knowing Bernanke himself doesn't know?

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The accelerated drawdown will dismay American and British commanders in Kabul, who have privately expressed concern that the White House is now being driven by political rather than military imperatives. "This is not something we feel entirely comfortable with," a Whitehall official told the Guardian. Obama's nationally televised address, the sixth he has given since becoming president, is intended to mark the beginning of the end of American military deployment in Afghanistan, from a present high of almost 100,000 troops.

The White House confirmed that the withdrawal will be "significant". Obama's decision is aimed at placating an American public tired of a 10-year war that has cost 1,522 US lives. The killing of Osama bin Laden added impetus to calls to pull out. Nato commanders led by General David Petraeus have set out the risks of withdrawing too many troops too soon, and warned Obama there has been no noticeable dividend from the death of the al-Qaida leader. They had urged him to keep in place the bulk of the extra 30,000 troops he committed to the "surge" until the end of 2012, so a drawdown can begin in 2013. That would give the military another full "fighting season" to attack Taliban strongholds and target insurgent leaders.

The withdrawal has created deep divisions in Washington. The defence secretary, Robert Gates, argued for a modest reduction - at one point as low as 2,000 - citing the advice of US commanders in Afghanistan that they need to protect gains made during the winter against the Taliban. But senior White House staff, conscious that the president has an election to fight next year, argued in favour of a reduction that would send a signal to the US public that an end to the war is in sight.

Unlike other highly indebted eurozone nations such as Greece and Portugal, it has not needed an outside bail-out. While the IMF did not comment on whether this remained a possibility for Spain, it warned that financial conditions could deteriorate further in the eurozone, which "could put additional pressure on sovereign and bank funding costs for Spain".

As a result, the fund said there could be "no let up in the reform momentum" to both help boost Spain's economy and ease the concerns of the financial markets. It added that Spain's 21% unemployment rate - the highest in Europe - was "unacceptably high". To help reduce unemployment, the Spanish government is continuing to change the country's labour laws.

Madrid hopes the changes will make firms more willing to take on new staff, because historically it has been difficult for Spanish companies to make staff redundant. As part of Spain's continuing austerity measures - which have sparked a number of large protests across the country - the government is also reducing the pensions of public sector workers.

Any real revolution in Paris has to include the storming of the Bastille. Which explains why 200 young demonstrators are sitting in the shade of the trees at Place de la Bastille on this Thursday evening, wondering how to go about staging such a revolution. Their numbers had already swelled to more than 2,000 by the Sunday before, when they had occupied the entrance to the Bastille Opera and half the square. But then the police arrived with teargas and, since then, have kept strict watch over this symbolic site.

The protestors are trying to create a movement to rival the protests in Madrid and Lisbon. They want tens of thousands of young people to march in the streets of Paris, calling for "democratie reelle," or real democracy. They believe that there is also potential for such large-scale protest in France, with youth unemployment at more than 20 percent, precarious working conditions and what feels like a constant state of crisis.

"Until now, our problems were always seen as individual problems," says Julien, a 22-year-old physics student who has joined a group called Actions. "You were told that if you couldn't find a job, it was your own fault. Perhaps we are now experiencing a change taking place, and that we are joining forces to form a pan-European movement against this system."

As in Cairo months ago, everything began on Facebook - with an appeal that Alexandre de Sousa Carvalho and some of his former fellow students at the University of Coimbra posted. They called upon the Geracao a rasca (or "generation of junk"), to join together in protest. "We, the unemployed, the underpaid and the interns, are the best educated generation in the country's history," they wrote. "We are protesting so that those responsible for our precarious situation quickly change this untenable reality."

"For the next three years, we're going to see different economies work out different problems. For European economies, especially Greece, it would be through default," Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of PIMCO, told reporters in Taipei on Wednesday via a video conference. El-Erian has suggested in the past that Greece would default and that Europe risks wasting money for nothing by pumping billions of dollars into the ailing economy.

He added on Wednesday it was "unlikely but not impossible" that a Greek default would trigger another global financial crisis. The confidence vote in Athens came after a European ultimatum requiring the debt-choked state to implement a five-year austerity package of measures within the next two weeks or miss out on a 12-billion euro tranche of aid money. European policymakers are also considering a second bailout package worth an estimated 120 billion euros that is meant to extend Greece's year-old 110 billion euro deal and fund it into 2014.

Prime Minister George Papandreou's reshuffled cabinet aims to get parliament approval for a package of spending cuts, tax hikes and state asset sales by June 28 and then push through laws needed to implement it within the next two weeks to avoid missing out on 12 billion euros (10.6 billion pounds) in aid and plunging into bankruptcy.

The vote follows a European ultimatum linking the release of the next instalment of a 110 billion euro EU/IMF aid package due in two weeks to a new five-year belt-tightening plan. Without the loans, Athens will run out of cash next month and policymakers fear a default would send shock waves through the global financial system.

The euro rose in hopes that the immediate threat of market chaos could be avoided, but the gains were short-lived as traders cited concerns about implementation of harsh austerity measures in a nation bruised by its worst recession in 37 years and doubts about Greece's ability to reduce its debt burden without some form of restructuring. "The reaction of the people is going to be critical. If we see cars burning and protests tomorrow, then all this short term success is going to get sucked out the window," said William Larkin, a fixed-income portfolio manager at Cabot Money Management in Salem, Massachusetts.

"To preserve our long-term fiscal health, we must also address the growing costs in Medicare and Social Security," Obama said to a joint session of Congress soon after he was inaugurated. And McConnell adds that Biden, the president's lead negotiator in the debt talks, said last January that "everyone talks about we have to do something about Social Security and Medicare, and we do."

Though Geithner didn't rule out savings from Medicare, Medicaid or the like, he said fundamental reform cannot be done in the next few weeks. Republicans say the same applies to raising revenues in these talks. However, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, Democrat for Maryland, said Tuesday, "It's hard to see how you get to $2 or $4 trillion in reductions without revenues or Draconian cuts that Democrats would not support."

But Republicans say any changes, other than savings from ending some subsidies, such as ethanol, belong in entirely separate talks about tax reform. "Some Democrats are insisting that they'll only agree to cuts if Republicans agree to raise revenue," McConnell said. "That's Washington-speak for tax hikes, and it's absurd."

"It is unusual," Ramey said. "Here it is the last day of spring." A winter storm advisory has been posted in the mountains of Colorado above 10,000 feet until 6 pm local time, and at least one tornado was reported in Kansas, according to the weather service. The Northern Hemisphere summer starts at 1:16 pm New York time tomorrow.

Ramey said the lingering effects of the La Nina ocean cooling are still playing havoc with local weather patterns. Normally at this time of year the daytime high temperature in Grand Junction, at an altitude of almost 4,600 feet, is 88 degrees Fahrenheit (31 degrees Celsius), according to the weather service. Yesterday it was 59, Ramey said.

La Ninas can bring more rain and stormy conditions to the northern US, while drying out the southern half of the country. The most recent La Nina was declared over earlier this month by the US Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Maryland. The atmosphere is still showing signs of the phenomenon, however.

According to reports, the plant has been in shutdown mode since April for refueling, and is allegedly still dry inside, despite being literally surrounded in every direction by massive flood waters. However, after the notification of an unusual event was announced, as well as the cryptic FAA declaration that no aircraft is permitted to fly anywhere near the plant, some are questioning what is really going on at the plant.

What is apparent just from the official pictures released of the plant is that it is currently an island, of sorts, sitting in the middle of an ocean of water. Reports say that flood barriers have been set up around the plant to protect it, but how long can these barriers last in the presence of continually rising flood waters? And despite being in shutdown mode, the plant's spent fuel rods, electrical control devices, and other crucial equipment are all threatened by a potential breach in these barriers, which could potentially lead to a Fukushima-type situation right in the heartland of the US.

If everything is really under control at the plant, and officials expect it to stay dry and protected, why has the FAA restricted aircraft from flying within a two-mile radius of it? When asked why the FAA made this decision, Jeff Hanson, spokesman for the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD), told reporters it was for "security reasons that we can't reveal." This is hardly reassuring.