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Senior intelligence officers kept secret records of meetings after pressure from No 10 Intelligence officers are holding a "smoking gun" which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war.The officers are furious about the accusation levelled by the Leader of the Commons, John Reid, that "rogue elements" are at work in the security services. They fear they are being lined up to take the blame for faulty intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.The intelligence services were so concerned about demands made by Downing Street for evidence...

Tax rises on fatty foods have been urged by doctors in order to curb growing obesity levels. The British Medical Association (BMA) is discussing a proposal to charge 17.5% VAT on high-fat foods such as biscuits, cakes and processed meals. Most food is currently exempt from VAT and extending the tax would earn the Treasury millions of pounds. Obesity-related problems are estimated to cost the NHS at least £500m a year. Last week it emerged the Labour Party was considering introducing health contracts to encourage overweight people and smokers to have healthier lifestyles. British diet 'harmful' But a super tax...

BRITAIN ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer. He...

Reaction may reveal how much of the national spotlight the senator still holds Everything has a shelf life. From books to politicians, public interest lasts only so long. Which is why Monday will mark the start of an interesting, and possibly predictive, period of assessment. Monday is the day a book, "Living History," written by a politician, Hillary Clinton, hits the stores. In its national shelf life may lie some indication of how much of the same remains for the junior senator from New York. Has Clinton become just another politician for most of the country or does she still...

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has submitted what is likely to be his last report on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before leaving the post later this month. Although UN teams returned to Iraq last November after a four-year absence, their mission was halted and they were withdrawn just before US-led forces invaded Iraq in March. In his latest report - which covers the last three months - Mr Blix said his inspectors had found no evidence to show that former President Saddam Hussein had been running programmes to build weapons of mass destruction (WMD)....

The British government needs to concede that we went to war for reasons of US foreign policy and Republican Party politics 30 May 2003 Chutzpah was the word that used to be applied to people who radiated belief in themselves without possessing any visible reason to justify it. In the chutzpah stakes Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the scale. Before the war he told us that Saddam had "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active programme to develop nuclear weapons". After the war he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles...

Up until Wednesday, the day before he got his long-overdue World War II medals from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the lobby of Niagara Falls International Airport, James "Jack" Breier, 85, of Grand Island, wasn't sure he wanted to go through with it. "He was saying, "I don't want any attention, I'm not going,' " said his daughter Marilyn Brennan, also of Grand Island, who launched the drive to get the medals. "And then he'd say, "Gee, it's going to be exciting to be there.' " Brennan was holding her father's medals and ribbons in the framed display case that...

ALBANY - State lawmakers, bar owners and the tobacco industry have stepped up efforts to weaken the state's new ban on smoking in most public places before it takes effect in July. Legislation was proposed Thursday in the Assembly and the Senate, including by a couple of dozen lawmakers who two months ago voted for the crackdown on smoking, to provide a series of exemptions from the law for bars and restaurants that say the measure will gut their businesses. The bill emerged several days after bar owners across New York temporarily shut down their lottery machines to protest the...

<p>WASHINGTON — Facing lawmakers critical of the Pentagon strategy for a postwar Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Thursday that U.S. plans cannot be judged "against a standard of unachievable perfection."</p> <p>He warned that the Iraq "will seem even messier" while its political problems are being worked out.</p>

On January 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton confided to an advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, that he felt like a character in Darkness at Noon, the Arthur Koestler novel about a former commissar charged with treason by a totalitarian state. Clinton was accused of lying under oath about sex with a White House intern. Koestler's central character, alone in a cell, faced death at the hands of a Stalin-like leader; Clinton, surrounded by an army of lawyers, faced embarrassment and, at worst, the loss of his job as president. But mentioning Darkness at Noon injected the grandeur of history into his squalid...

<p>In a speech broadcast on state television late Sunday, Karzai said provincial authorities had sent no money to central government coffers since mid-March, the start of the Afghan fiscal year, and scores of security forces and civil servants had not been paid as a result.</p>

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 16 - In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by the end of the month. Instead, top American and British diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting tonight that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period, said Iraqis who attended the meeting. It was conducted by L. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator here. Mr. Bremer, who was accompanied by John Sawers, a British diplomat representing...

CATTARAUGUS INDIAN RESERVATION - State lawmakers are looking to Native Americans, especially the Seneca Nation, to help balance this year's budget and provide more money to spend on education and health care. But those legislators are going to be sorely disappointed, Seneca leaders and residents said last week. "I will fight, whatever it takes, to protect our sovereignty and prosper. There's got to be an ultimate cost," said Barry E. Snyder Sr., the Seneca Tribal Council chairman who owns smoke shops and gasoline stations on the Cattaraugus and Allegany reservations. There are fears of a return to the battles of...

He insisted he is not a murderer. He swore that he shot Dr. Barnett A. Slepian only because he was trying to wound him and prevent him from aborting unborn babies. But after listening to James C. Kopp's story for 90 minutes Friday, a judge gave him the maximum sentence for the 1998 assassination of the Amherst physician and abortion provider. Saying he disputes Kopp's claim that he did not intend to kill Slepian, Erie County Judge Michael L. D'Amico sentenced the 48-year-old anti-abortion activist to 25 years to life in prison. D'Amico said he found it "inconceivable" that Kopp...

James C. Kopp likely will be sent to prison today for the maximum term of 25 years to life for the murder of Dr. Barnett A. Slepian. Even Kopp's attorney expects nothing less. Kopp, who killed Slepian in his Amherst home with a single bullet from a high-powered military rifle, will speak in his own behalf for the first time in court. Lynne Slepian, who has been in court for every proceeding since Kopp's arrest in March 2001, may also speak in court for the first time since her husband's death. She and three of the couple's four children are...

The eyes of the nation and the world will be on Buffalo tomorrow, when the confessed killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian is expected to make a statement. It's the most high profile case in recent memory in Erie County. Security will be tight for James Kopp's sentencing tomorrow, but Sheriff Patrick Gallivan expects no problems: "There's no threats. There's no real extra concern that there will be a problem, but we're not meeting our obligation if we don't take every precaution," Gallivan said. It took four and a half years to get to this point, and there have been several...

Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled financier promoted by the Pentagon as a leader of postwar Iraq, claims to have obtained 25 tonnes of intelligence documents detailing Saddam Hussein's relationship with foreign governments and Arab leaders. The files, seized by his Iraqi National Congress supporters from Ba'ath party offices and secret police stations, may fuel a fresh round of recriminations and score-settling as politicians meeting in Baghdad struggle to agree the terms of an interim administration. In interviews with Abu Dhabi television and Newsweek magazine, Mr Chalabi has already threatened to use the papers to damage the Jordanian royal family and the...

<p>WASHINGTON — Ten days before Timothy McVeigh (search) was executed, lawyers for FBI lab employees sent an urgent letter to the attention of Attorney General John Ashcroft alleging that a key prosecution witness in the Oklahoma City bombing trial might have given false testimony about forensic evidence.</p>

<p>No questions, they told me about phony sex-abuse charges. I asked anyway.</p> <p>My first encounter with the power of the sacrosanct accusation--the one no one was supposed to question--came when I was a television commentator at WWOR in New Jersey. I looked up at a row of monitors in the studio, all of them filled with pictures of a young woman just convicted on hundreds of counts of sexual abuse of the most grotesque kind--a lifetime's work, if they were all to be believed--and I began to wonder. A wonder born, not of particular concern, but of curiosity.</p>

For Washington, peace will not be as much fun as war was. The three initial stages of the conflict - drumming up domestic support, dispatching the enthused troops and the smart bombs to the region, and toppling Saddam's feckless regime - were, well, the easy part. The fourth stage - rebuilding Iraq - will last longer than all three combined, and may turn out to be not such an easily attainable goal after all. "We're dealing with a country," Deputy Defense Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz facilely told Congress recently, "that can really finance its own reconstruction relatively soon." The...