Following the new earthquake, the Japanese authorities issued a 20 inch tsunami warning for the Pacific coastal region which was later lifted, with no reports of immediate casualties or further damage. Japan's weather agency said that the strong tremor was believed to be the latest in a string of aftershocks to hit the region following the massive earthquake just over two weeks ago.

A large clean-up and restoration project remains in place across the northeast of Japan following widespread devastation and the loss of more than 27,000 lives. Fears of radiation contamination are continuing to hamper procedures and are causing widespread unease following damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Commander Bob Broadhurst, the head of public order for the Metropolitan Police, warned that the anarchists would be "deliberately targeting" the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29. "The concern for me is that they do what they did yesterday in central London and divert resources away from my security plan and take our eye off the ball security wise," he said.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, was under fire last night for speaking at the TUC march, during which the violence occurred. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said Mr Miliband would have been "quietly satisfied" by the chaos and claimed it was not surprising there was violence as Labour was failing to offer any alternative to the cuts.

The weekend's rally against the Government's austerity drive was marred by splinter groups who attacked officers and targeted shops and hotels. Mobs of masked anarchists pelted officers with sticks, paint bombs and fireworks loaded with coins. They brought chaos to Oxford Street and Piccadilly, the capital's busiest shopping streets, where they started fires, smashed their way into banks and shops, including Fortnum and Mason, the department store, and Topshop, and attacked the Ritz hotel.

More than 200 people were arrested and 31 police officers were injured, including 11 who were taken to hospital. The anarchists ended the day in Trafalgar Square, where they set fire to banners and threw missiles and broken bottles at officers.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's security forces clashed with protesters in several cities over the weekend after his promises of freedoms and pay increases failed to prevent dissent from spreading across the country. Clinton said the elements that led to intervention in Libya - international condemnation, an Arab League call for action, a United Nations Security Council resolution - are "not going to happen" with Syria, in part because members of the US Congress from both parties say they believe Assad is "a reformer."

"What's been happening there the last few weeks is deeply concerning, but there's a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities," Clinton said, referring to Qaddafi's attacks on the Libyan people, "than police actions which, frankly, have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see."

"Each of these situations is unique," Clinton said, referring to the North African and Middle Eastern countries dealing with change and unrest, a list that now includes Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Bahrain. Clinton said defectors from the Libyan military and government are offering more support to the rebels, who, she said, are "not a well-organized fighting force". But they are getting more support from defectors, from the former Libyan government military," Clinton said on CBS. She said that "a lot" of diplomats and military leaders in Libya "are flipping, changing sides, defecting because they see the handwriting on the wall."

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told "Meet the Press" that President Barack Obama thus far hasn't offered a plan or objectives for US involvement in Libya and that there should have been congressional debate on the issue. "I don't believe we should be engaged in a Libyan civil war," Indiana's Lugar said. "American interests are not at stake."

Deepening chaos in Syria, in particular, could dash any remaining hopes for a Middle East peace agreement, several analysts said. It could also alter the American rivalry with Iran for influence in the region and pose challenges to the United States' greatest ally in the region, Israel. In interviews, administration officials said the uprising appeared to be widespread, involving different religious groups in southern and coastal regions of Syria, including Sunni Muslims usually loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

The new American ambassador in Damascus, Robert Ford, has been quietly reaching out to Mr Assad to urge him to stop firing on his people. As American officials confront the upheaval in Syria, a country with which the United States has icy relations, they say they are pulled between fears that its problems could destabilize neighbors like Lebanon and Israel, and the hope that it could weaken one of Iran's key allies.

The Syrian unrest continued on Saturday, with government troops reported to have killed more protesters. With 61 people confirmed killed by security forces, the country's status as an island of stability amid the Middle East storm seemed irretrievably lost. For two years, the United States has tried to coax Damascus into negotiating a peace deal with Israel and to moving away from Iran - a fruitless effort that has left President Obama open to criticism on Capitol Hill that he is bolstering one of the most repressive regimes in the Arab world.

Officials fear the unrest there and in Jordan could leave Israel further isolated. The Israeli government was already rattled by the overthrow of Egypt's leader, Hosni Mubarak, worrying that a new government might not be as committed to Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

Hresha, who taught physics at Tripoli University, later fled to Canada. The prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood now lives in London, and anticipates the group could become an important player in a post-Gaddafi environment. As in Egypt and Tunisia, the Brotherhood in Libya has been energized by the sudden upheaval sweeping the Arab world. It says it has no organizational links with the Brotherhood elsewhere, but shares the philosophy of the pan-Arab Islamist movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s.

Largely drawn from the devout educated middle classes and university campuses in Tripoli and Benghazi, the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the mid-1950s. Islamist opposition to the Libyan regime gathered force in the late 1980s, as part of a wider Islamic awakening or "Sahwa" in the region and in reaction to what many saw as an attempt by Gaddafi to hijack and interpret Islam for his own purposes. While jihadists launched a brief but unsuccessful campaign to overthrow Gaddafi in the 1990s, the Brotherhood focused much of its efforts on clandestine preaching and social welfare efforts in Libya.

In 1998, Gaddafi's security services launched a crackdown against the group that saw more than 200 members imprisoned and hundreds more forced into exile, including Hresha. Despite years of repression, Hresha claims the Brotherhood still has thousands of members scattered across Libya, with chapters in almost every single town, including Sirte, Gaddafi's birthplace on the coast west of Tripoli. In 2006, its leaders were released after reconciling with the Libyan regime. But now the Brotherhood is siding with the rebellion.

Ahead of President Barack Obama's national address Monday to explain his decision to act against the Libyan leader, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in appearances on the Sunday talk shows that the intervention had effectively rendered Gaddafi's forces defenseless against air attacks and created the conditions for opposition advances westward.

In interviews taped Saturday, Gates and Clinton also defended the narrowly defined UN mandate to prevent atrocities against Libyan civilians and said the US had largely accomplished its goals. "We have taken out his armor," Gates said, adding that the US soon would relinquish its leading role in enforcing a no-fly zone and striking pro-Gaddafi ground targets intent on violence. Clinton said "we're beginning to see, because of the good work of the coalition, his troops begin to turn back toward the west - and to see the opposition begin to reclaim the ground they had lost."

Libyan rebels reclaimed an important oil town and kept pushed westward Sunday toward the capital, Tripoli. Brega, a main oil export terminal in eastern Libya, fell after a skirmish late Saturday. Rebel forces also seized the tiny desert town of Al-Egila on their way to the massive oil refining complex of Ras Lanouf.

US-led airstrikes allowed anti-government forces to recapture the key eastern city of Ajdabiya. NATO's top decision-making body was to meet Sunday to expand its enforcement of the no-fly zone to include air strikes against Libyan ground targets. The military progress follows deep criticism against Obama from lawmakers upset that the administration hadn't sought greater congressional input on Libya.

While some were happy to acknowledge them others refer to them as 'pseudepigrapha' - meaning a falsely attributed work - he wrote. In his new book, 'Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are', Professor Ehrman claims The Second Epistle of Peter - or 2 Peter - was forged.

'...scholars everywhere - except for our friends among the fundamentalists - will tell you that there is no way on God's green earth that Peter wrote the book. 'Someone else wrote it claiming to be Peter,' he writes.

Professor Ehrman then goes on to write how the Bible is actually filled with the need for 'truth' but many of its writers were telling a lie. 'It appears that some of the New Testament writers, such as the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy and Ephesians, felt they were perfectly justified to lie in order to tell the truth,' he writes. 'But we today can at least evaluate their claims and realise just how human, and fallible, they were.'

The anti-capitalists started fires and smashed their way into banks, hotels and shops, bringing chaos to Britain's busiest shopping street. Over 200 people were in custody today after the trouble flared following a separate rally where hundreds of thousands protested against the Government's public spending cuts. The Metropolitan Police later said at least 31 police officers were injured during the protests.

The violence began as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, addressed a TUC rally of at least 250,000 peaceful protesters in Hyde Park who had marched from Westminster to demonstrate against government spending cuts. As he spoke, an apparently co-ordinated attack began on shops and police in Oxford Street as a mob tried to storm into shops including Topshop, BHS and John Lewis.

Chris Heaton-Harris, a Tory MP, said Britain's reputation had been damaged by the "mindless thugs". Brendan Barber, the TUC general-secretary, said he "bitterly regretted" the violence but insisted that the march was important.

In 2007, the city lifted a cap on the number of psychics allowed to operate and now some believe the 'Witch City' is getting overrun. Barbara Szafranski is a long-time psychic license holder who conducts readings at her downtown shop Angelica of the Angels. She needed no crystal ball to tell her business would take a hit when more fortunetellers hit the scene.

"It affected me 75%. I lost business because many stores opened up that were not in this field. They just opened up because they wanted to get the money from the readings," said Szafranski. "It just becomes a bunch of gypsies. Maybe I shouldn't say that word because they might be upset by it but those people are not necessarily always qualified." She says Salem city leaders need to do a better job controlling the number of fortunetellers and preventing charlatans from operating.

Christian Day is a Salem warlock who owns two shops in the city, Omen and Hex. He employs psychic readers at both businesses and runs a psychic fair each year. He helped push the Salem city council to lift the cap on psychics and thinks the change offers a positive revenue stream for the area. "I feel like it creates this sort of sparkle effect where everybody's sort of raising the bar on one another and making everything more exciting," said Day.

Others say a major debt sell-off by Tokyo is unlikely, but noted that the mere fact that questions are being raised speaks volumes about the risks involved in relying so heavily on foreign investors to fund US debt.

"This natural disaster in Japan concerns me that it could speed up what's coming, because they are the second leading buyer of our debt," Senator Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, told The Washington Times. "Small degrees of differences in how much they buy of our debt, I think, can make a big difference in interest rates that we have to pay people to buy our debt."

With the federal government having piled up $14.2 trillion in debt, budget experts are warning that the country is on an unsustainable fiscal path. Congress, they say, must find cuts in all areas of the budget, while reforming the entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - that are the biggest drivers of national spending. Concerns about the financial plight facing Japan, which trails only China among foreign holders of US Treasury debt, aren't helping the picture.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.'s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world's best tax law firm. Indeed, the company's slogan "Imagination at Work" fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya". Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries". Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan". He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.

"The Islamists of al-Qaeda took advantage of the pillaging of arsenals in the rebel zone to acquire arms, including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries in Tenere," a desert region of the Sahara that stretches from northeast Niger to western Chad, Deby said in the interview.

"This is very serious. AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region," he said. His claim was echoed by officials in other countries in the region who said that they were worried that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) might have acquired "heavy weapons", thanks to the insurrection.

"We have sure information. We are very worried for the sub-region," a Malian security source who did not want to be named said. AQIM originated as an armed Islamist resistance movement to the secular Algerian government. It now operates mainly in Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, where it has attacked military targets and taken civilian hostages, particularly Europeans, some of whom it has killed. "We have the same information," about heavy weapons, including SAM 7 missiles, a military source from Niger said. "It is very worrying. This overarming is a real danger for the whole zone," he added

The UN's nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months. It is believed the radiation at Fukushima is coming from one of the reactors, but a specific leak has not been identified. Leaking water at reactor 2 has been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/hour - 10 million times higher than when the plant is operating normally.

"We are examining the cause of this, but no work is being done there because of the high level of radiation," said a spokesman for the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco). "High levels of caesium and other substances are being detected, which usually should not be found in reactor water. There is a high possibility that fuel rods are being damaged," the spokesman added.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government said that airbone radiation around the plant was decreasing. Four of the reactors are still considered volatile.

The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl. The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside the plant.

"This is not surprising," says a researcher "When the fuel is damaged there is no reason for the volatile elements not to escape," and the measured caesium and iodine are in the right ratios for the fuel used by the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Also, the Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site, and an unknown amount has been damaged. The Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes

The organisation set up to verify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) has a global network of air samplers that monitor and trace the origin of around a dozen radionuclides, the radioactive elements released by atomic bomb blasts - and nuclear accidents. These measurements can be combined with wind observations to track where the radionuclides come from, and how much was released. The amounts being released are "entirely consistent" with the relatively low amounts of caesium and iodine being measured in soil, plants and water in Japan, because so much has blown out to sea. The amounts crossing the Pacific to places like Sacramento are vanishingly small - they were detected there because the CTBT network is designed to sniff out the tiniest traces.

Iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid, and leaves only as it decays radioactively, with a half-life of eight days. Caesium is absorbed by muscles, where its half-life of 30 years means that it remains until it is excreted by the body. It takes between 10 and 100 days to excrete half of what has been consumed.

While in the body the isotopes' radioactive emissions can do significant damage, mainly to DNA. Children who ingest iodine-131 can develop thyroid cancer 10 or more years later; adults seem relatively resistant. A study published in the US last week found that iodine-131 from Chernobyl is still causing new cases of thyroid cancer to appear at an undiminished rate in the most heavily affected regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.