Thousands of Chinese mourners paid their last respects to purged Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang on Saturday in a tightly controlled memorial ceremony that underlined the government’s unease about the most prominent political victim of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

After the threats and the promises; after the bombs, assassinations and security clampdown; after the Sunni boycott and the Shi’ite religious call to vote, the day of Iraq’s first free elections in half a century dawned on Sunday over a country divided between fear and cautious optimism.

The United States is increasing the pressure on Iran by sending military planes into its airspace to test the country’s defences and spot potential targets, according to an intelligence source in Washington. ”The idea is to get the Iranians to turn on their radar, to get an assessment of their air defences,” said the source.

The Bush administration was confronted with fresh evidence of a far-reaching clandestine campaign to influence public opinion on Friday after a third conservative commentator admitted receiving payments for championing its policies.

European art lovers and investors are taking advantage of the cheap dollar to buy back some of the hundreds of thousands of works that have crossed the Atlantic over decades. Nicholas Hall, international director of Christie’s New York, said that European activity was ”exceptionally strong” at this week’s auction.

As darkness fell across Baghdad on Friday night — the silence punctuated by explosions and helicopters — residents, prisoners in their homes, awaited the unknown. A weekend of bloodshed seemed certain, but how much blood, and whose, nobody knew.