"If we succeed in opening the door for negotiations, we're not going to stop from attaining what belongs to us as Palestinians in this General Assembly starting on September 20," Mansour insisted. American and European efforts to restart Israeli-PA negotiations have been specifically intended to avert the PA's United Nations statehood bid, which they say is counter-productive.

"Unlike the construction in the West Bank, which is an illegal unilateral act, declaring a state is a given right which is not considered unilateral," Mansour insisted. Israel "did not ask permission to declare a state in 1948, the US did not ask the British for permission to declare a state in 1776. Our declaration of state is a natural right and not a unilateral act," he said. "Our independence is not one of the core issues," Mansour said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman previously stated a unilateral declaration of PA statehood would render the Oslo Accords null and void. The 1993 Oslo Accords, which serve as the basis of Israeli recognition of, and all cooperation with, the PA, contain the express understanding that an independent PA state would only be attained through bilateral negotiations and that any statehood moves outside that framework were proscribed.

Recent polls indicate the vast majority of Jewish Israelis do not believe negotiations with the PA are in Israel's interests at this time due to the PA's inclusion of Hamas in government and its unilateral statehood bid at the United Nations.

The legislative session went into overtime as conservative lawmakers fought for changes to enhance protection for faith-based groups opposed to recognising gay marriages. The decision followed weeks of contentious debate and negotiations between Governor Cuomo and the GOP-controlled Senate.

After the bill passed in the Assembly, it was unclear if the bill had secured enough support to pass in the Senate. After a several undecideds moved to support the bill - including Republican Roy McDonald who famously defended his decision, saying '...I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing' the balance was tipped. Even when Governor Cuomo had secured 31 votes (32 are needed to pass the bill), the question remained whether Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos would allow the bill to come to a vote on the Senate floor.

After days of crafting religious protections into the bill, and seven hours of GOP leaders' backroom talks, Skelos said the bill could come to a vote on Senate floor. The turning point came when Republican Senator Stephen Saland threw his support behind the measure, being the 32nd senator to do so, clinching the support needed to pass the bill. He said: 'I have to define doing the right thing as treating all persons with equality. I certainly am at peace with my vote.'

New York, the nation's third most populated state, will join Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington DC, in allowing same-sex couples to wed. Huge street parties erupted in New York with celebrants waving rainbow flags and dancing after the historic vote.

Shop staff have been assaulted by parents after being challenged about buying 18-rated DVDs for the child with them. The study, Letting Children be Children, has led to a pledge from High St stores to stop selling 'sexy' underwear to children and a promise from watchdog Ofcom to tighten up the use of sexual images before the broadcast watershed. But author Reg Bailey blames 'complicit' parents for an 'unthinking drift towards ever greater commercialisation and sexualisation' of children and described it as 'poor parenting'.

He was 'alarmed' at the number of adults who bought violent video games and played them with their children. Mr Bailey said: 'One father said it was okay he played Grand Theft Auto with his 13-year-old son because it helped them bond together.' He told the Daily Telegraph that there 'must be easier ways of bonding' with a child than playing a game that allowed 'gangsters to run over prostitutes'. 'I am concerned any parent would ignore these age restrictions. They are there for a reason.'

His criticism came as it emerged that hundreds of thousands of children under 13 are using Facebook with their parents' apparent blessing. The latest figures from the Advertising Association claim Facebook has 988,000 under-12s on the site in Britain. American founder Mark Zuckerberg wants the age restriction lifted. Miss Fraser said there were serious implications if children lied about their ages because Facebook would believe they were 18 and allow gambling, alcohol and cosmetic surgery advertising to be targeted at their pages.

As their sad, bewildered faces show whenever they appear on our screens, the EU's leaders have nowhere to turn. They cannot afford to allow Greece to fall out of their beloved euro, which might trigger an international currency crisis, the consequences of which no one can calculate. On the other hand, they cannot afford to continue pouring tens of billions of euros, which will never be repaid, into a basket-case economy. They - and we - are impaled on an impossible hook.

One of the few sources of pleasure in this mess has been to witness the discomfiture of our own homegrown euro-zealots who, a decade or more ago, were obsessively urging Britain to join the lemmings as they set off for that ultimately inevitable cliff. There was no cheerleader louder than the BBC's Today programme, which back in the late 1990s was almost daily wheeling on the likes of Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten and Leon Brittan to argue, unchallenged, that Britain was doomed unless we signed up.

Last week, in a ghostly, forlorn echo of those times, Lord Brittan was interviewed on Today by Evan Davis, himself once a stalwart cheerleader for the cause. A reader has sent me the transcript of a programme from 2003 in which Davis was trumpeting how happy the Greeks were, after years of inflation with the drachma, to be part of a currency which was "stable" and "quite secure".

Last week, of course, Lord Brittan was adamant that Greece must remain in the euro, while observing that the country had brought these problems on itself because it had "simply been spending more than it could possibly afford". Rather more to the point, one might have thought, was the cover of the latest issue of Private Eye, showing two speech bubbles coming out of the Parthenon. The first said "Massive debts, greedy banks, dodgy politicians, reckless borrowing, cuts, strikes...". The second agreed: "They should let Britain go bust."

Far more than most people realise, we in Britain are approaching a financial abyss almost as great as that into which Greece has been falling.

China's plan to continue to invest in the continent's volatile sovereign debt market comes as efforts continue to prevent Greece's financial crisis making it the first nation to be forced out of the euro. "China is a long-term investor in Europe's sovereign debt market," Mr Wen said at a press conference with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.

"In recent years we have increased by quite a big margin our holdings of government bonds. We will consistently continue to support Europe and the euro." He added: "China is ready to work with Europe to share opportunities, cope with challenges and achieve common development and to make unremitting efforts for stable development of the world economy and an in-depth development of China-Europe ties."

Mr Wen's comments, made before boarding a flight to Birmingham, came after a week in which EU leaders committed themselves to staving off a Greek default provided that the prime minister, George Papandreou, pushes through a package of budget cuts next week. As a signal of China's enthusiasm for doing deals with Europe, Mr Wen signed 12 trade deals with Hungary and agreed to finance more of the country's debt.

His openness in pledging his support will also bolster the UK Government's hopes of strengthening Anglo-China ties during his time in the UK, when he will tour the Chinese-owned MG car factory in Longbridge and attend a UK-China summit at 10 Downing Street tomorrow. Writing in today's Sunday Telegraph, Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said that the eurozone should look east for solutions to their continuing debt problems. He said that it is likely that sovereign wealth funds would be keen to invest.

But they (and we) face a huge looming crisis. It transcends politics and political candidates - it is much bigger than Michele Bachmann's hair or Barack Obama's thesaurus - and sometime soon they are going to have to face it. It's the debt. America's federal government debt is growing at $40,000 per second. It has reached $14 trillion, whatever that means. More comprehensible perhaps is this fact: the debt will soon match the entire GDP of the United States. Outside wartime, that has never happened before.

The real issue is the future of America's domestic spending. The projections are appalling: the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office thinks that by 2030 interest payments plus spending on pensions and health will take up all the government's tax income. Everything else, from education to war-fighting, will have to be borrowed for. Or cut out.

A nation whose productive capacity, whose support of economic and political freedom plays such a big part in our world could be heading for a period of poverty and introspection. AND THE POVERTY COULD COME QUITE SUDDENLY - brought on by interest rate rises forced on America by world markets, or by foreign powers selling dollar bonds.

While making my BBC Radio Four documentary 'Analysis: America's Debt', I asked Richard Haass, of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, whether the fiscal crisis might allow the US to be blackmailed. His answer: "Yes ...one can imagine a situation nowadays, where say there is a crisis over Taiwan between the US and China - which holds a significant number of dollars - and one can imagine the Chinese might be prepared to threaten the dollar, make some comments to weaken it unless the US backs off some of its support of Taiwan."

With Greece teetering on the edge of defaulting on its huge public debt, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos offered to talk to wavering deputies from the ruling Socialist Party, at least two of whom have said they will oppose the measures in crucial votes on Wednesday and Thursday. "I believe that the sense of responsibility will ultimately prevail, the God of Greece is great," he told TV station Alter.

Without parliamentary approval for the measures, the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have said they will not release a vital 12 billion euro ($17.2 billion) loan tranche and the government would run out of cash within days. On Friday, Prime Minister George Papandreou's already slim majority was further undermined when a deputy from his PASOK party said he would vote against the measures, joining another party rebel who announced his opposition earlier this month.

Papandreou's government has 155 seats in the 300-strong parliament, having seen five defections since it came to power in October 2009 with 160 deputies. With the economy stuck in its deepest recession since 1974 and youth unemployment running at over 40 percent, the mix of spending cuts, state sell offs and tax hikes demanded by the EU and the IMF has caused bitter resentment among ordinary Greeks.

"The river's coming up rapidly," Mayor Curt Zimbelman said. "It's dangerous and we need to stay away." Fed by heavy rains upstream and dam releases that have accelerated in recent days, the Souris surged past a 130-year-old record Friday and kept going. The river was nearly 5 feet above major flood stage Friday afternoon and expected to crest over the weekend after reaching more than 8 1/2 feet beyond major flood stage.

The predicted crest was lowered a foot based on new modeling by the National Weather Service, but it was little consolation in Minot. "This has been a very trying time for our community," Zimbelman said. "It's emotionally draining for all of us." Members of the state's congressional delegation pressed for a federal emergency declaration making people eligible for individual assistance, a step they said was needed for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up transitional housing centers.

Brent oil prices tumbled to a four-month closing low on Thursday and after rallying early on Friday, turned and fell again. Some doubts emerged that the unexpected decision by the International Energy Agency to release 60 million barrels over the next month would have a long-term impact. Japanese Economics Minister Kaoru Yosano said the IEA move was a warning to speculative buyers but India's Oil Minister S Jaipal Reddy doubted the action would have an impact.

"Even if there is a slight increase in production (supply), those gains will not be made available to us because of unbridled speculation in the financial markets of the world," he said. "We don't know whether this (weaker oil prices) is a stable trend." The stock release is only the third in the 37-year history of the agency that was set up as a counter weight to exporting group OPEC.

IEA Asian members Japan and Korea said that from next week they will start releasing oil reserves in line with the agency's targets. Japan will cut the reserve requirement for oil companies by 7.9 million barrels over the next 30 days and South Korea will release 3.46 million barrels, together providing about 19 percent of the IEA target.

Bank of England Governor and FPC Chairman Mervyn King said a roadmap was still needed to show markets there was a way out of the Greek debt crisis, and the watchdog's report focussed heavily on the risks posed by high-indebted euro zone states. "Sovereign and banking strains are the most material and immediate threat," it said.

"Market concerns remain over fiscal positions in a number of euro area countries and the potential for contagion to banking systems." Greece won the consent of international lenders on Thursday for a five-year austerity plan to avoid bankruptcy, which helped reassure financial markets. The FPC report stopped short of placing curbs on bank payouts to shareholders as US authorities have done.

"It does not make sense to place an arbitrary limit," King told a news conference. "What matters is to put in the capital." The FPC is one of a new breed of watchdogs set up after the financial crisis to try to spot trouble in the financial system before it can derail the wider economy.

The move drew immediate condemnation from Republicans and business interests opposed to tapping the emergency reserve for anything other than a critical cut-off of oil. "The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was designed for energy emergencies, not political convenience. Releasing our reserves to calm the market is emblematic of an administration whose energy policy is irrational and counter-productive," said Representative Fred Upton, Republican for Michigan, head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"The Obama administration's decision to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is ill-advised and not the signal the markets need," said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce's Energy Institute.

"Our reserve is intended to address true emergencies, not politically inconvenient high prices... With US crude oil production expected to decrease by 90 million barrels in the next year, the administration should instead focus on increasing domestic production to improve our energy security, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create thousands of jobs," she said in a statement.

No damage or injuries were reported. The warning, which extended for roughly 800 miles (1,300 km) - from Unimak Pass, northeast of Dutch Harbor, westward to Amchitka Pass, west of Adak Island - was cancelled after a little more than an hour. A tsunami wave measuring just 6 centimetres tall was recorded at Nikolski, a tiny Aleut village on the island of Umnak, and a 10-centimeter wave was observed at Adak, said Becki Legatt, a spokeswoman for the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Centre in Palmer, Alaska.

The coast of the entire Alaska peninsula and all of the Alaska mainland were never considered to be threatened. The quake struck shortly after 7 pm local time (4 am BST) at a depth of about 25 miles (40 km). A second tremor of magnitude 7.2 hit in the same vicinity of the Aleutians a half-minute later, the US Geological Survey said. Quakes of 7 to 8 magnitudes and higher are relatively common in the Aleutians but are generally of little consequence because the island chain is so remote and sparsely populated.

"This is a very seismically active area," said Randy Baldwin, a USGS geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Centre in Golden, Colorado.

Last week credit rating agency Moody's announced it was putting Italy on review for a possible downgrade to its Aa2 credit rating. These reviews typically last three months or so, and although a downgrade would still leave Italy at the higher end of investment grade, it is not good news to be sliding down the scale, especially when a sovereign debt crisis is raging further along the Mediterranean coast.

The reasoning behind the move by Moody's was firstly challenges to economic growth, and secondly difficulties in bringing its debt levels down. A lot of attention has focused on a Greek default hitting Portugal and Ireland hardest, but Italy has a public debt-to-GDP of close to 120 percent of GDP, thus it is extremely vulnerable to investors dumping its debt, which would push up interest rates and make its debts too expensive to service.

Nearly a quarter of all debt issued by the euro zone comes from Italy and yet its growth remains stubbornly sluggish. Its average quarterly growth rate since 2000 is just 1 percent. Italy now risks becoming a long-term low growth/high debt economy. Although its budget deficit is at a manageable level just below 4 percent of GDP, it has more than 300 billion euros of debt maturing this year and needs to get access to the capital markets in order to fund these bond redemptions.

Italy's structural economic deficiencies are only expected to get worse. By 2030 there will be less than two workers for every retired person aged 65 years or over, that compares with three today. If you think productivity is low now, imagine what it could be in the future. It has one of the fastest aging populations in Europe and its pension costs are set to continue to expand rapidly. This is the major challenge it faces in the coming decade. Without easy access to the capital markets it is easy to imagine a Greek-style situation for Italy as it drowns in its enormous public debt.

With a second bail-out due in the autumn, there had been a suggestion cash from EU-wide funds may be used. This will now not happen, but the UK will still contribute via the IMF. "This is the right outcome for the British taxpayer," a Downing Street source told the BBC after the vote. The confirmation that the European contribution to the second Greek rescue package will again be limited to eurozone countries - those that use the single currency - was made in Brussels by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

Mr Rompuy was speaking at the end of the first day of a summit of EU leaders, which Mr Cameron is also attending. The European money currently being given to Greece comes from the European Financial Stability Facility, to which only the 17 eurozone nations contribute. The UK instead contributes to the wider European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism, which covers the whole of the EU. The Greek parliament will vote next week on the government's latest round of spending cuts.

If the vote goes through, then Greece will get the next 12 billion euros instalment of the current 110 billion euros of eurozone and IMF funds. Greece needs this money by 15 July, or else it will default on its loan payments. However, many economists think that even if Greece gets the latest 12 billion euros it will still default at some time in the future.

The ministry on Thursday said the Chinese warships were monitored passing from the Pacific Ocean into the East China Sea. Ministry spokesman Shuichi Fukuya said they were believed to be returning from target practice and refueling exercises in waters about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) south of Okinawa. He said the Japanese military saw the Chinese warships heading out to the area June 8-9.

Separately, the foreign ministry said a Chinese maritime research vessel briefly entered Japan's exclusive economic zone Thursday, around 330 kilometers (205 miles) off the coast of Miyagi, one of the worst-hit areas in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. A coast guard patrol vessel issued a warning against the Chinese ship, which left the economic zone around four hours later.