Berlusconi steps down in bid to avoid voters

Silvio Berlusconi is resigning as head of the Italian Government in a technical move to launder the image of a regime now clearly rejected by Italian voters. The aim is to avoid an election which would see the government parties hammered by voters.

The second- and third-biggest parties in Berlusconi's four- way coalition, the Union of Christian Democrats and the National Alliance, both want to try mark a clean break with the previous four years of government and are set to try revamp the Cabinet and focus economic policy on low-income households and Italy's depressed south.

Rebellion escalating again across Iraq

Attacks by resistance fighters are escalating again across Iraq, as violence returns to the levels seen before January, 2005.

Two US soldiers were killed Tuesday evening in a sucicide car bomb attack in Baghdad, the military said. Six died and 44 were wounded outside an Iraqi army recruitment center. Four Iraqi soldiers were also killed in an attack Tuesday against an army patrol in Khalidiyah, west of the capital. At least two Iraqis were killed in three more blasts in the capital on Wednesday.

Rebels are mounting large scale raids against police stations, such as one in the northern city of Mosul on Monday when a 50-strong group unsuccessfully tried to overrun local police.

Marines in Husaybah, Western Iraq have been forced to hunker down in defensive positions. They primarily mount counterattacks after assaults on the camp.

"We're facing a well-developed, mature insurgency with the support of the local population" of about 100,000 townspeople, Marine Maj. John Reed says. "There is no Iraqi security force here. They are not effective. There are no police. They are dead or doing something else."

Ricin: The plot that never was

A deadly poison said to be at the heart of a terrorist conspiracy against Britain led to a dire warning of another al-Qa'ida attack in the West. The Government was swift to act on the fear that such a find generated. But, as Severin Carrell and Raymond Whitaker report, far from being a major threat, the real danger existed only in the mind of a misguided individual living in a dingy north London bedsit.

It was a weapon of mass destruction, a warning that we all needed to be 'vigilant and alert'. Weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the 'ricin plot' was used by Tony Blair as evidence of the danger from weapons of mass destruction, and by Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, before the UN Security Council as proof that Iraq was aiding al-Qa'ida terrorism.

But there was no ricin - a fact suppressed for more than two years. There was no terrorist cell, just one deluded and dangerous man who killed a police officer during a bungled immigration raid. Despite more than 100 arrests and months of investigation which took detectives to 16 countries, no al-Qa'ida plot ever materialised.

Last week at the Old Bailey, the Algerian was convicted and sentenced to 17 years for 'conspiracy to cause a public nuisance by the use of poisons and/or explosives to cause disruption, fear or injury'. Four other alleged co-conspirators were acquitted, and charges against four lesser figures, whose trial was due to start tomorrow, were dropped.

Yet the authorities remained undaunted. Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan police commissioner said it supported the argument for compulsory identity cards, echoing the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. Mr Clarke's immediate predecessor, David Blunkett, claimed that the case showed the need for more anti-terrorism laws.

A terrorism trial which was spun from start to finish, abetted by many senior elements of the security establishment and much hysterical coverage in the media, is still being manipulated, regardless of the evidence in court.