European officials were informed that "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was doubtless active or envisioned being active" on the "European continent, notably France," Hortefeux said during a joint TV and radio interview. "The threat is real," he said on RTL-LCI-Le Figaro's weekly talk show. The warning from Saudi Arabia is the latest in a series of alerts that have put French security forces and others in high-vigilance mode.

The US State Department advised American citizens living or traveling in Europe earlier this month to take more precautions following reports that terrorists may be plotting attacks on a European city, possibly a shooting spree or other type of attack similar to the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks in India.

France began boosting security last month at busy tourist sites like Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower, which was twice evacuated after false claims of an attack. French authorities recorded nine bomb alerts in the capital in September, including the two at the Eiffel Tower - a threefold increase from a year earlier. No explosives were found.

More than 1,000 supermarket petrol stations have run out of fuel, their industry association has said. The government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67. A further day of strikes is scheduled for Tuesday. The Senate is due to vote on the pensions bill on Wednesday.

More go-slow protests by truck drivers are planned during the rest of the day. There have been further blockades of fuel depots in western and southern France, with "at least 1,500 stations that have run out of at least one fuel product or are totally dry", an industry representative said. Around 4,500 of France's 12,500 petrol stations are attached to shopping centres, and supply 60% of the fuel used by French motorists.

"Twenty to 25% of our distribution capacity is either stopped or in trouble," said Alexandre de Benoist, a senior official with Union of Independent Petroleum Importers, which represents the sector.

Typhoon Megi is the strongest storm the Philippines has faced for four years. In 2006, a storm with winds of 155km/h triggered mudslides, burying villages and killing about 1,000 people. Tropical cyclones formed in the Pacific Ocean are called typhoons, but are classified on a scale of one to five in the same way as Atlantic Ocean hurricanes.

Strong typhoons with sustained winds of at least 130 knots (150mph; 240km/h), are referred to as super typhoons, according to the US Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Forecasters said Megi was a super typhoon as it made landfall, but weakened slightly as it made its way across the northern Philippines.

American and Chinese officials traded blows over the weekend, setting the stage for a tense G20 summit next month. The head of China's central bank rejected the idea of a big revaluation for the yuan, advocating a slow-acting "herbal medicine" instead. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner took a swipe at countries with "significantly undervalued" currencies, of which China is an obvious example.

The United States claims to be a loser in the currency wars. But in reality it is winning. The dollar has fallen sharply against most of its trading partners' currencies. On a trade-weighted basis, the dollar is the lowest it has been all year, according to the Federal Reserve major currencies index. The likelihood of an imminent bout of money-printing can keep that trend going for a long time.

China, meanwhile, claims not to be a winner. But that is disingenuous too. While the yuan just hit its highest level versus the dollar since officially abandoning its dollar peg in 2005, it has fallen heavily against most other currencies. The euro, the currency of China's biggest trading partner, has strengthened 14 percent against the yuan. The Japanese yen is not far behind. Various emerging markets, such as Brazil, have also seen their currencies soar.

The gap between winners and losers is widening.

A gradual but sustained revaluation of the yuan versus the dollar - combined with a halt to the dollar's own depreciation - is the least bad way forward. But getting such a deal, as positions become increasingly entrenched, will be tricky. And if both sides refuse to do anything, a currency war could mutate into a trade war - a genuine lose-lose scenario.

A recent survey showed that more than 30% of Germans believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners". The study - by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think-tank - also showed that roughly the same number thought that some 16 million of Germany's immigrants or people with foreign origins had come to the country for the social benefits.

Mrs Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party on Saturday that at "the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country... We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone', but this isn't reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other... has failed, utterly failed."

In her speech, the chancellor specifically referred to recent comments by German President Christian Wulff who said that Islam was "part of Germany" like Christianity and Judaism. While acknowledging that this was the case, Mrs Merkel stressed that immigrants living in Germany needed to do more to integrate, including learning to speak German. "Anyone who does not immediately speak German", she said, "is not welcome".

By speaking now, Mrs Merkel has now joined the increasingly hot debate on multiculturalism, coming down on the side of those who are uneasy about immigration, says the BBC's correspondent in Berlin, Stephen Evans.

Li, head of the Asia department at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top government think tank, said continued intervention in currency markets by developed economies would deal a blow to global economic recovery. Chinese leaders have warned before that loose monetary policies in the United States pose a serious challenge for emerging markets, but rarely in such strident language, a window onto the rising anger in Beijing.

"The dollar's depreciation may appear to be market-driven. In reality, it is a depreciation colored by very strong, deliberate actions," Li said in the paper, which serves as the chief mouthpiece of China's ruling Communist Party. Li said the Federal Reserve's announcement that it might soon launch another round of quantitative easing by buying bonds and other financial assets had been the key factor pulling down the dollar.

The motives were plain enough, he said. Without a weaker dollar, the United States would have no hope of meeting President Barack Obama's goal to double exports in five years, Li said. Dollar depreciation will also serve longer-term interests by generating inflation and easing the debt burden that the financial crisis dumped on the US government. "If the global financial crisis was about nationalizing private debt, then in the post-crisis period the urgent need of the United States is to internationalize its national debt," he said.

Germany recently marked the 20th anniversary of its unification. The anniversary recalls a time of heady optimism about European integration when far-sighted leaders like then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and then-French President Francois Mitterand spearheaded the creation of the European Union on the heels of German unity.

Today, the outlook for Europe's future is decidedly pessimistic. The crisis in the euro zone has laid bare a few disquieting facts: European leaders lack the ambitious vision that once propelled continental integration, states no longer see European interests as parallel to national interests and the EU's political and economic institutions are inadequate to the challenges of economic and monetary union. There is a paradox at the heart of Europe's conundrum: Even as the European appetite for integration reaches its nadir, the best solution to the crisis may be greater unity.

With the EU mired in crisis - from demonstrations in French streets to Irish bank bailouts - strong leadership from European capitals is more important than ever. Unfortunately, the EU suffers from a leadership void. Rather than stepping up to the plate on behalf of the union, however, national leaders are focused on appeasing domestic constituencies.

It has been over a decade since NATO, the Western military alliance, presented its last mission statement. Back in 1999 the Cold War was still a raw memory and the September 11 terror attacks had not yet led to NATO's embroilment in Afghanistan. Now, facing a host of new potential enemies and challenges, the alliance is working on a brand new strategic concept.

On Thursday the defense and foreign ministers of the 28 member states gathered in Brussels to discuss the draft of the mission statement to be adopted at the next NATO summit in November. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rassmussen said that the alliance was moving toward approving an anti-missile system that would protect Europe and that he hoped that Russia would cooperate on creating the shield, designed to protect Europe from possible missile attacks from the likes of North Korea or Iran. The system replaces an American plan, conjured up by the former Bush administration, to station missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, a project that drew the ire of Moscow and annoyed many of Washington's allies.

On Thursday, however, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came out against removing the US's remaining 200 nuclear weapons from Europe and she insisted that as long as nuclear weapons existed, NATO must remain a nuclear alliance. Clinton also called for closer cooperation with Russia and said she hoped President Dmitry Medvedev would attend the November summit in Portugal.

The portrait is rather pretentious - oil on canvas, and a whopping 156x120 centimeters (5 feet 1 inch by 3 feet 11 inches). It shows Adolf Hitler the way his Nazis and favorite artists most liked to see him - posing as the visionary ruler against a backdrop of an imagined German landscape.

"We likely could have had it," says Hans-Ulrich Thamer. The US Army, which has held the painting since 1939, would certainly have been open to loaning out the painting. But Thamer, a curator for the German Historical Museum (DHM), didn't want it. The rationale, it appears, was that German eyes shouldn't be dazzled a second time by this sort of monumental state-sponsored art from the Third Reich. Thamer prefers, instead, to display smaller reproductions of the Fuhrer. "That detracts from his impact," the curator says.

An extensive exhibition about the dictator opens this Friday at the German History Museum in Berlin, the first in Germany's post-war history to focus exclusively on Hitler's life. The exhibition is not without risks: Organizers fear that the show could be showered with unwanted praise from right-wing extremists - and with bitter protest from the rest of the country. Indeed, out of a lack of trust in those who will visit the exhibition, the show will omit anything that might glorify Hitler as a hero. "We cannot provide any opportunity to identify with him," has been the watchword for Thamer, who developed the show.

To be sure, there have been countless exhibitions in Germany addressing the Third Reich, covering topics including the Holocaust, crimes committed by the German military, the Nazi justice system, medicine in the Third Reich, forced labor, concentration camps and other horrors. Until now, though, museum directors and politicians responsible for cultural affairs have shied away from dealing directly with the man who presided over those horrors.

Last month the church council of St Peter's in Folkestone voted to take the first formal steps towards converting. It comes as traditionalists performed well at the CofE synod elections. Last October, Pope Benedict made his controversial offer of a place in the Roman Catholic Church for Anglicans that would let them retain some of their practices and traditions.

The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Piggott said the invitation was expected to be of most interest to traditionalist clergy who were unwilling to serve under women bishops. However, the initiative at St Peter's was taken by lay people, with the intention of converting as a group, our correspondent added. It is thought unlikely they would be allowed to take their church with them however.

France's airport operator played down worries of fuel shortages, but strikes at all of the country's 12 refineries and fuel depot blockades prompted motorists to stock up on petrol. Truck drivers also were set to join the fray as momentum built for a day of street rallies on Saturday.

The widening protests have become the biggest challenge facing President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is struggling with low popularity ratings as he tries to appease financial markets by stemming a ballooning pension shortfall.

The US currency dropped this week to a 15-year low against the yen and fell to parity with the Australian and Canadian dollars before next week's Fed report on regional economies. Asian currencies rallied against the dollar as Singapore sought faster currency appreciation, pulling back from efforts to stem gains.

"There's a bit of push and pull in dollar weakness: the push has been revolving around quantitative easing, and the pull has been the attractiveness of emerging-market currencies," said Alan Ruskin, global head of Group of 10 foreign-exchange strategy at Deutsche Bank AG in New York. The US currency's five weeks of decline against the euro tied a stretch of losses during a period that ended December 26, 2008. The central bank cut its fed funds target that month to a range of zero to 0.25 percent.

The central bank will release on October 20 its Beige Book survey of regional Fed banks. Last month, the report found the economic rebound showed signs of slowing. Minutes of the Fed's September meeting released on October 12 indicated that policy makers were poised to take more easing steps "before long."

Most analysts expect the Fed will embark on a fresh round of Treasury purchases, over and above the $1.7 trillion in longer-term assets it has already bought. "In my opinion, much more policy accommodation is appropriate today," Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans told a conference hosted by the Boston Fed, repeating an argument he made earlier this month.

Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, speaking at the same event, said Japan's drawn-out battle with deflation shows prevention may be easier than the cure, and policymakers should respond aggressively before "pernicious" deflation takes hold. "Insuring against the risk of deflation may be much cheaper than waiting until it has occurred and then trying to address it," said Rosengren, who has a darker view of the economic outlook than some of his colleagues at the central bank.

It was the most explicit signal yet from Bernanke that the US central bank is likely to ease as soon as its next meeting in November. He also suggested the Fed could indicate a willingness to hold interest rates low for longer than currently expected. "There would appear - all else being equal - to be a case for further action," Bernanke said at a conference sponsored by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank.

However, he said policymakers were still weighing how aggressive they should be if they decide to pursue a further round of asset buying, or quantitative easing, to push borrowing costs lower. "The only question left is the size and scope of QE," said Boris Schlossberg of GFT Forex in New York.

The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year that ended September 30 will total $1.29 trillion. That's down by $125 billion from the $1.4 trillion in 2009 - the highest deficit on record. Soaring deficits have become a problem for Democrats in an election year focused on the weak economy.

Republicans have tapped into voter angst over the deficits, using the $814 billion economic stimulus and $700 billion Wall Street bailout to paint President Barack Obama and his party as big spenders. Democrats say the recession would have been worse if the government didn't step in with those programs to prop up the economy. They also note that most of the bailout, which began during the Bush administration and was supported by many Republicans in Congress, has been repaid.

Both parties have acknowledged that rising deficits will present headaches for policymakers regardless of which party controls Congress after November. The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2011 budget year, which began on October 1, will climb to $1.4 trillion. Over the next decade, it will total $8.47 trillion. Deficits of that size will constrain the administration's agenda over the next two years and will certainly be an issue in the 2012 presidential race.