He said the UN Security Council must force Iran to accept real supervision that would prevent the further development of its nuclear program.

If they continue with their plans, Ayalon warned, Iran may have the know-how needed for the production of nuclear weapons by the end of the year.

Ayalon, in an interview to Reuters, stated that he believed Iran's nuclear program would be blocked by diplomatic, not military means.

Iran announced it was halting trade with Denmark, as protesters pelted the Danish embassy with petrol bombs.

Police fired tear gas in a bid to keep back hundreds of angry demonstrators, some of whom attempted to scale the wall into the embassy compound. Earlier, the Austrian embassy in Tehran came under attack.

The violence follows attacks on Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon over the weekend. The cartoons were first published in a Danish newspaper.

Tensions continue to escalate around the world:

# Norway demands compensation from Syria after its embassy in Damascus was set on fire on Saturday

# The Turkish and Spanish prime ministers make a joint plea for respect and calm in an article in the International Herald Tribune

# In Indonesia, protesters target the Danish and US consulates in Surabaya, the country's second largest city. Protests are also held in the capital, Jakarta

# Riot police in the Indian capital, Delhi, fire tear gas and water cannons to disperse hundreds of student protesters

# Shops and businesses across Indian-administered Kashmir close after a general strike is called in protest at the drawings

# In Thailand, protesters shout "God is great" and stamp on Denmark's flag outside the country's embassy in Bangkok, the Associated Press news agency reports

# There are protests again outside the European Union offices in Gaza, following demonstrations there last week.

'Test our feelings'

Hundreds of people took part in the morning demonstration in Afghanistan's Laghman province, in a second day of protests in the city.

Three people died when police fired on protesters after a police station came under attack, a government spokesman said.

Demonstrators shouted "death to Denmark" and "death to France". They called for the expulsion of diplomats and soldiers, who were sent by both countries as part of international efforts in the US-led "war on terror".

"They want to test our feelings," protester Mawli Abdul Qahar Abu Israra told the BBC.

"They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers," he said.

In Bagram district, a peaceful protest in the morning turned violent when around 300 "bandits and gangsters" tried to enter the US base, local police chief Mawlana Sayed Khel told the BBC.

A shoot-out with police left two protesters dead, and six police officers injured, he said.

Elsewhere, hundreds protested in Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and the north-eastern province of Takhar. Some 200 demonstrators gathered outside the Danish embassy in the capital, Kabul.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai reiterated his condemnation of the cartoons and called on western nations to take "a strong measure" to ensure such cartoons do not appear again. "It's not good for anybody," he told CNN.

'Defending freedoms'

In the autonomous Somali region of Puntland, demonstrators marched through the port city of Bosaso, shouting anti-Western slogans and converging on the UN and international aid agency buildings.

A 14-year-old boy was reportedly trampled underfoot as police fired into the air to try and disperse an increasingly angry crowd.

Peaceful protests were held in several other Somali towns.

The cartoons first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and caused outrage among Muslims, who consider any images of Muhammad offensive.

One of the cartoons shows Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban.

Newspapers across Europe republished the pictures last week, saying they were defending freedom of expression.

Zieler received an email back from the paper's Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: "I don't think Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them."

The illustrator told the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, which saw the email: "I see the cartoons as an innocent joke, of the type that my Christian grandfather would enjoy."

"I showed them to a few pastors and they thought they were funny."

He said that he felt Jyllands-Posten rated the feelings of its Christian readers higher than that of its Muslim readers.

But the Jyllands-Posten editor in question, Mr Kaiser, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that the case was "ridiculous to bring forward now. It has nothing to do with the Muhammad cartoons.

"In the Muhammad drawings case, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for these cartoons. That's the difference," he said.

"The illustrator thought his cartoons were funny. I did not think so. It would offend some readers, not much but some."

The decision smacks of "double-standards", said Ahmed Akkari, spokesman for the Danish-based European Committee for Prophet Honouring, the umbrella group that represents 27 Muslim organisations that are campaigning for a full apology from Jyllands-Posten.

"How can Jyllands-Posten distinguish the two cases? Surely they must understand," Mr Akkari added.

Meanwhile, the editor of a Malaysian newspaper resigned over the weekend after printing one of the Muhammad cartoons that have unleashed a storm of protest across the Islamic world.

Malaysia's Sunday Tribune, based in the remote state of Sarawak, on Borneo island, ran one of the Danish cartoons on Saturday. It is unclear which one of the 12 drawings was reprinted.

Printed on page 12 of the paper, the cartoon illustrated an article about the lack of impact of the controversy in Malaysia, a country with a majority Muslim population.

The newspaper apologised and expressed "profound regret over the unauthorised publication", in a front page statement on Sunday.

"Our internal inquiry revealed that the editor on duty, who was responsible for the same publication, had done it all alone by himself without authority in compliance with the prescribed procedures as required for such news," the statement said.

The editor, who has not been named, regretted his mistake, apologised and tendered his resignation, according to the statement.

Iran's fiercely anti-Israeli regime is supportive of so-called Holocaust revisionist historians, who maintain the systematic slaughter by the Nazis of mainland Europe's Jews as well as other groups during World War II has been either invented or exaggerated.

Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prompted international anger when he dismissed the systematic slaughter by the Nazis of mainland Europe's Jews as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel.

Mr Mortazavi said tomorrow's edition of the paper will invite cartoonists to enter the competition, with "private individuals" offering gold coins to the best 12 artists - the same number of cartoons that appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Last week, the Iranian foreign ministry also invited British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Teheran to take part in a planned conference on the Holocaust, even though the idea has been branded by Mr Blair as "shocking, ridiculous, stupid".

Mr Blair also said Mr Ahmadinejad "should come and see the evidence of the Holocaust himself in the countries of Europe", to which Iran responded by saying it was willing to send a team of "independent investigators".

Mr Clarke, who met the Parliamentary Labour Party yesterday, faced anger from his own MPs over the failure of the police to act against the protesters. But in a Commons statement he made it clear that the Government would support any prosecutions if the police and the Crown Prosecution Service took action.

"They are undertaking rigorous assessments as the appropriate way to proceed in individual cases," he said. "If the police decide there have been breaches of the law and take action, we would support them."

The Metropolitan Police yesterday promised an urgent and swift inquiry, headed by a detective chief inspector, in the public order crime unit. Senior officers will examine everything, from video recordings made by officers to photographs published in newspapers.

A student who wore a "suicide vest" in Friday's protest issued a full apology yesterday. Omar Khayam, 22, said that he apologised " wholeheartedly" to the victims and families of those attacked on 7 July for the offence caused by dressing as a suicide bomber.

The part-time construction student ­ a convicted drug dealer jailed in 2002 for five-and-a-half years for dealing heroin and cocaine, but who has since been freed on licence ­ said that he dressed in the military-style webbing because he had found the cartoons showing the Prophet "deeply offensive" . But as he became the subject of increasing media interest, he realised his actions had been wrong.

Speaking outside his home in Bedford while flanked by his MP, Patrick Hall, and the chairman of a local mosque, Mr Khayam said: "My method of protest has offended many people, especially families of the victims of the July bombings.

"I do not condone these murderous acts, do not support terrorism or extremism and would like to apologise unreservedly and wholeheartedly to the families of the victims. I understand it was wrong, unjustified and insensitive of me to protest in this way."

Mr Clarke sought to use the protests to challenge opponents of the Government's Terror Bill to drop their opposition to some of the most controversial proposals including a clause to outlaw the "glorification" of terrorism, which was thrown out in the Lords. His remarks are certain to intensify the row over the Bill when it returns to the Commons next week.

Ministers appeared to harden their rhetoric after calls grew for prosecutions over the demonstrations in London, with the police accused of standing by while protesters carried banners that appeared to incite people to murder.

Mr Clarke called on the Tory leader David Cameron to drop opposition to a clause outlawing glorification of terrorism. But Mr Cameron later appeared to rule out any compromise over the plans.

Asked if he would back the law, he said: "I believe in free speech, but free speech under the law. Many of those people carrying those placards were clearly inciting violence or inciting hatred and that is against the law. It does not need any new glorification laws. The things they are inciting people to do are against the law today."

Labour rebels, who are determined to stick to their objections, are also likely to accuse Mr Clarke of using the offensive protests last week to drive through a measure which will damage civil liberties. However, it is likely that the Government will overturn the Lords defeat and reintroduce " glorification" of terrorism as a new offence.

Officials said it would enable the prosecution of Muslim clerics who have avoided directly inciting supporters to kill people, but suggested that those who carried out killings would enter heaven. Senior Whitehall sources confirmed that protesters who last weekend directly called for people to be killed could be prosecuted under the existing incitement to murder laws.

The Government appeared ready to support prosecutions but both Mr Clarke and the Prime Minister's official spokesman went to great lengths to distance themselves from a decision to prosecute, saying it was a matter for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

The Home Secretary condemned the violence aimed at European embassies and Danish citizens but caused frustration on his own side by refusing to publicly back the prosecution of the protesters. David Winnick, an outspoken Labour backbencher, said: "It is entirely unacceptable for a bunch of hooligans and thugs in London to demand that people be beheaded. They glorify the atrocities of 7 July and call for further atrocities to be committed."

He added: "The message should go out that never again on British soil will we see the kind of slogans and incitement to murder that so disgraced this country last Friday."

But lawyers warned the Government not to try to make any political capital out of the demonstrations.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said this was not the time to have this kind of debate. "The law surrounding the curtailment of free speech has grown up through ad hoc responses to a series of public outrages over the years. There is an awful lot of it, some of which has been abused in the past."

She said that the real danger to free speech was the "chilling effect" of some of this legislation, including the proposal for the glorification of terrorism, which meant people would become too afraid to voice legitimate criticism in public.

Hugo Charlton, a barrister who worked on the anti-poll tax campaign and has advised animal rights activists and protesters against the war in Iraq, said he was opposed to knee-jerk reaction to the cartoons row.

He said: "We all need to remain calm ­ what we don't want is more legislation that might be misused at other times. The media has a very important role to play in what happens next.

"The newspapers have to ask themselves whether they think they have contributed to the problem or helped to resolve matters. I don't think they have covered themselves in glory."

Freedom of speech in Britain today: How the legislation is applied

* OMAR KHAYAM

Who? Muslim protester who took part in demonstrations outside the Danish embassy last week.

What he said: Gave the impression he was a suicide bomber by wearing a jacket with dynamite pouches.

What happened? Apologised for his actions but faces an investigation by the police.

* NICK GRIFFIN

Who? Leader of the British National Party.

What he said: In a speech to BNP supporters, which was secretly recorded by the BBC, he described Islam as a "wicked, vicious faith".

What happened? He was acquitted by a jury last week of inciting racial hatred.

* SIR IQBAL SACRANIE

Who? Secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

What he said: Claimed that homosexuality and Islam were incompatible.

What happened? He was investigated by the police for allegedly making homophobic remarks. The case was dropped on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service.

* MAYA EVANS

Who? A 25-year-old peace protester.

What she said: Read the names of the (then) 97 British soldiers killed in the Iraq conflict, at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

What happened? Ms Evans was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £100 costs.

* WALTER WOLFGANG

Who? Octogenarian and member of the Labour Party.

What he said: Shouted "nonsense" as Jack Straw defended Britain's role in Iraq at last year's Labour Party conference.

What happened? He was bundled out of the conference and later stopped under anti-terrorist powers as he tried to re-enter.

* BRIAN HAW

Who? A campaigner against the war in Iraq who lives in Parliament Square.

What he said: Claims Labour is responsible for Britain fighting an illegal war.

What happened? The Government banned demonstrations within 1km of Parliament. The courts have since ruled the law does not apply to Mr Haw.

"Agents of certain persuasion" (Jewish) are behind the egregious affront to Islam in order to provoke Muslims. The key "agent" is Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of JP, who commissioned cartoonists to produce the blasphemous (to Muslims) images and then published them in Denmark's leading morning paper last September.

Rose is also alleged to have ties to the Zionist Neo-Cons behind the "war on terror."

Bottom line: Jewish owned newspapers laugh at Muslims, call them crocodiles, call their religion a 'Cauldron of Hate', and now they defile their prophet. Zionists have killed millions of Muslims in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, etc.

Zionists orchestrated 9/11 and blamed the Muslims. They make silly movies about 9/11 and evil Muslims, but won't show a single boarding video from Logan Airport or security videos of the Pentagon.

Go figure.

Teams of roughly 20 scientists and engineers at the nation's two laboratories for nuclear-explosive design — Livermore and Los Alamos in New Mexico — are in a head-to-head competition to offer designs for the first of the new thermonuclear explosives, termed "reliable replacement warheads" or RRWs.

Designers are aiming for bombs that will be simpler, easier to maintain over decades and, if they fell into terrorists' hands, able to be remotely destroyed or rendered useless. Once the designs are unveiled in September, the Bush administration and Congress could face a major choice in the future of the U.S. arsenal: Do they keep maintaining the existing, tested weapons or begin diverting money and manpower to developing the newly designed but untested weapons?

Administration officials see the new weapons and the plant to make them as "truly transformative," allowing the dismantlement of thousands of reserve weapons.

But within the community of nuclear weapons experts, the notion of fielding untested weapons is controversial and turns heavily on how much the new bombs would be like the well-tested weapons that the United States already has.

"I can't believe that an admiral or a general or a future president, who are putting the U.S. survival at stake, would accept an untested weapon if it didn't have a test base," said physicist and Hoover Institution fellow Sidney Drell, a longtime adviser to the government and its labs on nuclear-weapons issues.

"The question is how do you really ensure long-term reliability of the stockpile without testing?" said Hugh Gusterson, an MIT anthropologist who studies the weapons labs and their scientists. "RRW is partly an answer to that question and it's an answer to the question (by nuclear weapons scientists) of 'What do I do to keep from being bored?'"

The prize for the winning lab is tens, perhaps hundreds of million of dollars for carrying its bomb concept into prototyping and production. If manufactured, the first RRW would replace two warheads on submarine-launched missiles, the W76 and W88, together the most numerous active weapons and the cornerstone of the U.S. nuclear force.

Altogether, the nation has 5,700 nuclear bombs and warheads of 12 basic types, plus more than 4,200 weapons kept in reserve as insurance against aging and failure of the active, fielded arsenal.

Most are 25-35 years old. All were exploded multiple times under the Nevada desert before U.S. nuclear testing halted in 1992. It is in most respects the world's most sophisticated nuclear arsenal, and beyond opposition at home to continued testing, ending testing made sense to discourage other nations from testing to advance their nuclear capabilities.

Faced by the Soviet Union, Cold War weapons scientists devised their bombs for the greatest power in the smallest, lightest package, so thousands could be delivered en masse and cause maximum destruction. Designers compare those weapons to Ferraris, sleek and finely tuned.

Scientists at the weapons laboratories are laboring to keep the bombs and warheads in working order, by examining them for signs of deterioration and replacing parts as faithfully to the original manufacturing as possible. It is an expensive and not especially stimulating job.

Some worry that an accumulation of small changes could undermine the bombs' reliability. So far, every year since 1995 directors of the weapons labs and secretaries of defense and energy have assured two presidents that the weapons are safe, secure and will detonate as designed.

The new reliable replacement warheads are actually an old idea that 1950s-era weapons designers called, with some disdain, the "wooden bomb." Bomb physicists were proud of their racier, more compact designs and figured they were plenty dependable already. The wooden bomb by comparison was boring.

"They said, 'Well heck, that isn't a challenge to anybody'," recalled Ray Kidder, a former Livermore physicist who found a chilly reception to proposals in the 1980s for clunkier, more reliable designs. "It was like saying, 'Well, why don't you make a Model A Ford.'"

Now the wooden bomb is back in vogue. With fewer, simpler kinds of warheads, the argument goes, the arsenal could be maintained more inexpensively and — assuming construction of a factory to turn out the new bombs on demand — thousands of reserve warheads could be scrapped.

But in a sharp break with the past, the new bombs would never be exploded except in war. The only button-to-boom tests of the new arsenal would be virtual — simulated detonations inside a supercomputer.

Today's weaponeers say they've learned enough of the complex physics of thermonuclear explosives to guarantee the bombs would deliver precise explosive yields even after decades on the shelf. If military leaders agreed, the most lethal and final resort of U.S. defenses would be deployed without a test shot.

Ex-military leaders are split on accepting a new, untested nuclear arsenal.

Former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre told a House appropriations committee last year that he thinks a new arsenal will be needed some day. But he said, "I do believe we should test the new weapons to demonstrate to the world that they are credible."

Eugene Habiger, the senior-most commander over U.S. nuclear forces as chief of Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said he would be inclined to accept the new weapons.

"The science is pretty well understood," he said.

The Bush administration and weapons scientists say the warheads will not have new military missions. They will ride on the same bombers and missiles as today's nuclear explosives and strike the same targets. But administration officials are talk of eventually wanting features beyond the sizable array of explosive yields and delivery methods available now: deep earth-penetrating bombs, enhanced radiation weapons and "reduced collateral damage" bombs with lower fission radiation.

Designers and executives at Lawrence Livermore are taking a conservative line. The lab's weapons chief, Bruce Goodwin, talks of starting with nuclear-explosive designs that are well tested and well understood.

"Our plan is to develop a design that lies well within the experience — and within what we call the 'sweet spot' — of our historical test base," he said in a recent statement.

One candidate under consideration as a starting point is the W89, a 200-kiloton warhead designed for a short-range attack missile. It is well-tested, plus it comes from a long line of well-understood designs and uses every safety and security feature available at the time.

Yet weaponeers at Los Alamos lab and Brooks, as the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, have talked of a more freewheeling design effort.

"This is not about going back to rake over old designs. That's why I've got two different teams of weapons scientists at two labs working on this," Brooks said. "There's never been anything tested that will do the sorts of things we want to do."

Such talk alarms Stanford's Drell.

"How the hell do you make a new design without testing?" he said. "Those kinds of flamboyant statements worry me because I don't believe we could maintain a confident stockpile with new designs that haven't been tested."

Some former weapons scientists say the wiser course is maintaining the current arsenal and boosting its reliability in simple ways, such as adding more tritium to "sweeten" the hydrogen gases at the very core of the weapon.

"We've got a reliable stockpile. We have a test base for it. We have now in the last 10 or 15 years far more sophisticated computational abilities than we had doing these designs originally, so things are extremely well understand in terms of the performance," said Seymour Sack, once Livermore's most prolific designer, whose innovations are found in nearly every U.S. weapon. "I don't see any reason you should change those designs."

Lawmakers say they are watching carefully to make sure the new warheads hew closely to existing, well-understood designs. But in a recent report on the new warhead program for the Livermore watchdog group, Tri-Valley CAREs, former White House budget analyst Bob Civiak said Congress has a poor record of restraining the weapons design labs from what after all they were built to do.

"Congress thinks it can allow the labs to design new nuclear weapons but restrict them to existing designs," he said. "History shows that cannot be the case."

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.

Democrats, as expected, pronounced the Republican president's budget plan dead on arrival. But many Republicans were equally sharp in their reservations about the $2.77 trillion spending blueprint the administration unveiled on Monday.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., called Bush's proposed cuts in education and health "scandalous" while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she was "disappointed and even surprised" at the extent of the administration's proposed cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.

Given the level of congressional frustration, administration witnesses, led by Treasury Secretary John Snow, were expected to face a tough sales job before various congressional committees on Tuesday.

Bush's spending blueprint for the 2007 budget year that begins Oct. 1 would provide large increases for the military and homeland security but would trim spending in the one-sixth of the budget that covers the rest of discretionary spending. Nine Cabinet agencies would see outright reductions with the biggest percentage cuts occurring in the departments of Transportation, Justice and Agriculture.

And in mandatory programs _ so-called because the government must provide benefits to all who qualify _ the president is seeking over the next five years savings of $36 billion in Medicare, $5 billion in farm subsidy programs, $4.9 billion in Medicaid support for poor children's health care and $16.7 billion in additional payments from companies to shore up the government's besieged pension benefit agency.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley noted that Congress has just completed a yearlong battle to achieve far smaller five-year savings in Medicaid, the joint federal-state health program for the poor, and Medicare as part of a $39 billion five-year trim in benefit programs.

"It wasn't an easy legislative accomplishment," said Grassley, R-Iowa. "Any more reductions of a significant scope could be difficult this year."

Bush's budget would meet his twin goals of making permanent his first-term tax cuts, which are set to expire by 2010, and cutting the deficit in half by 2009, the year he leaves office.

The administration's new budget projects that this year's deficit will soar to an all-time high of $423 billion, surpassing the old mark in dollar terms of $412 billion set in 2004, as the costs of rebuilding from last year's devastating hurricanes and the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan push spending higher.

Democrats, hoping to wrest control of Congress from the Republicans in this year's election, charged that Bush was forced into an austere spending plan because of the estimated $1.4 trillion over the next decade that it will cost to extend his first-term tax cuts, which Democrats claim primarily benefit the very wealthy.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said Bush's budget was sending a clear message "that the most important thing to this administration are tax cuts being made permanent for the wealthiest of Americans."

In addition to strict limits on most discretionary, non-security spending in the budget, Bush sought drastic cuts or total elimination on 141 programs that would produce savings of nearly $15 billion in 2007.

The targeted programs included 42 in the area of education ranging from drug-free schools to federal support for the arts, technology and parent-resource centers.

Those proposed cuts were coming at a time when the administration is seeking more spending to train 70,000 high school math and science teachers as part of Bush's new American Competitiveness Initiative designed to relieve anxiety about the country's ability to compete with emerging economic powers such as China and India.

Even previously favored agencies such as the National Institutes of Health were not immune from the budget knife with overall funding essentially frozen and many individual programs seeing budget cuts. That brought objections from groups ranging from the American Heart Association to the American Diabetes Association.

Robert A. Rizza, president for medicine and science of the American Diabetes Association, said Bush's proposed cuts in diabetes research and prevention "would weaken the federal resources needed to fight this national epidemic."

Bush's budget submission is just the opening round in what opponents are promising will be a spirited fight in Congress over spending priorities.

"The president's budget slashes resources for exactly the priorities we should be supporting _ groundbreaking medical research, health care for our seniors, and education for our kids," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

© 2006 The Associated Press