Most economists expect the Fed to announce a plan Wednesday to shift money in its $1.7 trillion portfolio out of short-term securities and into longer-term holdings.The plan could lower Treasury yields further. Ultimately, it could reduce rates on mortgages and other consumer and business loans, too. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is expected to advocate the move despite criticism from within the Fed and from Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates.

On Monday, the four highest-ranking Republicans in Congress sent Bernanke a letter cautioning the Fed against taking further steps to lower interest rates. Their letter suggested that lower rates could escalate the risk of high inflation. The plan the Fed is considered most likely to unveil Wednesday has been dubbed "Operation Twist" and dates to the early 1960s. The Fed used a similar program then to "twist" long-term rates lower relative to short-term rates. Expectations that the Fed will do so again, along with renewed fears of another recession, have led investors to buy up US Treasurys. Treasury yields have dropped in response.

The decision to do so highlighted a rift within the central bank. Three members dissented from the Fed's decision - the most negative votes in nearly two decades. The three, all regional Fed bank presidents, said the Fed's policies have increased the risk of inflation. Bernanke has also faced criticism from congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates. Some have argued that the Fed's $600 billion bond-buying program, which ended in June, weakened the value of the dollar against other currencies and contributed to a spike in oil and commodity prices.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is seeking the GOP nomination for president, went so far as to say Bernanke would be "almost treasonous" to launch more bond buying.

There are concerns heavy rain could force radioactive water into the sea. The storm, packing winds of 162km/h (100mph), passed near Tokyo stranding tens of thousands of commuters as trains and flights were cancelled. The typhoon made landfall on Wednesday afternoon (05:00GMT) in Hamamatsu, scouring its way up the main island of Honshu.

The storm is now tracking a path towards Fukushima prefecture and is then expected to travel up along the north-east coast, which was battered by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. The BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says pools of radioactive water remain at the Fukushima nuclear site, and there is concern that a heavy downpour could cause them to overflow into the sea or groundwater.

Five people have so far been found dead in central and western Japan, public broadcaster NHK reported. Four people are missing including a nine-year-old boy and 84-year-old man who were swept away by flood waters in Gifu prefecture as the storm approached.

If all goes according to plan, German President Christian Wulff will greet the pope at 11:15 am this Thursday in front of Bellevue Palace, the president's official residence in Berlin. Photographers and cameramen will be eagerly jostling for the best spots, security teams will be intently scanning the area, and Wulff will shake his guest's hand with the proper degree of decorum.

But what will happen next? What will the German head of state and the leader of the Roman Catholic Church talk about when they meet for the first time, shortly after Benedict XVI's landing in Berlin? Will they talk about the fact that Wulff, a practicing Catholic, is divorced and remarried, a fact that, under the current rules of the Church, excludes him from receiving Communion?

Will Benedict XVI address the sensitive issue in his speech before the German parliament, the Bundestag, that afternoon? Although about 100 Bundestag members plan to boycott his address, Gerda Hasselfeldt, the Catholic chairwoman of the conservative Christian Social Union's group in the Bundestag, will be there without fail. Hasselfeldt is also divorced and has remarried. So has the leader of her party, Horst Seehofer, who also fathered an illegitimate child, and Oskar Lafontaine, the former co-chairman of the Left Party and a former Jesuit school pupil.

Benedict is scheduled to arrive at Berlin's Olympic Stadium at 6 pm, where he will celebrate mass and meet with Berlin's openly gay Mayor, Klaus Wowereit. Will the pope encourage Wowereit, a Catholic and a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) who has been living with his partner for years, to practice abstinence and not to act out his proclivities, as his church demands of all homosexuals?

Luckily for the pope, he won't have any problems with two other prominent people he will meet in Berlin. Chancellor Angela Merkel (remarried) and German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle (gay) are both Protestants.

City officials in San Juan Capistrano, California say Chuck and Stephanie Fromm are in violation of municipal code 9-3.301, which prohibits "religious, fraternal or non-profit" organizations in residential neighborhoods without a permit. Stephanie hosts a Wednesday Bible study that draws about 20 attendees, and Chuck holds a Sunday service that gets about 50. The Fromms appealed their citations but were denied and warned future sessions would carry heftier penalties.

A statement from the Pacific Justice Institute, which is defending the couple in a lawsuit against the city, said Chuck Fromm was also told regular gatherings of three or more people require a conditional use permit, which can be costly and difficult to obtain. "How dare they tell us we can't have whatever we want in our home," Stephanie Fromm told the Capistrano Dispatch. "We want to be able to use our home. We've paid a lot and invested a lot in our home and backyard... I should be able to be hospitable in my home."

According to the Dispatch, the Fromms live in a neighborhood with large homes and have a corral, barn, pool and huge back lawn on their property, so parking and noise aren't a problem. "There's no singing or music," Stephanie said. "It's meditative."

"Imposing a heavy-handed permit requirement on a home Bible study is outrageous," said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute. "An informal gathering in a home cannot be treated with suspicion by the government, or worse than any other gathering of friends, just because it is religious. We cannot allow this to happen in America, and we will fight as long and as hard as it takes to restore this group's religious freedom."

'What's on Xiamen', a Chinese news source, reports that countless millions of dead fish were found floating on a large portion of the Minjiang River stretching from Huangtian in Gutian County, to Shuikou, an area that represents the largest grass carp breeding region in China's Fujian Province. As many as nine million fish have reportedly died in Huangtian alone, thus far.

"All the fish in Huangtian floated onto the river on August 27, 28 and 29," said Wei Maoci to Chinese reporters. Maoci, who owns his own fish farm, was the first of many farmers to experience massive and unexplained fish deaths and he reportedly lost the equivalent of roughly $470,000 worth of fish as a result. "Fish started to die even as we gave more oxygen. Some 100 cages of fish died within two hours. We all lost a family fortune."

Abbas told UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon he would press ahead with plans to ask on Friday for a Security Council vote on Palestinian membership. Washington has threatened to veto any such move. Ban told Abbas he would forward on to the Security Council any application submitted, and called for the Israelis and the Palestinians to resume talks "within a legitimate and balanced framework," UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

The Palestinian crisis has overshadowed this week's meeting of the UN General Assembly and sparked hectic talks aimed at averting a confrontation which carries risks for the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. Senior diplomats from the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - the so-called Quartet of Middle East mediators - are meeting throughout the week in hopes of finding a way forward.

The Quartet has for months been trying to put together guidelines for future peace talks, thus far without result.

"Due to financial trading relationships and off-balance sheet exposure to European banks, the US banking system will not go unscathed," said Michelle Meyer, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch economist, in a note to clients Friday. "If the crisis in Europe escalates, it could be the shock that pushes the US economy into recession."

While this is not the base case predicted by Bank of America, the firm does still prepare its clients for this possibility by laying out how the Greece crisis could quickly become a "Lehman event." After all, a 50 percent haircut on Greek sovereign debt would mean a very manageable $60 billion, or just two percent, of total bank foreign claims for US banks, according to the report. But that's just director exposure.

There are five major ways the US is connected: trading counterparty risk and derivative ownership with heavily-exposed European banks, overall market confidence, central bank funding, money-market funds and trade flows.

It cited fears over Italy's ability to cut state spending and bring its finances in order, particularly given the country's growth prospects. Italy said the move had been influenced by "political considerations". A government statement said the downgrade had also been dictated more by stories in the media than by economic reality.

Italy recently passed an unpopular austerity budget, but S&P suggested this did not go far enough."We believe the reduced pace of Italy's economic activity to date will make the government's revised fiscal targets difficult to achieve," S&P said in a statement.

"Furthermore, what we view as the Italian government's tentative policy response to recent market pressures suggests continuing future political uncertainty about the means of addressing Italy's economic challenges." Italy follows fellow eurozone countries Spain, the Republic of Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus in having its credit rating downgraded this year. The surprise move by the ratings agency will fuel fears of contagion in the eurozone.

The 6.9-magnitude quake Sunday evening triggered landslides, damaged buildings and sent people rushing into the streets. The epicenter was in India's Sikkim state near borders with Nepal and China's Tibet region, but the shaking was felt across northern and eastern India and to the south in Bangladesh. The quake killed at least seven people in India's Sikkim state and injured more than 50, said the state's top official, Chief Secretary Karma Gyatso. The north Indian state of West Bengal reported six deaths, and Bihar state reported three.

In China, at least seven people were confirmed dead and 22 hurt in southern Tibet, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It did not immediately give any details. Nepal's government said seven people died there, including two men and a child who were killed when a brick wall toppled outside the British Embassy in the capital, Katmandu. Nearly 70 people were injured, some of them seriously, and were in hospitals across the city. Much of the damage was not immediately known because the region is sparsely populated, with many people living in remote areas now cut off by mudslides triggered by the quake, Sikkim state police Chief Jasbir Singh told The Associated Press.

The quake was also felt as far as the Indian capital, with New Delhi residents also rushing out of shaking buildings. The quake caused some houses in China's Himalayan region of Tibet to collapse and disrupted a border county's telecommunications services, Xinhua said. There were at least two aftershocks of magnitude 6.1 and 5.3, Indian seismology official RS Dattatreyan said. He warned more aftershocks were possible.

A joint statement by Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran priests pledged their "support for the diplomatic efforts being deployed to win international recognition for the State of Palestine... on the June 1967 borders with Jerusalem as our capital." The priests went further than their bishops, who in a statement this week confined themselves to a call for intensified prayer and diplomatic efforts ahead of the Palestinian membership request, to be sent to the UN Security Council on Friday.

"Palestinians and Israelis should exercise restraint, whatever the outcome of the vote at the United Nations," the bishops said. "We call upon decision-makers and people of good will to do their utmost to achieve the long-awaited justice, peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians."

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu look set for a UN showdown next week, with Abbas planning to push for membership for a Palestinian state and Netanyahu arguing against it. "Despite the pressures that we face, Palestine goes to the UN on the 23rd of this month to seek admission as a full member," Abbas told Egyptian television on Wednesday.

"There is great volatility in the markets," Evangelos Venizelos said after emerging from crisis cabinet talks. "If we want to avoid default, to stabilise the situation, to remain in the eurozone... we must take big strategic decisions. Measures must be specified," he added, referring to reforms outlined in a contentious budget plan passed in July. "After tomorrow's talks with the troika [of representatives from the EU, ECB and IMF] we will spell out the measures."

With the threat of bankruptcy looming, Greece was told in no uncertain terms over the weekend that a critical 8 billion euros rescue loan would not be released next month unless it proved that it had bitten the bullet with reforms. The funds would be the sixth instalment of cash Athens has received since being bailed out to the tune of 110 billion euros in May 2010.

But reading the riot act to Greece as never before, EU finance ministers meeting in Poland insisted that without "concrete facts and figures" to show that Athens was intent on bringing its budget deficit in line, the aid would not be forthcoming. Without the cash injection, the ruling socialists will be unable to cover state wages and pensions in October. "The atmosphere was far from diplomatic," said one Greek insider. "They don't seem to have faith in us. The choice is clear. Either we go down or show real determination, not words but deeds."

The lack of political consensus over the austerity measures has further eroded Greece's credibility. The main conservative opposition leader, Antonis Samaras, is calling for snap elections and for the loan conditions to be renegotiated.

The portrait was described by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey in an hourlong interview before he was to leave for the United Nations, where a contentious debate was expected this week over a Palestinian bid for recognition as a state. Viewed by many as the architect of a foreign policy that has made Turkey one of the most relevant players in the Muslim world, Mr Davutoglu pointed to that issue and others to describe a region in the midst of a transformation. Turkey, he said, was "right at the center of everything."

He declared that Israel was solely responsible for the near collapse in relations with Turkey, once an ally, and he accused Syria's president of lying to him after Turkish officials offered the government there a "last chance" to salvage power by halting its brutal crackdown on dissent. Strikingly, he predicted a partnership between Turkey and Egypt, two of the region's militarily strongest and most populous and influential countries, which he said could create a new axis of power at a time when American influence in the Middle East seems to be diminishing.

Mr Davutoglu credited a "psychological affinity" between Turkey and much of the Arab world, which was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for four centuries from Istanbul. The foreign minister, 52, remains more scholar than politician, though he has a diplomat's knack for bridging divides. Cerebral and soft-spoken, he offered a speech this summer to Libyan rebels in Benghazi - in Arabic. Soon after the revolution in Tunisia, he hailed the people there as the "sons of Ibn Khaldoun," one of the Arab world's greatest philosophers, born in Tunis in the 14th century. "We're not here to teach you," he said. "You know what to do. Ibn Khaldoun's grandsons deserve the best political system."

The Vatican has been working for years to bring the breakaway Society of St Pius X back into its fold, and this week told its members they must accept some core church teachings if they want to be fully reintegrated into the church. But the Holy See said some expressions contained in documents from the Second Vatican Council could be left open for "legitimate discussion." The 1962-65 Vatican II meetings brought modernizing reforms to the Catholic Church, including outreach to Jews and introduction of the Mass in the vernacular rather than Latin. The Swiss-based Society of St Pius X was formed in 1969, opposed to many of Vatican II's reforms.

The Vatican refused to say which core teachings the society must accept to be reintegrated, and which elements of Vatican II documents could be left open for discussion. A key Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate, revolutionized the Catholic Church's relations with Jews by declaring that Christ's death couldn't be attributed to Jews as a whole. Other Vatican II teachings to which the society objects concern religious freedom and ecumenical relations. The uncertainty over what is being required of the society provoked unease among some Jewish groups, which issued veiled warnings Friday about the possible impact on Vatican-Jewish relations were Nostra Aetate and other Vatican II teachings to be now considered ripe for discussion.

The German-born Benedict has worked for two decades, as pope and as cardinal, to bring the group back into the Vatican's fold, eager to prevent further schism and the expansion of a parallel church. Benedict, who has won praise from Jews for his decades of outreach, nevertheless provoked outrage in 2009 when he lifted the excommunication of Williamson, who denied gas chambers were used during the Holocaust.

As it turned out, the demonstrators found much of their target off limits on Saturday as the city shut down sections of Wall Street near the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall well before their arrival. By 10 am, metal barricades manned by police officers ringed the blocks of Wall Street between Broadway and William Street to the east. (In a statement, Paul J Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman said, "A protest area was established on Broad Street at Exchange Street, next to the stock exchange, but protesters elected not to use it.")

Organizers, promoters and supporters called the day, which had been widely discussed on Twitter and other social media sites, simply September 17. Some referred to it as the United States Day of Rage, an apparent reference to a series of disruptive protests against the Vietnam War held in Chicago in 1969. The idea, according to some organizers, was to camp out for weeks or even months to replicate the kind, if not the scale, of protests that erupted earlier this year in places as varied as Egypt, Spain and Israel.

Throughout the afternoon hundreds of demonstrators gathered in parks and plazas in Lower Manhattan. They held teach-ins, engaged in discussion and debate and waved signs with messages like "Democracy Not Corporatization" or "Revoke Corporate Personhood."

The president on Monday will announce a proposal that includes repeal of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, nearly $250 billion in reductions in Medicare spending, $330 billion in cuts in other mandatory benefit programs, and savings of $1 trillion from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the officials said.

The plan includes no changes in Social Security and does not include an increase in the Medicare eligibility age, which the president had considered this summer. The officials briefed reporters Sunday evening, but spoke on the condition of anonymity in advance of the president's announcement. The new taxes in particular have little or no chance of passing Congress as proposed. Republicans were already lining up against the president's tax proposal before they even knew the magnitude of what he intended to recommend.