"You don't just have a government and a movement for democracy," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair cautioned on Monday. "You also have others, notably the Muslim Brotherhood, who would take this in a different direction. We need to be anxious to meet the aspirations of the people, but do it in a way that produces something better."

Former Israeli diplomat Eli Avidar argues that elections put the militant Islamist Hamas movement in power in Gaza. "President (George W) Bush and (Secretary of State) Condi Rice pressured the State of Israel to allow democratic elections in the Palestinian Authority and what happened was that Hamas took over and these were the first and last democratic elections," he said.

The Muslim Brotherhood could do the same thing in Egypt, he fears. "If they go and take the leadership because of democratic elections, I believe that democracy will not continue in Egypt because the fact is, the second that they take power, they will not leave it," he said.

"Everything is running out. I have three children, and I only have enough to feed them for maybe two more days. After that I do not know what we will do." school administrator Gamalat Gadalla told CNN. The unrest has paralyzed daily life in Egypt with many grocers closing shop and spotty food shipments.

"With the curfew, there are no restaurants, food or gas. Basic goods will soon be in shortage," Sandmonkey, an Egyptian blogger said via Twitter. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has ordered a curfew in Egypt to be extended from 3 pm to 8 am on Monday, further stifling normal life in the embattled nation.

Egyptian state-run Nile TV has set up a hotline for citizens to call in and report bread shortages. There has been no other indication of what the Egyptian government is doing to address the crisis.

Egypt's powerful army has vowed it will not use force against the protesters. Meanwhile, new Vice President Omar Suleiman says he will hold cross-party talks on constitutional reform. Mr Mubarak reshuffled his cabinet on Monday to try to head off the protests, replacing the widely despised Interior Minister Habib al-Adly.

But correspondents say that the army's statement has been a major blow for President Mubarak, and appears to have encouraged protesters. The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, in Cairo, says that the feeling that change is coming in Egypt is getting stronger. Too much has happened too quickly to go back to the way things were before, he says.

On Monday, the Egyptian army said it respected the "legitimate rights of the people". In its statement, carried on Egyptian media, the military said: "To the great people of Egypt, your armed forces, acknowledging the legitimate rights of the people... have not and will not use force against the Egyptian people." Whatever happens next, this will change the Middle East, our correspondent adds.

Secondly it would see Greece use the EFSF to buy back bonds at between 65-75% of their nominal value from the ECB and private bondholders. Thirdly the plan would see the maturity of the bail-out loans extended by 30 years. In return, Greece would need to impose further austerity measures, specifically introducing a cap on its budget deficit into its constitution. If adopted the scheme is expected to re-profile two thirds of Greece's 330 billion euros debt by the end of the year. It has been compared to the Brady plan which rescued Latin America from bankruptcy in the 1980s.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Friday, Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou confirmed that informal talks are underway to find ways to reduce Greece's debt burden. The FT reports that some IMF and EU officials support Portugal being pushed into seeking a bail-out. Die Welt notes that the Italian government is holding up discussions on the new Stability Pact, as they do not agree on setting public debt limits at 60% of GDP.

Over the weekend Der Spiegel reported on the 'pact for competitiveness' which German Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to propose to eurozone leaders at the Summit on Friday, including increase of retirement ages across Europe, harmonisation of corporate tax rates and the introduction of a debt brake into all eurozone members' national constitutions. Bloomberg suggests that Merkel will ask for this in return for an increase in the eurozone bail-out fund.

Handelsblatt quotes government sources saying that the plan still needs to be agreed upon with the coalition partner FDP. On his Coulisses de Bruxelles blog, Jean Quatremer argues "the French have already showed opposition to a pension age of 62 years; they will detest retiring at 67". FT Deutschland and Handelsblatt report that the ECB is keeping interest rates low for fear of harming the weaker eurozone members or destabilising their weak banking sectors, with inflation fear in Germany as a result.

A recent poll conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and commissioned by RBC Capital Markets shows that more than four out of five senior executives, or 85%, believe that there is a chance of one or more countries leaving the eurozone in the next three years, while two in three, or 60%, said there was a chance the eurozone would break-up over the next three years.

The reception for Sheikh Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda party, at Tunis airport was the biggest showing by the Islamists in two decades, during which thousands of them were jailed or exiled by president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Ghannouchi was exiled in 1989 by Ben Ali, who was toppled on January 14 by popular protests that have sent tremors through an Arab world where similarly autocratic leaders have long sought to suppress Islamist groups.

Protesters in Egypt demanding an end to President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule have been inspired by the example of Tunisia. Egypt's main opposition group is also Islamist, but played no part in organising the protests there. Ennahda is expected to contest future legislative but not presidential elections, dates for which have yet to be set.

Father Keith Newton has encouraged Anglicans to join the Ordinariate - a special branch of Catholicism established by the Pope - to welcome protestant defectors. Despite the efforts of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglo Catholics have begun leaving following the conversion of three Anglican bishops in mid-January. The Church of England said that 1,000 of its 13,000 parishes were opposed to the ordination of women.

At St Barnabas church in Tunbridge Wells, southeastern England, the parish priest said that a majority of his parishioners want to defect - and he is considering going too. Father Ed Tomlinson believes that traditionalists who oppose the ordination of women have been badly let down by Church leaders.

The priest was told if he and his followers leave they will no longer be allowed to hold services, even on a shared basis, at St Barnabas. "The whole thing stinks to high heaven," he said.

The weeklong vote, held in early January and widely praised for being peaceful and for meeting international standards, was a condition of a 2005 peace agreement that ended a north-south civil war that lasted two decades and killed 2 million people.

The head of the commission's southern bureau, Justice Chan Reec Madut, said Sunday that voter turnout in the 10 states in the south was also 99 percent. He said only some 16,000 voters in the south chose to remain united with northern Sudan, while 3.7 million chose to separate. In northern Sudan, 58 percent of voters chose secession, said Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the referendum commission. He said some 60 percent of eligible voters participated.

"These results lead to a change of situation," said Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the referendum commission, after he read the results. "That change relates only to the constitutional form of relationship between north and south. North and south are drawn together in indissoluble geographic and historic bonds."

The moves continued to sharpen the country's clash over whether Mubarak would resign. Events here present difficult choices for the US, which has been attempting to push for both the stability that the military offers and the sweeping political changes demanded by the opposition. There was no indication that the two sides would meet or hold discussions.

State television showed footage of Mubarak with his newly appointed vice president, former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, meeting Egypt's top army commanders Sunday. The images appeared to be a bid to show that control of the armed forces was still in the hands of Mubarak and his regime.

Fragmented opposition groups, including the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, put aside sometimes strident differences to unify behind Mohamed El Baradei, a Nobel peace laureate who often tangled with US officials when he led the United Nations agency inspecting Iran's nuclear program. His entry in Egyptian politics is more recent. He came to Cairo last week only after the protest movement had gathered steam on its own.

Egypt's opposition groups have had a checkered past, with ideological divides and personal animosities sapping them against the might of the Mubarak regime. For now, their solidarity appears to be holding. El Baradei's endorsement by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest and best-organized opposition force, amounted to a historic display of unity between the country's secular and Islamist opposition forces.

If you insist on joining the emerging market party at this stage of the agflation blow-off, avoid countries with an accelerating gap between rich and poor. Cairo's EGX stock index has dropped 20 per cent in nine trading sessions. Events have moved briskly since a Tunisian fruit vendor with a handcart set fire to himself six weeks ago, and in doing so lit the fuse that has detonated Egypt and threatens to topple the political order of the Maghreb, Yemen, and beyond.

As we sit glued to Al-Jazeera watching authority crumble in the cultural and political capital of the Arab world, exhilaration can turn quickly to foreboding. This is nothing like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The triumph of secular democracy was hardly in doubt in central Europe. Whatever the mix of aspirations of those on the streets of Cairo, such uprisings are easy prey for tight-knit organizations - known in the revolutionary lexicon as Leninist vanguard parties.

In Egypt this means the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not Nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei ever served as figleaf. The Brotherhood is of course a different kettle of fish from Iran's Ayatollahs; and Turkey shows that an 'Islamic leaning' government can be part of the liberal world - though Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan once let slip that democracy was a tram "you ride until you arrive at your destination, then you step off."

It does not take a febrile imagination to guess what the Brotherhood's ascendancy might mean for Israel, and for strategic stability in the Mid-East. Asia has as much to lose if this goes wrong as the West. China's energy intensity per unit of GDP is double US levels, and triple the UK. The surge in global food prices since the summer - since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens - is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.

Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) implored goverments to avoid panic responses that "aggravate the situation". If you are Hosni Mubarak hanging on in Cairo's presidential palace, do you care about such niceties? We are on a thinner margin of food security, as North Africa is discovering painfully, and China understands all too well. Perhaps it is a little too early to write off farm-rich Europe and America.

"Let me highlight the one resource that is scarcest of all: time," said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, as dozens of senior international figures swung by to lobby some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet. Ban was specifically talking about the battle to halt climate change, but he could just have easily be addressing stalled world trade talks, Europe's debt crisis, Chinese asset-price inflation or soaring world food prices.

There was no lack of good will in Davos, the self-selecting group that makes the annual pilgrimage up the mountain to this snowbound resort is largely sold on the virtues of a globalised economy and multilateral cooperation. But many of the debates at this year's event were pessimistic in tone, and the political guests sometimes appeared caught flat-footed by shock events far beyond the Davos Congress Centre.

Meanwhile, topics debated with great elan at Davos 2010 have scarcely moved on: post-earthquake reconstruction in Haiti has stalled, the Middle East peace process is in ruins and Iran clings doggedly to its nuclear plants. Since then the Lebanese government has fallen and Ivory Coast has found itself divided between two would-be presidents and on the brink of war.

About 100 members of the fundamentalist group and activists from other leftist organizations and trade unions chanted "Mubarak, step down" and "the decision is made, the people's revolt will remain." Elsewhere, a separate group of 300 protesters gathered in front of the office of Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Rifai, demanding his ouster. "Rifai, it's time for you to go," chanted the group.

Jordan's protests have been relatively small in size, but they underline a rising tension with Jordan's King Abdullah II, a key US ally who has been making promises of reform in recent days in an apparent attempt to quell domestic discontent over economic degradation and lack of political freedoms.

Saeed said Arabs have grown disgruntled with US domination of their oil wealth, military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for "totalitarian" leaders in the region. "The Americans and (President Barack) Obama must be losing sleep over the popular revolt in Egypt," he said. "Now, Obama must understand that the people have woken up and are ready to unseat the tyrant leaders who remained in power because of US backing."

Saeed did not specifically name King Abdullah. But he said Jordan's prime minister 'must draw lessons from Tunisia and Egypt and must swiftly implement political reforms'. "We tell the Americans 'enough is enough'," he said.

While the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confronted its own popular uprising two years ago - and successfully suppressed it - conservatives in Iran said they saw little similarity between those events and the Arab revolts, and instead likened the recent upheavals to Iran's own 1979 Islamic revolution.

"In my opinion, the Islamic Republic of Iran should see these events without exception in a positive light," said Mohammad-Javad Larijani, secretary general of the Iranian High Council for Human Rights and one of the most outspoken figures among Iran's traditional conservatives. He made it clear that he hoped that the "anti-Islamic" government of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in Tunisia, would be replaced by a "people's government," meaning one in which conservative Islamic forces would gain the upper hand, as they did when Iranian people overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, establishing a quasi-theocracy.

On the other side are the United States and France, he said, who are "doing everything they can to ride the wave and prevent the people from establishing the regime that they desire." Some here have even echoed the pan-Islamic rhetoric of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

"Today, as a result of the gifts of the Islamic revolution in Iran, freedom-loving Islamic peoples such as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and nearby Arab countries are standing up to their oppressive governments," said a leading hard-line cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is believed to have influence with President Ahmadinejad.

Iranian outlets, especially those linked to the government and establishment, are using terms like "revolution" and "uprising" to describe the protests, painting the demonstrators as heroic and giving headline treatment to voices predicting the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak.

The approach is in sharp contrast to their treatment of Iran's own political upheaval following disputed presidential elections 18 months ago. Then many Iranian media organizations promoted the government position and treated protestors unsympathetically - even with contempt (traditional media was also heavily censored during that period).

The Tehran Times, Iran Daily and Resalat newspapers were among those that led their Thursday editions with the Egypt story, using headlines like "SPIRIT OF TUNISIA COMES TO EGYPT," "Egyptians demand end to Mubarak rule" and "Intensification of public protests against Mubarak regime."

And in Israel, a member of the Knesset, or parliament, described a recent conversation with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that suggested that Mubarak had been expecting - and preparing for - the wave of unrest that has engulfed Egypt, the most populous Arab nation. Leaders across the Middle East were following events in Egypt with rapt attention Saturday, aided in that endeavor by saturation coverage on Arabic television networks such as Al-Jazeera. Many are on edge after protests in Algeria, Jordan and Yemen following unrest in Tunisia that forced that country's president from office after two decades in power.

In Saudi Arabia, the turmoil in Egypt rattled investors as the nation's stock market lost over 6% of its value Saturday. That said, Saudi King Abdullah called Mubarak and "was reassured" about the situation in Egypt, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported. "During the call, the king said, 'Egypt is a country of Arabism and Islam. No Arab and Muslim human being can bear that some infiltrators, in the name of freedom of expression, have infiltrated into the brotherly people of Egypt, to destabilize its security and stability and they have been exploited to spew out their hatred in destruction, intimidation, burning, looting and inciting a malicious sedition,'" the news agency said. Saudi Arabia "strongly condemns" the protest, it said.

Mubarak assured the Saudi king "that the situation is stable" and that the protests "are merely attempts of groups who do not want stability and security for the people of Egypt, but rather they seek to achieve strange and suspicious objectives." Mubarak added that Egypt will "deter anyone who tries to exploit the freedom of (the) Egyptian people and will not allow anyone to lure those groups or use them to achieve suspicious and strange agendas," the news agency said.

The reactions did not come as a surprise. Iran's Shiite government has long been at odds with mostly Sunni Saudi Arabia for dominance in the region.

On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011. He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph. The crisis in Egypt follows the toppling of Tunisian president Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, who fled the country after widespread protests forced him from office.

The disclosures, contained in previously secret US diplomatic dispatches released by the WikiLeaks website, show American officials pressed the Egyptian government to release other dissidents who had been detained by the police. Mr Mubarak, facing the biggest challenge to his authority in his 31 years in power, ordered the army on to the streets of Cairo yesterday as rioting erupted across Egypt.

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters took to the streets in open defiance of a curfew. An explosion rocked the centre of Cairo as thousands defied orders to return to their homes. As the violence escalated, flames could be seen near the headquarters of the governing National Democratic Party. Police fired rubber bullets and used tear gas and water cannon in an attempt to disperse the crowds.

At least five people were killed in Cairo alone yesterday and 870 injured, several with bullet wounds. Mohamed ElBaradei, the pro-reform leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was placed under house arrest after returning to Egypt to join the dissidents. Riots also took place in Suez, Alexandria and other major cities across the country.