If anyone had checked they would have found that Dr Wang, then a pathologist, had heckled Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, in Malta five years ago. She was charged yesterday by the American authorities for willfully intimidating, coercing threatening and harassing a foreign official. It was almost three full minutes before she was bundled away by embarrassed US officials who began an immediate inquiry as to how she had got so close to the world leaders. Members of Falun Gong pop up wherever Chinese leaders travel, but they are usually kept well away, outside the concentric security cordons.

But the woman, Wang Wenyi, had been granted an official pass as a reporter for The Epoch Times, a Chinese newspaper which denies it is a front for the Falun Gong but tends to be remarkably sympathetic to it. "Hu, your days are numbered." Then, in English, she addressed the leader of the US: "President Bush, stop him from persecuting the Falun Gong! Stop him from killing! Stop the torture and killings! Falun Dafa is good."

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As the two presidents looked on stunned, and the Chinese leader tried falteringly, to continue his speech, she railed on. She unfurled a red and yellow banner with Chinese lettering ­ the symbols of the Falun Gong "Evil people die early," she screamed in Chinese. Hemmed in as she was by ladders and equipment no one could get to her for a full two minutes.

Suddenly the decorum of the White House lawn was shattered by a banshee shriek. From among the television camera crews a woman began shouting at President Hu Jintao of China Panic filled the eyes of security staff. "They are the leaders of the world's two superpowers," the reporter was intoning, with the solemnity appropriate to the dawning of a new geo-political era in which China is set to overtake the United States as the leading global economy. Mr Abbas had earlier nominated a security chief from his own Fatah.A senior Israeli commander, Major General Yoav Galant, warned that Israel was seriously considering a large-scale land operation in the Gaza Strip ifcurrent levels of violence were maintained..