After nine months of intriguing, emotional, and at times acrimonious, public discussion, the city and state governments poured lavish praise on the design, which has as its centrepiece the hollow pit where fires burned and many remains were buried after the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001.

Since the American release of the film Adaptation, author and journalist Susan Orlean has been receiving emails from people who are convinced she does not really exist. "I don't think it would take much (time or money, these days) to cook up a phony website, a phony book, including a phony ISBN number, etc," writes Nathan. "So tell me: are you fer real?"

A Washington Post-ABC poll found that 56% of the public is willing to wait in order to win UN endorsement for war, with only 39% believing that the United States should "move quickly" without the security council's backing.

The United Nations was in the throes of the biggest diplomatic confrontation for decades last night after the US and Britain tabled a new resolution paving the way for an assault on Iraq next month.

In an exclusive interview with the CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, to be screened in the US tomorrow night, the Iraqi leader denied that the Samouds violated UN mandates and said he would not destroy them.

Both the governor of New York state, George Pataki, and the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, prefer Libeskind's jagged towers design to the other shortlisted proposal, a set of latticework towers designed by a rival practice, Think.

Authorities said a tanker blew up as it was being refuelled, and there was no indication of terrorism. The fire was under control within an hour.

Sami Amin al-Arian was led in handcuffs to the FBI headquarters in Tampa, Florida, yesterday, accused of being the American leader of the Palestinian-based Islamic Jihad and the secretary of its worldwide council.

Some applicants to the federal programme lived several miles away from Ground Zero. Others simply wanted free air conditioners.

Carol Moseley-Braun was the first and so far the only African-American woman elected to the US Senate, where she served only one term.

Plans to open a northern front against Iraq - seen as vital to ensure a pincer movement against Baghdad - were looking shaky last night as Turkey resisted an ultimatum from Washington to accept US troop deployments or forfeit a multi-billion dollar compensation package.

In a scramble to escape the fumes many clubbers rushed to the club's only open staircase to find the doors jammed shut. A number tripped and fell, precipitating a human avalanche which crushed some and left others suffocated.

The answer to the question of whether the world was moving towards war or peace was written on the faces of the permanent members of the UN security council yesterday, following the report of Hans Blix.

Mobiles may still be set on vibrate mode and people will be permitted to speak on their phones in lobbies and during intermissions. Audible pagers have also been outlawed.

"One man just came in and bought up all my plastic sheeting - about 20 or 30 feet of it," said the owner of Sisters. "Now that never happens. It'll be worse tomorrow because it's pay day. But it's been pretty bad today. And you know it's the media because there's a whole lot more women coming in or sending their husbands who couldn't care less."

The setback to the anti-war camp came just hours after France and Germany secured a breathing space by forcing the US and Britain to delay tabling a UN resolution - that would authorise war - from tomorrow until at least early next week.

A series of court rulings has presented convicted murderer Charles Singleton, his lawyers and prison doctors with an agonising choice.

Welcome to Europe, as viewed through the eyes of American commentators and newspapers yesterday, as Euro-bashing, and particularly anti-French sentiment, reached new heights. In a barrage of insults and invective which ranged from the basest tabloid rants to the loftiest columnists on the most respected newspapers, European-led resistance to America's war plans in Iraq was portrayed not as a diplomatic position to be negotiated as a genetic weakness in the European mindset which makes them reluctant to fight wars and incapable of winning them.

Michael Moore's Stupid White Men makes a brave and impressive showing at number seven, but otherwise the literary profile seems to mirror the country's political course. With Republicans in control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, America appears to be in a belligerent, rightwing mood. And while most of the world might complain about the Bush administration or, at most, seek to contain its excesses, only Americans can get rid of it.

They badger me as though their own reference points represent the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under colonisation.

His presentation to the UN security council was impressive in its delivery. He barraged the members with questions: "Who took the hard drives? Where did they go? What's being hidden? Why?" Yet he offered few answers and much speculation.

Led by President George Bush, thousands of grieving space workers and their families, friends and neighbours paid tribute to the seven astronauts who died on the space shuttle Columbia at the weekend.

John "Jackie" Elliott, who has been on death row for 16 years, is due to die by lethal injection in Huntsville tonight after being sentenced to death for the 1986 rape and murder of 18-year-old Joyce Munguia.

A thunderclap in Fort Worth, a tornado in Palestine, a hailstorm in Nacogdoches.

As part of the project, students aged 12 and 13 were given a chapter from the book, Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by the black Harvard professor Randall Kennedy.