BBC News with Iain Purdon
With a deadline for resolving the United States debt crisis just three days away, there's intense debate in the Senate over a Democrat-backed plan to raise the nation's borrowing limit. The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the
proposal
was, in his words, "the only game in town", and there will be a vote by midnight. From Washington, Paul Adams.
An acrimonious standoff continues between the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Democratic-controlled Senate with competing bills being passed or blocked. The room for compromise on raising the debt ceiling and cutting government spending clearly exists, but it'll require some
deft
congressional diplomacy and almost certainly the involvement of the White House to
make sure
it happens. But Washington is bracing itself for the possibility that it won't. The Treasury has been
drawing up
its emergency plans, working out what bills to stop paying and when. The fact that American soldiers in Afghanistan have started to ask their leaders whether they'll continue to be paid, which they will, is perhaps a measure of just how the sense of anxiety is spreading.
A top American adviser on Iraq has accused the US military of
gloss
ing over an
upsurge
in violence just months before its troops are due to be withdrawn. The US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart W Bowen Jr, said the killing of US soldiers and senior Iraqi figures as well as attacks in Baghdad had all risen, making Iraq more dangerous than it was a year ago. A BBC correspondent in the region says the report is