At least 33 people died in Rio de Janeiro city after 28cm (11in) of rain fell in 24 hours, while 33 were killed in the neighbouring city of Niteroi. Many houses in Rio's hillside shanty towns were buried under mudslides.

Rescue teams have been scouring the hillside to find missing people and recover bodies buried under the mud. With no let-up in the rain, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has urged residents to leave their homes if they are at risk of flooding. Authorities say Rio's transport system is close to collapse, after traffic ground to a halt with many streets under water. "The situation is chaos," Mayor Eduardo da Costa Paes said in a statement on Tuesday. "All the major streets of the city are closed because of the floods."

The head of Rio de Janeiro's civil defence department told TV Globo the amount of rain that had fallen was "more than any city is capable of supporting". Paulo Marqueiro, a reporter for the newspaper O Globo, told the BBC it was like the city had "collapsed". Houses had been brought crashing down by the floods and landslides, and there was no public transport whatsoever, he said.

Gordon Brown today met with the Queen at Buckingham Palace to ask her for a May 6 election date. The Prime Minister briefed his Cabinet at a short meeting this morning before leaving Number Ten through the front door at 10am. He smiled but kept tight-lipped and ignored the massed ranks of media as he clambered into his chauffeur-driven car which then led the motorcade on the short journey to the Palace.

There, he spent 22 minutes inside at a private meeting with the Queen before heading back to Downing Street where he will shortly emerge to make a brief statement. The move to dissolve Parliament fires the starting gun for the most defining election campaign for a generation. The Queen only flew back to the Palace from Windsor a short time ago, arriving by helicopter onto the lawns and walked inside accompanied by one aide.

They have found sheep with "neat holes" while their brains and other internal organs were removed. Other animals have lost eyes or had their flesh "carefully stripped away", usually on the left side. Phil Hoyle, 53, who has spent almost a decade investigating how the livestock have died, said the UFOs were found to have roamed a 50-mile "corridor" between Shrewsbury and Powys.

Mr Hoyle and 15 members of the Animal Pathology Field Unit, claimed they witnessed UFOs at work last month while working during the night at a Welsh hill farm near Radnor Forest. "The technology involved in these attacks is frightening," he told The Sun. "These lights and spheres are clearly not ours. They are built by technology and intelligence that's not from here." He added: "For a short while it looked more like a Star Wars battle."

Next day he interviewed farmers and "all but one had some type of unusual disappearance of animals or deaths with strange injuries", he told the paper.

Karzai made the unusual statement at a closed-door meeting Saturday with selected lawmakers - just days after kicking up a diplomatic controversy with remarks alleging foreigners were behind fraud in last year's disputed elections. Lawmakers dismissed the latest comment as hyperbole, but it will add to the impression the president - who relies on tens of thousands of US and NATO forces to fight the insurgency and prop up his government - is growing increasingly erratic and unable to exert authority without attacking his foreign backers.

"He said that 'if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban'," said Farooq Marenai, who represents the eastern province of Nangarhar. "He said rebelling would change to resistance," Marenai said - apparently suggesting that the militant movement would then be redefined as one of resistance against a foreign occupation rather than a rebellion against an elected government.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, EVEN IF THEY ATTACKED THE UNITED STATES WITH BIOLOGICAL OR CHEMICAL WEAPONS OR LAUNCHED A CRIPPLING CYBERATTACK.

Mr Obama's new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting the United States' most potent deterrent and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that the country would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

The most immediate test of the new strategy is likely to be in dealing with Iran, which has defied the international community by developing a nuclear program that it insists is peaceful but that the United States and its allies say is a precursor to weapons. Asked about the escalating confrontation with Iran, Mr Obama said he was now convinced that "the current course they're on would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities," though he gave no timeline. He dodged when asked whether he shared Israel's view that a "nuclear capable" Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.

"Obama's treatment of [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu [during their recent meeting in Washington] was disgraceful and shameful," Peters told FoxNews. "We treat our enemies with greater courtesy! In addition, it was counter-productive - because this vendetta on the part of the White House against Israel - all it does is encourage the Palestinians and their Arab backers to make ever wilder demands that Israel cannot possibly fulfill. This is not a peace process; this is something about a chip on the President's shoulder."

Peters says that Obama's approach is "absolutely" a departure from past American policy. "It all started with Obama's Cairo speech," he said, "where Obama attempted to appease radical Muslims in the Middle East, cold-shouldered Israel, and raised Palestinian expectations that he'd take care of Israel and that the Palestinians would get their revenge. Secondly, in the past, under Presidents Clinton and Bush, there were face-to-face negotiations; the Palestinians were offered one deal after another, and it was always - always! - the Palestinians who walked away."

The American animosity towards Israel "is not about housing in Jerusalem or anything else," Peters emphasized. "We need to back up and get a little wide-angle picture and recognize the fundamental issue in play here: Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbors, and its neighbors want Israel destroyed. The President refuses to understand that."

In a nutshell, that's how many conservatives see the health reform bill President Barack Obama signed into law on March 23, after a year of acrimonious debate. The language has been shrill and the superheated political temperature is reflected by worried headlines such as "The heat is on. We may get burned" (Wall Street Journal) or "Putting out the flames" (Washington Post).

Verbal venom is not restricted to radio talk shows or Internet rants that draw parallels between Obama and Hitler or Stalin. John Boehner, the leader of the Republican party in the House of Representatives, described the reform as Armageddon and a Republican congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann, voiced fears on national television for her country's future because of the president's "anti-American views."

Today's end-of-freedom arguments sound very much like the ideas set out in a 1961 speech by the late Ronald Reagan, then an actor working as a corporate spokesman, now venerated as a secular saint by many Republicans. "One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people," he said, "has been by way of medicine."

Reagan was raising the alarm against an early version of what became Medicare, the government-run health care programme for people over 65 which now has 45 million beneficiaries, most of whom rate it more highly than private health insurance, according to surveys. If the program were passed, Reagan warned, "behind it will come other federal programmes that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until one day... we will awake to find that we have socialism."

Outlook for the political temperature: high and rising

The pontiff is celebrating Holy Week - the most solemn period in the Roman Catholic calendar - as allegations that the church covered up clerical sex abuse spread across Europe, including his native Germany, and the United States. The feet-washing ceremony in St John Lateran Basilica in Rome symbolizes humility and commemorates Jesus' last supper with his 12 apostles on the evening before his crucifixion.

Wearing a white apron, Benedict poured water from a golden pitcher over one bare foot of each of the priests, who were seated in a row. With the water dripping on a golden basin, the pope dried the feet with a white cloth. The pope did not directly address the scandals during the Mass that included the feet-washing ritual. He said that Jesus, in his prayer after washing the feet of the apostles, "challenges us to a constant examination of conscience."

Cardinals rushed to Benedict XVI's defense on Holy Thursday, as an increasingly angry Vatican made a stinging attack on the US media for its coverage. The relationship between the church and the media has become increasingly bitter as the scandal buffeting the 1 billion-member church has touched the pontiff himself. On Wednesday, the church singled out the New York Times for criticism in an unusually harsh attack.

Western news organizations, including The Associated Press, have reported extensively on the burgeoning scandal, and new revelations have emerged on an almost daily basis. Venice's Cardinal Angelo Scola expressed solidarity with Benedict in his Holy Thursday homily in the lagoon city, describing him as a victim of "deceitful accusations." He praised the pope as seeking to remove all "dirt" from the priesthood.

A Times spokeswoman defended the articles and said no one has cast doubt on the reported facts. "The allegations of abuse within the Catholic church are a serious subject, as the Vatican has acknowledged on many occasions," said Diane McNulty. "Any role the current pope may have played in responding to those allegations over the years is a significant aspect of this story."

The Israeli military has told the BBC the operation was targeting four weapons factories. The strikes are the most serious for more than a year, says the BBC's Jon Donnison from Jerusalem. Witnesses and Hamas officials said the Israeli raids targeted metal workshops, farms, a milk factory and small sites belonging to the military wing of Hamas.

"Israel will not tolerate terroristic activity inside Gaza that threatens Israeli citizens," the Israeli military said in a statement released to the BBC. Palestinian news agencies reported that Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets over parts of Gaza on Thursday warning residents of retaliation for last Friday's killings of the soldiers in Khan Younis.

They were the first Israeli soldiers to be killed in hostile fire in Gaza in over a year. The military wing of Hamas claim responsibility for those attacks. Hamas said police stations and training facilities were among the targets of Israel's overnight raids. Tensions in the region are running high after a recent Israeli government announcement of plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jewish people in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a capital of a future state.

By the end of this year, if sanctions have not persuaded Iran to stop what many countries insist is a nuclear weapons programme, the war party in Israel will be pushing for military action. South Lebanon is once again looking like a tinderbox. Insults and threats have been bandied back and forth between Syria, Israel and Hezbollah. In Washington DC, where I have been this week, analysts say Syria has been shipping bigger and better weapons to Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally.

Israel assumes that there will be another war in Lebanon, and has been training its army to win it, which it could not do last time in 2006. And then there is the crisis between the United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu's disastrous visit to Washington DC has exposed just how bad this crisis and current US-Israeli relations are.

What is even more serious is that it is centred on the future of Jerusalem, which is about the single most emotive issue in the entire Middle East. Mr Netanyahu returns home weakened, though his ministers are declaring their support. US President Barack Obama seems to see him as part of the problem.

The precise details of what happened in Washington between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu are emerging only slowly. But it is clear that the Americans want Israel to freeze building for Jews in those parts of the holy city that Israel occupied and annexed in 1967. The Obama administration has concluded that it will be impossible to negotiate peace while Israel continues to settle its people on occupied land.

Mr Netanyahu insists, long and loud, that he wants a peace deal if it guarantees Israeli security. The Americans agree with that, but not with his insistence that Israel has the right to build whatever and wherever it wants in Jerusalem. Israel's claim that the city is its sovereign capital is not accepted by its allies.

King Abdullah of Jordan, whose father made peace with Israel in 1994, has told newspapers in Amman that Israel needs to decide between war and peace. Never mind making peace, just avoiding war in the places that are not already fighting is going to be hard enough, and perhaps impossible.

Speaking to News Mediaset in Italy, the 85-year-old exorcist noted that the devil is behind "the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI regarding some pedophilia cases. There is no doubt about it. Because he is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to 'grab hold' of him."

Father Amorth added that in instances of sexual abuse committed by some members of the clergy, the devil "uses" priests in order to cast blame upon the entire Church: "The devil wants the death of the Church because she is the mother of all the saints. He combats the Church through the men of the Church, but he can do nothing to the Church."

The exorcist went on to note that Satan tempts holy men, "and so we should not be surprised if priests too ... fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world."

The interview with Giuseppe dalla Torre, head of the Vatican's tribunal, was published in Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper as Pope Benedict led Holy Thursday services in St Peter's Basilica and Catholics marked the most solemn week of the liturgical calendar, culminating on Sunday in Easter Day.

In the morning the pope blessed oils for Church services during the year, and in the evening in the Rome basilica of St John's in Lateran he washed the feet of 12 priests to commemorate Jesus' gesture of humility the night before he died. But on the day Catholics commemorate Christ's founding of the priesthood, the pope did not refer in any of his sermons to the crisis of confidence sweeping the Church as almost daily revelations surface of sexual abuse of children in the past, accompanied by allegations of a cover-up.

Dalla Torre outlined the Vatican's strategy to defend the pope from being forced to testify in several lawsuits concerning sexual abuse which are currently moving through the US legal system. "The pope is certainly a head of state, who has the same juridical status as all heads of state," he said, arguing he therefore had immunity from foreign courts.

His warning comes on the day that the High Court is expected to rule on whether to grant Network Rail an emergency injunction against the RMT union, which is threatening to strike from Tuesday - the day that Gordon Brown is expected to call the election.

Mr Barber said that he did not believe that the current spate of strikes and threats, particularly at British Airways and Network Rail, amounted to a "spring of discontent", but he said that labour relations could worsen after the election as the Chancellor of the Exchequer grapples to reduce the country's burgeoning budget deficit.

"If there are serious cuts in public spending and in vital public services, then there are very real risks of some very difficult disputes," he said. "Whoever wins the next general election will have to think very carefully before they reach for the axe and what that will mean not only for pay and living standards but for the quality of services that the public sector delivers."

The risk of an increase in industrial disputes is heightened by the chances of a Conservative government, Mr Barber said. "There is a worry if a Tory government takes an antagonistic line to the trade union movement that that would increase the risks of real clashes."

Speaking at Andrews air base outside Washington, Obama said, "This is not a decision that I've made lightly." He addressed the expected outcry from disappointed environmentalists by saying he had studied the issue for more than a year and concluded it was the right call given the nation's voracious thirst for energy and the need to produce jobs and keep American businesses competitive.

"We're announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration but in ways that balance the need to harness domestic energy resources and the need to protect America's natural resources," Obama said, according to his prepared remarks released in advance by the White House. "This announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy. And the only way this transition will succeed is if it strengthens our economy in the short term and long term."

He added: "To fail to recognize this reality would be a mistake." Obama made no secret of the fact that one factor in his decision was securing Republican support for a sweeping climate change bill that has languished in Congress. But Obama has long stated his support in favor of the "tough decision" to expand offshore drilling

Even in countries Google has no intention of leaving, the world's Web search leader has been under increasing pressure to filter information. For instance, local laws prodded Google to help shield Turkey's founder and Thailand's monarch from public ridicule by blocking unflattering videos of them in their home countries.

The company also complies with laws in Germany, France and Poland that force it to exclude information that promotes or supports Nazi causes. Google has edited discussion forums in India to remove comments that the government flagged as violations of its restrictions against speech that's indecent, immoral or threatens public order.

The censorship demands often thrust Google into a tricky balancing act. Its pursuit of higher profits from international markets has entangled the company in vastly different cultures and laws that conflict with its idealistic crusade to make the world's information "universally accessible." Even as it censors some information, Google says it's fighting to ensure that the Web's most popular gateway doesn't also become the Web's main muzzle.