US Outlook It was, in the words of Neil Patrick Harris's medley of Disney tunes, a super-spicy-synergistic-glitzy-celebration. Emphasis on the synergistic.

As authorities in New York touted their success in foiling an alleged terror plot, new questions were raised about the seriousness of the threat, with reports that the FBI declined to investigate the suspect because it did not consider him an effective terrorist.

Occupy Wall Street protesters fought with police in New York after they tried but failed to take over the streets around the Stock Exchange in downtown Manhattan and disrupt the usual market opening. Disturbances on the two-month anniversary of the movement also broke out in other US cities.

In a decade as Mayor, his calm confidence steadied a city recovering from 9/11. Does the US itself now need such a leader?

As commuters trickled into a mostly unscathed New York City yesterday in the wake of Hurricane Irene, raging rivers continued to cause record flooding all across the north-eastern United States and electricity companies struggled to restore power to 5m darkened homes and businesses.

Eyewitness

Washington and New York among cities braced for storm

The wedding bells rang out ceaselessly across New York yesterday as dozens of gay couples rushed to tie the knot after the state became the sixth to sanction same-sex marriage.

The focus of the gay rights struggle in the United States shifted yesterday to the New York state legislature in Albany, where hundreds of supporters and opponents of a draft bill to give full marriage rights to gay and lesbian New Yorkers jammed corridors and hallways as a final vote went down the wire.

Ah, the courting rituals of the American male. First the gridiron legend Brett Favre, then the rap musician Kanye West, now the ambitious Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner. All three have been accused in the last few months of sending lewd pictures of themselves to women, via the social media.

A sting operation saw two men arrested in New York yesterday accused of plotting to attack a major synagogue, after they purchased three guns and a grenade from an undercover policeman.

A plan unveiled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg aims to put landlubber New Yorkers back in touch with the resource that surrounds them – the city's sometimes glittering but too-often-ignored waterfront, all 520 miles of it.