Campaigners applauded Brazil's rejection of $40 million for its AIDS programs because it refuses to agree to a declaration condemning prostitution. The government and many AIDS organizations believe such a declaration would be a serious barrier to helping sex workers protect themselves and their clients from infection.

The demand from the U.S. administration, heavily influenced by the religious right, follows what is known as the "global gag" -- a ban on U.S. government funds to any foreign-based organization that has links to abortion. This has resulted in the removal of millions of dollars of funding from family-planning clinics worldwide.

Tuesday Pedro Chequer, the director of Brazil's HIV/AIDS program, said the government had managed to resist U.S. pressure during negotiations on the AIDS funding to focus on promoting abstinence and fidelity rather than condoms -- another ideological battle being waged by the religious right. But the U.S. negotiators insisted that the clause on prostitution had to stay.

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In a notice issued by the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., court officials Wednesday said that the hearing was convened with the express purpose of entering a guilty plea from Moussaoui, and to move forward on a case that has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration. More than three years after the attacks, the administration has failed to bring any captured al-Qaida figures to trial.

In Moussaoui's case, delays, legal wrangling and courtroom outbursts turned the test case into a bizarre spectacle punctuated by the suspect's outbursts and volatile behavior. Moussaoui's mental state was the prime consideration before the U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who issued her decision after a one-hour private meeting with Moussaoui Wednesday morning.

The meeting was convened two weeks after Moussaoui wrote to the judge indicating that after more than three and a half years in prison he was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy and terrorism, even though these admissions would carry the death penalty.

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The comments, made to reporters traveling with her on her first official visit to Moscow, carried even greater resonance because of her status within the Bush administration, where she is one of President Bush's most trusted confidantes. In addition, she was an expert on the former Soviet Union before becoming involved in Republican politics and joining the government.

In the harsher of two attacks on Putin's reforms since her appointment, she told reporters Tuesday that "trends [in Russia] have not been positive on the democratic side." The secretary of state had been expected to water down her past criticism of the Kremlin as the United States attempts to draw Russia closer to the West with trade incentives.

She will meet Putin Wednesday to smooth the way for a summit meeting between him and Bush when the U.S. president attends the 60th anniversary Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.

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It might have proved helpful to former CIA operative Melissa Mahle. In 1998, Mahle was the CIA station chief in Jerusalem when a call came in that Palestinian police had seized two bags of explosives at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. She was five months' pregnant -- a fact that she overlooked after arriving at the scene. "At the time I was focused on mission accomplished; I didn't even think about my baby," she says. Over dinner that evening, she learned that the friction of opening a a bag -- or wayward cigarette ash -- could have detonated an explosion that would have flattened the police station as well as Christendom's holiest shrine.

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It was the deadliest school shooting since April 20, 1999, when two students at Colorado's Columbine High School killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. The scale of the violence overwhelmed the emergency services in the remote community, forcing the evacuation of some of the more seriously wounded. "We've never dealt with anything like this before," Sherri Binkeland, spokeswoman for North County Regional Hospital, told reporters.

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In a scathing letter to President Bush, Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan said the Defense Contract Audit Agency's audit was completed last October -- before the election. They also note that 12 separate requests to the Pentagon to view the completed audits on the contractor's $2.5 billion contract to supply fuel and other services in postwar Iraq had been ignored.

"We would like to know why this audit report -- and audit reports on nine additional task orders -- are being withheld from Congress," they wrote. "We also want to know what steps you are taking to recover these funds from Halliburton."

In a second public letter Tuesday, Waxman accused Bush administration officials of deliberately withholding information on overcharges by Halliburton from U.N. auditors -- at its behest. Some $1.6 billion of the $2.5 billion Halliburton contract was funded from Iraqi oil revenues overseen by the U.N.

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Through the course of that night, she won the trust of a man accused in a rash of killings, bringing a peaceful end to a 26-hour manhunt.

Brian Nichols, the alleged gunman, was in a federal prison Monday after surrendering peacefully to the authorities. He was expected to be formally charged with shooting dead a judge, a court reporter and a police deputy, and the subsequent killing of a customs agent.

Their encounter began at 2 a.m. on Saturday when Smith took a break from unpacking boxes in her new flat and went on a cigarette run. As she unlocked the door, Nichols appeared, jabbing a gun in her side. He removed his baseball cap to make sure Smith recognized him as the armed and dangerous outlaw accused of killing four people that day.

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"We're relieved," Marc Falkoff, a lawyer for the Yemenis, told the New York Times.

Human rights organizations say such transfers place the detainees at grave risk of torture, and lawyers have prepared a series of legal challenges to such moves. The Pentagon, however, appears equally determined to carry out the transfers, and halve the prison population at Guantánamo. Over the weekend, it rendered three inmates to Afghanistan, Maldives and Pakistan.

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Transcripts of the investigation, obtained by the Guardian from the American Civil Liberties Union, show only the most cursory attempts by the investigator to establish whether the women were raped. The soldiers claimed the women were prostitutes, or denied any knowledge of anyone in their unit having sex while deployed in Iraq. The statements went largely unchallenged. "I know the women were Iraqi. I however don't know if they were raped, or were prostitutes, or just wanted sex," one soldier told investigators.

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The U.S. stand was also widely seen as further evidence of the sweeping policy change in Washington under the Bush presidency. The last four years have seen a steady erosion of government support for international population projects as a result of the administration's opposition to abortion.

The U.N.'s Commission on the Status of Women had drafted a brief declaration reaffirming support for the Beijing declaration and calling for further effort to implement its recommendations. Organizers had hoped that informal discussions last week would reach a consensus on the draft, leaving the next fortnight clear for government officials and women's activists to hold more substantive talks on advancing economic equality and political participation, and fighting violence against women. But those hopes were crushed in a closed-door session late last week when Washington demanded that the declaration reaffirm its support for the declarations made in Beijing 10 years ago only if "they do not include the right to abortion," says a copy of the U.S. text obtained by the Guardian.

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A thousand pages of evidence from U.S. Army investigations released to the American Civil Liberties Union after a long legal battle, and made available to the Guardian, show that an Iraqi detained at Tikrit, Iraq, in September 2003 was forced to withdraw his report of abuse after soldiers told him he would be held indefinitely.

Meanwhile, photographs taken in southern Afghanistan showing U.S. soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Battalion posing in mock executions of blindfolded and bound detainees, were purposely destroyed after the Abu Ghraib scandal to avoid "another public outrage," the documents show.

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Summers provoked an uproar last month with ill-judged comments on women in science, a gaffe that brought resentment about his leadership style to a crisis point. On Tuesday night the anger broke into the open at a stormy faculty meeting at which he was accused of instituting a reign of fear and intimidation. He can expect equally harsh treatment next week, since several professors say they are determined to bring about real change in the university's management.

"He has apologized many times. Now the question is, Can we put in place structures that -- if he stays -- will mean that his relationship with the faculties and others in various parts of the administration will be much better," said Everett Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science. He added: "If a no-confidence vote is what it would take to bring about the change, then sure."

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Howell's ire is directed against publicly visible boxers, briefs and thongs. His targets are those who follow the trend of wearing low-rise or baggy trousers that put such garments on display. Earlier this week, Virginia's House of Delegates signed on to Howell's campaign, passing a bill that would levy a $50 fine on anyone who "exposes his below-waist undergarments in an offensive manner."

Howell, 67, told local reporters that his campaign was inspired by a visit to his barber shop where customers complained bitterly about the fashion sense of a younger generation that favors low-slung trousers. "That's why they're called undergarments," he told the Virginian-Pilot. "They're supposed to be worn under something else."

Virginia's lawmakers apparently agreed, adopting Howell's bill by a margin of 60-34, in what they described as a blow against the "coarsening" of American culture. The bill still has to clear the state Senate to become law.

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"This is a painful episode for everyone in the U.N.," said the head of the investigation, former U.S. Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker. He went on to accuse Sevan of offering to use his influence at the U.N. in return for the granting of vouchers to purchase Iraqi oil at favorable prices on behalf of a small Panamanian-registered firm. "Mr. Sevan created a grave and continuing conflict of interest," he said.

Sevan, a Cypriot who has spent 40 years as a career diplomat at the U.N., has denied wrongdoing. However, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement later Thursday saying the U.N. would take disciplinary action against Sevan and Joseph Stephanides, the former chief of the U.N. sanctions branch, who was also criticized in the report. "Should any findings of the inquiry give rise to criminal charges, the U.N. will cooperate with national law enforcement authorities pursuing those charges, and in the interests of justice I will waive the diplomatic immunity of the staff member concerned," Annan said.

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"This means that these folks are actually going to get a hearing," said Barbara Olshansky, of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The judge "is saying that the rule of law in this country cannot be disregarded by executive fiat -- despite what this administration might want."

The judgment was highly critical of the Pentagon's military tribunals, set up in June 2004 to decide whether to continue holding the inmates at Guantánamo. Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled that prisoners were entitled to the protection of the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention even during the war on terror.

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"The U.S. government is less and less able to push for justice abroad because it is unwilling to see justice done at home," says Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director. The report comes as the Bush administration prepares for the presidential inauguration next week. But the administration has shown little interest in moderating its aggressive approach to its "global war on terror."

Thursday's scathing report argues that the United States has weakened its own moral authority at a time when that authority is most needed, "in the midst of a seeming epidemic of suicide bombings, beheadings, and other attacks on civilians and noncombatants."

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"Clearly, the medical personnel who helped to develop and execute aggressive counterresistance plans thereby breached the laws of war," says the article, which is based on interviews with more than two dozen military personnel and recently released official documents. It adds: "The conclusion that doctors participated in torture is premature, but there is probable cause for suspecting it."

The issue that the administration had encouraged the use of coercive interrogation techniques was raised Thursday in the Senate confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales, President Bush's nominee for attorney general. Gonzales was attacked for a memo that said only the most severe types of torture were not permissible under U.S. law.

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The documents, which largely appear to be e-mails from field agents to their superiors, describe growing FBI discomfort with the interrogation methods in use at Guantánamo and in Iraq. They provide the most detailed account yet of the methods of interrogation sanctioned by the Bush administration in the "war on terror." They also reinforce the position of human rights groups that the abuse of detainees at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan and Iraq was a product of a new gloves-off policy.

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"Several centuries ago it would have been understood that marriage be available only to opposite-sex couples," the Canadian ruling said. "The recognition of same-sex marriage in several Canadian jurisdictions, as well as two European countries, belies the assertion that the same is true today."

The 9-0 judgment paves the way for legislation to be introduced shortly after Christmas formally legalizing same-sex marriages. The verdict is to some extent symbolic, however. Six provinces and the Yukon territory already recognize gay marriage rights. About 3,000 same-sex couples, including many Americans, have tied the knot since June 2003, when Canada's most populous province, Ontario, began solemnizing such unions.

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The action marks the first time the CIA, which proclaimed that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, has been publicly accused by one of its employees of exerting pressure to produce reports that would help the Bush administration make its case to go to war on Saddam. However, one former CIA employee said the process described by the analyst -- pressure and retaliation -- was a familiar bureaucratic response to agents who did not conform.

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