Chilean investigators were examining reports on Wednesday that 9 tonnes of gold had been found in a Hong Kong bank under the name of Augusto Pinochet. The gold, valued at -million, was found during an ongoing investigation into tax evasion and money laundering by the former dictator.

The huge roadside billboards along the new motorway that ploughs its way through barren, yellowed fields in the central Spanish province of Toledo promise a glittering and happy future to those who wish to come and live here. Behind them dust billows up from trucks that crisscross a giant, uninhabited new town where dozens of ugly, high-rise blocks are hurriedly emerging.

He has eluded United States special forces, elite French paratroopers and Britain’s finest, the SAS. But Radovan Karadzic, genocide suspect and regarded by Serbs as a Scarlet Pimpernel-style figure, has finally met his match in Richard Gere. In a film being shot on Thursday on the forested hillsides of northern Zagreb, the Hollywood heartthrob succeeds where Nato, the CIA and the SAS have failed.

The CIA tried to persuade Germany to silence European Union protests about the human rights record of one of the United States’s key allies in its clandestine torture flights programme, the Guardian can reveal. According to a secret intelligence report, the CIA offered to let Germany have access to one of its citizens, an al-Qaeda suspect being held in a Moroccan cell.

United States President George Bush on Wednesday tried to rekindle his country’s faith in his strategy for Iraq, admitting he was dissatisfied with the worsening violence, but insisting the US would make the tactical changes that would lead to victory.