But after he began attending Bedfordshire University in Luton "everything changed" as he became a strict Muslim with increasingly extremist views, even naming his baby son Osama in honour of the al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden. On Saturday he blew himself up in a street full of Christmas shoppers in Sweden's first suicide attack, after recording a message which promised to kill "your children, daughters, brothers and sisters" partly in revenge for the country's support role in Afghanistan.

Abdulwahab's radicalisation during his time in Luton once again raised questions over whether British universities are doing enough to stamp out the recruiting of extremists on campus. A close friend said the family had been shocked by his transformation from an ordinary teenager to a religious fanatic after he left for Britain.

"There is no doubt that Taimur changed when he went to Britain," said the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He would drink beer with his friends and go to nightclubs. He didn't care about politics or religion. He even had an Israeli girlfriend. He had many girlfriends, he enjoyed life. His parents were even a little worried that he was having too much fun. But then he went to England to study in 2001 and everything changed."

"When he came back he had grown a beard and he was very serious. He talked about Afghanistan and religion and did not want to hang out with his friends. His parents were worried about him but they thought he was just going through a phase. No-one ever imagined anything like this. Everyone who knew him is devastated. His parents are heartbroken."

Minnesota and Wisconsin were hardest-hit by the blizzard, with more than 20 inches of snow piling up east of the Twin Cities and into western parts of Wisconsin Friday night into Saturday night. Snowfall totals reached 23.0 inches near Osceola, Wisconsin, 22.0 inches in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and 21.5 inches in New Market and Shakopee, Minnesota.

While Minnesota and Wisconsin bore the brunt of the blizzard, daily snowfall records were set all across the Midwest. Other major cities where records were set include Detroit with 6.3 inches, Indianapolis with 4.1 inches and St Louis with 4.4 inches. In each of these cities, this was the highest daily snowfall on December 12 in more than 100 years. The previous records were 4.0 inches for Detroit in 1893, 3.5 inches for Indianapolis in 1898 and 2.5 inches for St Louis in 1903.

For the United States, a loss of the top AAA rating, reduce the appeal of US Treasuries, which currently rank as among the world's safest investments. "From a credit perspective, the negative effects on government finance are likely to outweigh the positive effects of higher economic growth," Moody's analyst Steven Hess said in a report sent late on Sunday.

After Obama announced his plan, Treasury prices fell sharply in volatile trade last week and yields have hit a six-month high, in part due to concerns over the effect the package will have on government debt levels. If the bill becomes law, it will "adversely affect the federal government budget deficit and debt level," Moody's said.

On Monday, the Democratic-led US Congress moved toward grudging approval of President Obama's deal with Republicans to extend expiring tax cuts, even for the wealthiest Americans, Last week, Moody's and Fitch Ratings both expressed concerns about the US's rating longer term, with Moody's fearing the impact if the tax cuts become permanent. In a market obsessed with the euro sovereign debt crisis, the Moody's note reminded foreign exchange investors about their worries of growing US debt and was a factor pressuring the dollar on Monday.

Requiring Americans to buy insurance "would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers," wrote Judge Hudson, a George W. Bush appointee in the Eastern District of Virginia. "At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance - or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage - it's about an individual's right to choose to participate."

The Obama administration said it was confident higher courts would rule the law constitutional, and said it was weighing an appeal. "Challenges like this are nothing new," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Monday. "I don't think the decision today and how he decided it was a surprise to anybody here."

The lawsuit, brought by Virginia Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, is the first court ruling against the law since President Barack Obama signed it in March. More than 20 federal lawsuits have been filed against the overhaul, and judges in two of those cases ruled in favor of the Obama administration. The battle is expected to end up at the Supreme Court, though probably not until the 2011-12 term at the earliest.

"We've won the first round of this particular fight, but we know there are others to come," Mr Cuccinelli said. "This lawsuit is not about health care. It's about liberty."

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, California. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before." For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption." They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections - they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem. "To predict eruptions we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," says Title, "we have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun."

This revelation increases the work load for space weather forecasters, but it also increases the potential accuracy of their forecasts. "The whole-sun approach could lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity," commented Rodney Viereck of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. "This in turn would provide improved forecasts to our customers such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew."

In a paper they prepared for the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR), Schrijver and Title broke down the Great Eruption into more than a dozen significant shock waves, flares, filament eruptions, and CMEs spanning 180 degrees of solar longitude and 28 hours of time. At first it seemed to be a cacophony of disorder until they plotted the events on a map of the sun's magnetic field. Title describes the Eureka! moment: "We saw that all the events of substantial coronal activity were connected by a wide-ranging system of separatrices, separators, and quasi-separatrix layers." A "separatrix" is a magnetic fault zone where small changes in surrounding plasma currents can set off big electromagnetic storms.

A deep divide runs through Europe, and Merkel is more isolated than ever within the circle of the EU's 27 heads of state and government. The chancellor sees herself confronted with the charge that she has focused exclusively on national interests in the euro crisis. Last week, in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Juncker accused Merkel of "un-European behavior" and "simplistic thinking."

The premier of the Grand Duchy is not alone in his criticism. Many European leaders resent Merkel for the fact that Germany has recently been less flexible and not as enthusiastic about the EU as it used to be. Germany's understandable desire to not become Europe's paymaster doesn't give it the right to be its taskmaster, say critics from Lisbon to Helsinki.

The South's naval live-fire drills are scheduled to run Monday through Friday at 27 sites. The regularly scheduled exercises are getting special attention following a North Korean artillery attack on front-line Yeonpyeong Island that killed two South Korean marines and two civilians. The November 23 artillery barrage, the North's first assault to target a civilian area since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, began after the North said South Korea first fired artillery toward its territorial waters. South Korea says it fired shells southward, not toward North Korea, as part of routine exercises.

After the attack, South Korea staged joint military drills with the United States and also pushed ahead with more artillery exercises, despite the North's warning that they would aggravate tension. A South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff officer tried to play down the significance of this week's drills, saying they are part of routine military exercises and would not occur near the disputed western Korean sea border where last month's attack took place. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of office policy, gave no further details.

North Korea, however, lashed out at Seoul, accusing South Korea of collaborating with the United States and Japan to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang. That cooperation "is nothing but treachery escalating the tension between the North and the South and bringing the dark clouds of a nuclear war to hang over the Korean peninsula," Pyongyang's main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

Although Britain's banks "should be able to absorb the likely losses on their direct exposures to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain without too much difficulty" thanks to the efforts made "over the past couple of years", the indirect impact of a resurgent eurozone crisis holds serious dangers. "Harder to gauge is the potential effect on household and, especially, business confidence. In the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, this was arguably the most significant transmission channel to the real economy," Mr Bean said.

"An intensification of the sovereign debt problems in the euro area could therefore administer a blow to the recovery here. But given the very high degree of uncertainty, there is little that the MPC can do to deal with this risk ahead of crystallisation." His comments follow a warning from the Ernst & Young Eurozone Forecast that the single currency area has a 10 per cent chance of collapsing into serious recession again and a further 25 per cent chance of crippling downturns in the peripheral member states.

Mr Bean refused to rule out the prospect of the crisis spreading to Portugal, Italy and Spain, saying: "Support to Greece and Ireland from the IMF and rest of the European Union has given those countries a breathing space in which to undertake the necessary adjustments. Financial support for other countries may or may not prove necessary - only time will tell." A eurozone crisis is just one risk lingering over the coming year. Although "the recovery has remained on track", he said, "there remain significant challenges for the year ahead".

How can Germany or France agree lightly to plans that amount to an EU debt union, with a common treasury, tax system, and budget policy, the stuff of civil wars and revolutions over the ages? To do so is to dismantle the ancient nation states of Europe in all but name. Even if Chancellor Merkel wished to take this course - and even if the Bundestag approved it - the scheme would still be torn to pieces by the German constitutional court unless legitimised by radical EU treaty changes, which would in turn take years, require referenda, and face populist revolt in half Europe.

What the German people are being asked to do is to surrender fiscal sovereignty and pay open-ended transfers to Southern Europe, taking on a burden up to six times [the cost of] reunification with East Germany. "If we pool the debts of the countries in the south-west periphery of Europe, we are blighting our children's future: the debt levels are astronomic," said Hans-Werner Sinn, head of Germany IFO institute.

At the end of the day, debtor governments still have to persuade Japanese life insurers, Mideast wealth funds, or French and German banks, to put up real money to buy their bonds at a bearable interest rate. Credit Agricole said last week that it would hold back at next week's auction of Spanish debt because it is not yet clear whether the ECB will back-stop the country. "The risk is simply too large for our appetite," it said. So we drift on with rising yields into 2011, when Portugal must raise 38 billion euros, Belgium 85 billion euros, Spain 210 billion euros, and Italy 374 billion euros - according to Goldman Sachs.

The reflex of the EU elites is to blame this structural mess on lack of statesmanship. "There is something surreal about the unfolding financial crisis," said Stefano Micossi from the College of Europe, the sanctum sanctorum of the European Project. "Leaders grudgingly do what is needed to prevent disaster at the last minute before it is too late, and the next minute they go back to the behaviour that brought them against the wall in the first place. The eurozone is in bad need of a psychiatrist," he wrote at VoxEU.

"If the eurozone follows this path, either all of the sovereign debts become German public debt, or the euro will collapse," he said. This is admirably candid in one sense, but is today's crisis really just a failure of leadership? Was EMU not dysfunctional from the first day? Did it not inflict negative real interest rates on Club Med and Ireland in the boom years, driving them into distastrously pro-cyclical policies?

Did it not lock in chronic imbalances between North and South? Has it not left victim states trapped in debt deflation or slumps which have gone too far to respond to an austerity cure, and from which there seems to be no escape on terms acceptable to Germany? Should we blame the current hapless leaders, or the guilty men of Maastricht who created this doomsday machine? If the project itself is rotten, surely what the eurozone needs most is an undertaker.

Painfully cold, arctic air sweeping across the Midwest has already been driving temperatures well-below zero. Temperatures will remain or plunge back below zero in the Upper Midwest with lows between 10 and 20 below zero across much of Iowa, Minnesota, western Wisconsin and the eastern Dakotas tonight.

Tonight into Monday, the bitter cold will overspread the rest of the eastern half of the country, creating a flash freeze in many places where a storm has made roads wet or slushy. While actual temperatures may not fall below zero, horrendous winds will make it feel that way for millions. AccuWeather.com RealFeel temperatures, which provide a measure of how cold it feels with the wind factored in, will plummet below zero as far south as Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama, early Monday morning. Early Tuesday and Wednesday morning, these values will be near zero all the way east into New York City and Philadelphia.

In Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, people will have to endure RealFeel® temperatures that stay below zero for 36 to 48 hours straight. Frostbite and hypothermia can set in very quickly is such extreme cold. Meanwhile, subfreezing temperatures will reach all the way into Deep South Texas, central Florida and many areas along the Gulf Coast, including Houston, New Orleans, Gulfport, Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, and Panama City, Florida. The cold will put additional stress on winter crops across the Southeast and especially in Florida. Damage was already done during last week's freeze.

The storms have ended a long drought in Lebanon, Syria and Israel and come just a week after more than 40 people died in a forest fire. A Moldova-registered cargo ship sunk off the Israeli port of Ashdod. All of its 11 crew members were rescued. A woman died when an uprooted tree fell on her car in Lebanon's northern port city of Tripoli.

Shipping has been delayed through the Suez Canal and most Egyptian ports, both on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean - including the country's largest at Alexandria - have closed, with winds reaching speeds of up to 60km/h (37mph). Waves of up to 10 metres (33 feet) battered coasts, damaging fishing boats in Lebanon. In Syria, snow blanketed the streets of the capital, Damascus, and closed roads.

The BBC's Jon Leyne, in the Egyptian capital Cairo, says there are strong, cold winds in the city and the murky yellow sky of a sand storm. He says the storms, which caused temperatures to plunge to below freezing in some places, have ended weeks of unseasonably warm and dry weather across the region. Last week a devastating forest fire, fanned by drought and hot weather, killed more than 40 people near Israel's northern port city of Haifa. Thousands of hectares of forest were destroyed there and in Lebanon by fires.

Such a sharp rise in US benchmark market interest rates matters a lot - and it matters way beyond America. The US government is now servicing $13.8 trillion (8.7 trillion pounds) in declared liabilities - making it, by a long way, the world's largest debtor. Around $414 billion of US taxpayers' money went on sovereign interest payments last year - around 4.5 times the budget of America's Department of Education.

Debt service costs have reached such astronomical levels even though, over the past year and more, yields have been kept historically and artificially low by "quantitative easing (QE)" - in other words, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's virtual printing press. Now borrowing costs are 28 per cent higher than a month ago, with the 10-year Treasury yield reaching 3.33 per cent last week, an already eye-watering debt service burden can only go up.

Few on this side of the Atlantic should feel smug. The eurozone's ongoing sovereign debt debacle has pushed up Germany's borrowing costs by 27 per cent over the last month - to 3.03 per cent. The market has judged that if Europe's Teutonic powerhouse wants the single currency to survive, it will ultimately need to raise wads of cash to absorb the mess caused by other member states' fiscal incontinence.

Over the coming months, the world's appetite for dollar assets will be very severely tested - perhaps very close to destruction. America boasts the world's reserve currency, of course, but its ability to borrow from the rest of the world is not without limit. Last week's US tax move poses great dangers. There is little point in a fiscal giveaway that's cancelled out by higher rates. All you end up with is even more sovereign debt. Upgraded growth forecasts don't cause yield spike like that we saw last week - and it's absurd to suggest that they do. There's a new mood in the bond markets - a mood of zero tolerance.

The dispute over the area, home to sensitive Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites, has derailed past peace talks and spilled into violence. Palestinians claim the sector as the capital of their future state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reaffirmation of his intention to hold on to east Jerusalem drew criticism from the Palestinians and was likely to increase friction with the Americans. The White House Mideast envoy is scheduled to arrive this week in another attempt to push peace efforts forward.

Netanyahu's defense minister, Ehud Barak of the centrist Labor Party, called for sharing Jerusalem with the Palestinians. But a government official said Barak's idea does not reflect the government's view. The Palestinians want to establish their future state in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, lands Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel later annexed east Jerusalem in a move that is not recognized by the international community.

US-led negotiations broke down after just three weeks and Israel refused to renew a 10-month moratorium on new settlement housing. Palestinians said they would not return to the talks unless there was a total freeze in West Bank and east Jerusalem construction. Israel countered that such a condition had never been made before, and the issue should be part of the negotiations. Washington's special envoy to the Mideast, George Mitchell, is expected to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week.

The sum is enormous: 6 billion euros ($7.9 billion) is how much the Irish government wants to cut from the public finances next year. The drastic course of treatment, the fourth budget in two years, was passed by the Irish parliament late on Tuesday night. It will be a huge test of strength for the small country: The average Irish household will be 7,500 euros worse off by 2012, according to the Irish Independent.

The Dublin government has been congratulated and encouraged from across the European Union for being so brave in sticking to its austerity goals. The unemployed, low-income workers, pensioners, students - hardly any sector of society has been left unscathed. Yet this huge national sacrifice will not significantly improve the country's massive debt problem. The sometimes severe cuts to social welfare payments, public sector pay and state investment pale into insignificance when compared to the massive gaps in the Irish banks' accounts. That is why INVESTORS ARE CONTINUING, UNDETERRED, TO SPECULATE ON IRELAND'S EVENTUAL INSOLVENCY.

However, the high interest rates mean that IRELAND HAS NO PROSPECT OF PAYING BACK THE LOAN. There remains only the hope that the government won't have to avail of all the funds. But no expert believes that this will be possible - after all, the Irish banks have repeatedly sought fresh capital over recent months.

Bombs used against civilians; millions paid to corrupt officials; and a kidnapping industry that employs students during university vacations: The US diplomatic cables from the Nigerian cities of Abuja and Lagos paint an unusually bleak picture of the situation in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Hardly any of the international oil companies active in the delta publishes production figures, kidnappings and hostage-taking are a daily occurence and the civilian population is suffering - not least because they too are occasionally targets of the Nigerian Army's special forces.

The central government in Abuja has neglected the delta for decades. It has failed to build schools, hospitals and roads and has simply ignored the serious environmental problems. All that mattered was that the oil kept flowing - and continued to produce kickbacks for the political elite. "The Federal Government has not funded one road in the key Niger Delta States in the last 10 years," reads one February 2009 cable from the US Consulate in Lagos, citing a high-ranking politician.

In the face of such neglect, organized crime has become rampant in the delta. There are kidnappers who are in bed with the authorities and special military units that, while they sometimes fight rebels in the delta, frequently have a stake in the oil business. The rebels, although they stage attacks on the multinational oil companies, also sell oil and enjoy police protection. The political elite thrives on the chaotic situation.