But while United States president George Bush and his brother Jeb, the Florida governor, have made it through some tough questioning, the president's younger brother, Neil, may not be so lucky.

"Lady Liberty", a gift from the French, whose torch symbolised hope to millions of immigrants over the generations, has been closed to the public since September 11, and will remain so unless the city can raise $5m (£2.94m).

On a day when thousands of demonstrators protested at the US president's visit to Britain, and rescuers sifted through the the rubble in Turkey, looking for bodies, Americans were both outraged and intrigued.

Four months of secrecy surrounding the submissions and their designers ended as the works went on display in New York's Winter Garden. Each design seeks to find an architectural response to the emotional trauma of the attacks. On February 26 1993 six people died when a bomb exploded at the World Trade Centre and almost 3,000 people died in the al-Qaida attacks on September 11 2001.

The Massachusetts supreme court gave the state's lawmakers 180 days to work out how to ensure equality at the altar after ruling 4 to 3 that same-sex couples were legally entitled to get married under its constitution.

"I can't stand that woman," says one.

The project, abandoned in August after political criticism, will be launched next month by the San Diego-based technology company Net Exchange - the firm the Pentagon worked with on the idea.

But where there once would have been excitement there is only anxiety.

The difference between how Bush and his administration perceive the world and almost everybody else experiences it would be comic if the consequences were not so tragic. It is not the product of a misunderstanding but carefully crafted, wilful ignorance. Once, when asked how he gets his information, Bush said: "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff."

The recently-painted work, a forest scene entitled Painters Garden, was being sent from Freud's London home to Acquavella Galleries on the Upper East Side when art handlers hired by the gallery found the crate it was shipped in was empty. It was left to Nicholas Acquavella, a co-owner of the gallery, to break the news to the 80-year-old Berlin-born artist. "He was very upset; we all were," he told the New York Times. "He had just finished it. We spent an anxious day wondering if we'd ever see it again. We didn't know whether it was gone on that side of the pond or on this side of the pond."

There is the Holy Ghost, for African Americans, and St Landry, for whites. In between is the cemetery where, by law and then by custom, people of the same faith have been buried separately according to their race.

Brassfield, 22, also went to be a soldier in the 4th infantry division of the American army. By all accounts, throughout his short life there were only two things he really wanted to do - play basketball and join the army. And so the tank driver from Flint, Michigan, was playing basketball at a military base in Samiri, Iraq, on October 24 when a mortar struck and killed both him and 26-year-old José Mora instantly.

The work was one of several in a collection of 19th and 20th century masterpieces owned by casino developer and art collector Stephen A Wynn.

Relatives of some of the victims wept in the courtroom as the confession by Gary Ridgway, 54, was read aloud by prosecutors. "I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in the statement. "I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could."

A US military spokesman said 16 soldiers were killed and more than 20 wounded when an "unknown weapon" struck a Chinook helicopter early yesterday morning, sending it spinning from the sky to crash in a field near the village of Hasi, six miles south of Falluja, a stronghold of anti-American militancy.

Bethany Hamilton, 13, had been lying on her board in clear blue waters off Kauai's North Shore in Hawaii when the shark struck. Its bite also took a huge chunk of her board, but it struck only once, ignoring her companions and disappearing back into the ocean.

The poll was taken over last week, during which the mounting US casualties were denting the public's confidence in the Bush administration's grasp on events. The increasing cost of the occupation has further added to disillusionment.

I know this because he told me in response to a column I wrote on August 11 about racial attitudes to war in America. His email arrived on August 13, which I've copied here verbatim.

The US is preparing to take staff away from the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led unit charged with searching for weapons of mass destruction, to join the search for much more basic arms, such as mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, and small surface-to-air missiles, which pose an immediate threat to US forces.

According to sources close to the investigation Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River killer, will admit murdering 42 of the 49 women on the investigator's list, and another six who are not on the list.