"It looks like the Arab Spring, but it can also be a radical Islamic winter," he said in a speech at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. "This leads us to the conclusion that through a long-term process, the likelihood of an all-out war is increasingly growing," the IDF general said. "Iran has not abandoned its nuclear program. The opposite is true; it continues full steam ahead," he said. "In Egypt, the army is collapsing under the burden of regular security operations, and this is reflected in the loss of control in the Sinai and the turning of the border with Israel into a terror border, with the possibility that Sinai will fall under the control of an Islamic entity."

"In Lebanon, Hezbollah is growing stronger within government arms, but it has not lost its desire to harm Israel, and the ties with Turkey aren't at their best," Major General Eisenberg added. During his address, the senior IDF official revealed that new, more lethal arms surfaced in the hands of Gaza terror groups during the latest round of fighting in the area. As result of the disturbing development, Israeli civilians were instructed to adopt greater precautions, he said. "We discovered a new weapon, and as result of this we instructed the public to hide under two roofs, rather than only one," he said.

Scores of residents were left wondering whether they had homes to return to as many of the fires continued to burn Sunday night. The largest and most destructive fire was in Bastrop County, where a blaze burned 14,000 acres and grew to an estimated 16 miles long by the end of the day, said Mark Stanford, fire chief of the Texas Forest Service. "It's catastrophic," Stanford said of the Bastrop County fire. "It's a major natural disaster."

Forest Service spokeswoman Lexi Maxwell said that fire began about 2 pm in the Circle D subdivision off Texas 71. It merged with another fire north of there that pushed south and crossed over Texas 21 and Texas 71, Maxwell said. Aerial units estimated that at least 300 homes had been damaged or destroyed by the fire.

Frankfurt's Dax index ended the day 5.3% lower, while the Paris Cac 40 fell 4.7% and the FTSE 100 a comparatively modest 3.6% - its second-biggest fall this year. The German market dropped below the low point that it reached during the sharp sell-off in early August. Asian markets also fell earlier in the day, with the Nikkei in Tokyo ending 1.9% down, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng 3% lower. US markets remained closed on Monday for Labor Day.

The current slide in markets, which began in late Thursday trading in New York, was triggered by mounting evidence of a slowdown in the global economy and fears over the impact of US and European government austerity. In the latest such indication, August service sector survey data released by the research group Markit on Monday showed that activity in the UK almost stagnated and business confidence in the eurozone fell at its fastest rate in August since the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Bank shares have taken the brunt of the latest stock market sell-off. Royal Bank of Scotland fell 12.3%, Deutsche Bank 8.9% and Societe Generale 8.6%. Most major banks in the US and Europe have lost about half of their value over the last six months. Fears began to mount again that the eurozone may not be able to contain its debt crisis, and a government default could in turn lead to a European banking crisis. Deutsche Bank's outgoing chief executive, Josef Ackermann, said on Monday that some European banks would go bust if they were forced to recognise in their accounts the existing losses on government debts they own, based on current market prices for government bonds.

It bankrolled French farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy, that disguised tithe for war reparations. It then bankrolled Spanish farmers as well. It funded each new wave of EU expansion, though reeling itself from the 60 billion euros annual cost of its own reunification. It gave up the cherished D-Mark, the anchor of German economic stability. We are so used to German self-abnegation for the sake of Europe that we can hardly imagine any other state of affairs. But the escalating protest against EMU bail-outs by Germany's key insistutions go beyond the banalities of money. The fight is over German democracy itself.

You can feel the storm brewing in Germany. Within days of each other, President Christian Wulff accused the European Central Bank of going "far beyond" its mandate and subverting Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty by shoring up insolvent states, and Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann said bail-out policies had "completely gutted" the EU law.

Both believe the EU Project has taken a dangerous turn. Fiscal powers are slipping away to a supra-national body beyond sovereign control. "This strikes at the very core of our democracies. Decisions have to be made in parliament in a liberal democracy. That is where legitimacy lies," said Mr Wulff Otmar Issing, the ECB's founding guru, fears that the current course must ultimately provoke the "resistance of the people". Instead of evolving into an authentic union with a "European government controlled by a European Parliament" on democratic principles, it has become deformed halfway house.

In its rush to save EMU, he said, Europe has forgotten that legislative primacy over tax and spending is the crucible of our democracies. It was monarchical assault on the power of the purse that led to England's Civil War, and America's Revolution. We will find out to what extent Germany's constitutional court shares these fears when it rules this Wednesday on the legality of the EU rescue machinery, and delivers its verdict of life or death for monetary union.

The motley rebel forces who overthrew Gaddafi two weeks ago have set up no guard to prevent anyone taking it away or looting it for parts. Western powers and Libya's neighbors fear that the power vacuum could allow huge quantities of unsecured weapons left over from the civil war to end up in the hands of Islamist militants, in particular the North African branch of al Qaeda.

Officials with Libya's interim government, the National Transitional Council, say they are trying to secure these weapons. But there was little evidence of that at the Scud site, in farmland about 25 km (15 miles) southeast of Tripoli. Abdelhamid Omar Derbek, a colonel at the local anti-Gaddafi military headquarters, said he and his men visit the site several times a day.

A Scud-launching complex, consisting of an 11-meter (33-foot) rocket with a range of up to 300 km (200 miles) depending on the variant, could be a valuable resource for any insurgent. Even without launching it, the warhead alone contains up to a tonne of high explosive, which could be stripped from the missile and used to make improvised bombs for urban guerrillas. "The possibility is certainly there," said Shashank Joshi, a military expert at Britain's Royal United Services Institute. In an interview with Reuters on Friday, the senior European Union representative in Tripoli said the bloc was concerned that Islamist militants could obtain weapons in Libya and take them out across the country's largely unpoliced borders. "This is an evident risk," said EU envoy Agostino Miozzo.

"Our situation is extremely serious," the postmaster general, Patrick R Donahoe, said in an interview. "If Congress doesn't act, we will default." In recent weeks, Mr Donahoe has been pushing a series of painful cost-cutting measures to erase the agency's deficit, which will reach $9.2 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers - nearly one-fifth of the agency's work force - despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions' contracts.

The post office's problems stem from one hard reality: it is being squeezed on both revenue and costs. As any computer user knows, the Internet revolution has led to people and businesses sending far less conventional mail. At the same time, decades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office's costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency's expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees.

Missing the $5.5 billion payment due on September 30, intended to finance retirees' future health care, won't cause immediate disaster. But sometime early next year, the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks, officials warn, forcing it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly.

"There is no alternative to this decision and no going back on it and if the United States vetoes it, we will continue to knock on the door of the UN Security Council seeking full Palestinian UN membership," he told AFP. The comments from Shaath, a member of the Fatah party led by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, came after The New York Times reported that Washington was trying to put together a new peace talks proposal that would convince the Palestinians to hold off seeking membership at the United Nations.

Washington has said it will veto any Palestinian bid, but has made it clear it would prefer that the issue does not reach a vote at the Security Council. The Times, citing US officials and foreign diplomats, said Washington was labouring to find language that would be sufficient to lure the Palestinians away from their bid, bring Israel to the negotiating table and be acceptable to the other members of the peacemaking Quartet - the EU, UN and Russia. Europe has struggled to define a unified position on the Palestinian bid, and Shaath said Sunday that EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton would visit Ramallah this week for talks with Abbas on the issue.

The director general of the official Voice of Palestine radio Ahmed Aridi told AFP on Sunday that the station would soon begin broadcasting radio spots in six languages to promote the membership bid. The messages, which will run in English, Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish and Russian, state: "You are being offered peace with the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders." The spots are part of the broader "Palestine 194" campaign, which is being officially launched later this week and is expected to include adverts and peaceful protests inside the West Bank and overseas.

"The appeal to the UN is a battle for all Palestinians, and in order to succeed, it needs millions to pour into streets," Palestinian official Yasser Abed Rabbo told the Associated Press following a Palestinian Authority vote endorsing a mass protest march on Israel. Rabbo and other Palestinian leaders insist the protests will be peaceful, but Israeli officials noted that more often than not the Palestinians' definition of "peaceful" does not match Israel's. And even if the intention truly was for a peaceful march, the Israelis say that having tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians march on Israeli civilian neighborhoods is a situation that can quickly spiral out of control.

While Jerusalem is certain to be a primary target of such a march, it is pretty heavily barricaded from the north and east, the directions from which the Palestinian protestors would be coming. But the Jewish settlements make much softer targets. That's why the IDF, which will preoccupied defending the northern neighborhoods of Jerusalem and the portion of the "Green Line" separating the Tel Aviv metropolitan area from the West Bank, is busy preparing the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria to defend themselves.

Those preparations include unspecified drills on how to handle various situations, including a large Palestinian mob beseiging the gates of a small Jewish community. Jewish settler leaders stressed that the training exercises do not constitute the formation of a new Jewish militia, noting that these are pre-existing local security teams, the members of which are, like all Israelis, also members of the IDF reserve forces. Even with all the preparations, the situation can still devolve into chaos and violence at a moment's notice. If armed Palestinian elements open fire from among the protestors, or a Palestinian mob manages to break into a Jewish community, Israeli security forces will be obliged to use deadly force in defense of local men, women and children.

The administration has circulated a proposal intended to be the basis of renewed peace talks with the Israelis - based on a formula that President Barack Obama outlined in May - in hopes of persuading the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to abandon the bid for recognition at the annual gathering of the UN General Assembly beginning September 20.

The administration has privately made it clear to Mr Abbas that it will veto any request that comes before the UN Security Council to make a Palestinian state a new member outright. But the United States alone does not have enough support to block a vote by the General Assembly to elevate the current status of the Palestinians' nonvoting observer ''entity'' to that of an nonvoting observer state.

Senior officials said the administration wanted to avoid not only a veto but also the more symbolic and potent General Assembly vote that would leave the United States and only a handful of other nations in opposition. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic maneuverings, said they feared that in either case a backlash could sweep the Palestinian territories and the wider Arab world when the region is already in tumult.

Two administration officials said that Mr Abbas had indicated as recently as last week that he would forgo a UN vote in favor of the prospect of real talks. But a senior Palestinian official, Nabil Shaath, angrily dismissed the American proposal now being circulated as inadequate and said a vote would go ahead regardless. ''Whoever wrote this thought we are so weak that we cannot even wiggle, or that we are stupid,'' he said in a telephone interview from the Palestinian capital in the West Bank, Ramallah. He added, ''Whatever is to be offered, it is too late.''

Talas had crossed the southern Japanese island of Shikoku and the central part of the main island of Honshu early on Sunday. But because of the storm's slow speed, weathermen warned heavy rains and strong winds would continue, increasing the likelihood of more floods and landslides. Nearly 500,000 people in western and central Japan were issued with evacuation orders and advisories, the Kyodo News agency reported.

The worst hit areas were in Nara and Wakayama prefectures, with homes swept away by flood waters and landslides. Three homes were buried in a landslide in Wakayama prefecture, and one woman who was rescued later died, four remained missing and a 14-year old girl was saved from the debris, police said. They said 10 people were dead and 32 people were missing. In nearby Nara Prefecture NHK TV said seven people were missing after their homes were swept away down a river.

If the court rules that Berlin's commitment to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) goes against EU law, or worse, against the German constitution, the entire Eurozone could collapse. Think of the Eurozone as a minefield full of bombs that have long lay dormant, but are all still very active. Now, Germany's court ruling - itself a single bomb timed to go off next Wednesday - could ignite a massive chain reaction.

If the German court rules that European law has been broken, then it has been broken by all other nations subject to the Maastricht Treaty who have participated in bailouts and directly or indirectly assumed each other's debts. If the German constitution has been broken, it's unlikely that German citizens will tolerate any government that refuses to protect the constitution and their rights to participate in determining whether or not they want to backstop all the profligate neighbours that surround them.

The court may sidestep any hard and fast decisions to avoid destroying the entire EU. But it may not have a choice. The law is the law.

Their three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and five-year-old son, will either be 'fostered without contact' or adopted. Either way, the family's only hope of being reunited will be if the children attempt to track down their parents when they become adults. The couple, who have been married for nearly 20 years and are not being named to protect their children's identities, were given a 'draconian' ultimatum three years ago - as reported at the time by The Mail on Sunday.

Warned that the children must slim or be placed in care, the family spent two years living in a council-funded 'Big Brother' house in which they were constantly supervised and the food they ate monitored. But despite subjecting them to intense scrutiny, social workers did not impose rules on what food the children should eat, and there was apparently little or no improvement.

News of the decision to remove them was broken to the couple, from Dundee, on Tuesday. Critics called it a disgraceful breach of human rights and a chilling example of the power of the State to meddle in family life.

The father, aged 56, said: 'We have tried very hard to do everything that was asked of us. But nothing we've done has ever been enough. The pressure of living in the family unit would have broken anyone. We were being treated like children and cut off from the outside world. To have a social worker stand and watch you eat is intolerable. I want other families to know what can happen once social workers become involved. We will fight them to the end to get our beloved children back.'

Voth has examined the history of 28 European countries over the last 90 years. His conclusion:

1) "Austerity and anarchy are closely linked"

2) "Savings [budget cuts] amounting to just one percentage point of GDP are accompanied by social unrest. And when they reach two or three percentage points, it massively increases."

The cuts being asked in Greece - and likely Italy - far exceed two to three percentage points. The debate on the Italian austerity budget begins in Parliament next week. Nor are they likely to be implemented: "There's no reason to believe that the scale of reforms currently needed to move things forward economically is politically feasible."

This is the perverse outcome of the country's longstanding preference for sons, and its sudden modernisation. Traditionally, the family line is passed via men. When a woman marries, she joins her husband's family. Having a boy is a cultural and a pragmatic choice: you expect him to continue your lineage and support you in old age. The result has long been a surplus of men, because of female infanticide or excess female deaths through neglect. But in the last 20 years, the problem has exploded thanks to the spread of prenatal scans.

Sex-selective abortion is illegal, but is clearly widely practised. The normal human birth ratio is 106 males for every 100 females. In China, that has risen to 118 boys. That means 30 to 50 million men will fail to find wives over the next two decades, according to Professor Li Shuzhuo of the institute for population and development studies at Xi'an Jiaotong University. It is equivalent to every male in the UK dying a bachelor.

Experts have warned that these unmarried "bare branches" pose a threat to social stability. Some suggest that excess men leads to more crime and sexual violence; officials have warned of increased women trafficking. Already, women are kidnapped and sold as wives.

"It would mean we couldn't use our own currency on a train in our own country to buy a British cuppa and a Kit-Kat," he said.

Tory MP Philip Davies said the scheme was "totally outrageous". But last night the Daily Express forced Eurostar bosses to back down. We contacted the multi-national firm after hearing from an outraged reader about his experience of the proposed new system.

Eurostar initially said it was unsure when it would reach a final conclusion on the move to ban cash payments in sterling because it had to review customer reaction to a seven-day trial which ended this week. But hours later it said customer feedback had convinced it to continue accepting the pound. The move was warmly welcomed as a victory for common sense, although critics remained aghast that the company had even considered making the change in the first place.

London MEP Mr Batten took up the issue after being contacted by a constituent. He said: "Banning the pound on Eurostar was a ludicrous idea in the first place. Thank goodness the Daily Express took up my constituent's complaint and that Euro-star has seen sense and back-tracked." Daily Express reader James Beedell discovered the ban on a return trip to France last Sunday with his wife and daughter and her boyfriend.