London

We arrive at Tham Krabok, Thailand’s monastic answer to the Betty Ford clinic; the door of our minibus is slammed back to reveal a 6ft 2in tall Buddhist monk, a Vietnam vet. ”OK,” he rasps. ”Who’s fucked up?”

Black twins born to a white couple after an IVF (in vitro fertilisation) blunder should remain with them, a British judge said Monday, naming for the first time the hospital responsible for the fiasco.

Former South African president Nelson Mandela paid tribute late on Saturday to Diana, Princess of Wales, calling on people across the world to ”learn from her example and embrace her legacy”.

Some 35 000 overseas British citizen of Asian origin living in east Africa are to be granted the right to settle in Britain, Home Secretary David Blunkett told Wednesday’s Guardian newspaper.

Three North African men have been arrested and charged over an alleged plot to release cyanide gas in London’s Underground rail system.

Conservationists deplored a decision yesterday to allow Namibia, South Africa and Botswana to sell off up to 30 tons of their legally held ivory stockpiles.

Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who has been accused of war crimes by his critics, was yesterday appointed by George Bush to head the investigation into the September 11 attacks.

America’s oldest senator ever, Strom Thurmond, who was born before aeroplanes and was considered too old to fight in the second world war, fulfilled his last ambition yesterday, celebrating his 100th birthday while still in office.

Disgraced British politician and best-selling novelist Jeffrey Archer, currently serving a four-year jail term for perjury, has struck a multi-million-pound deal to write three books.

The Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, set himself on an early collision course with the US and Britain yesterday by defiantly continuing to insist he has no weapons of mass destruction.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon in a matter of months if he can get his hands on enriched uranium or plutonium from abroad, a London-based think tank said on Monday.

Cane toads, which have become the plague of northern Australia, are now threatening one of the world’s last unspoilt wildernesses.

President George Bush last night said he was confident that the vote will be held today on a UN resolution that would disarm Saddam Hussein by seeing the return to Iraq of the weapons inspectors as early as the week after next.

Police in South Africa raided homes of suspected white militants across the country yesterday in the biggest security sweep since terrorists started a bombing campaign to destabilise the government.

The Russian government may claim its use of fentanyl, a heroin-like chemical 100 times more potent than morphine, was unavoidable in the circumstances of the Moscow hostage crisis.

Iraq has military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, Britain said on Tuesday in a dossier of evidence about Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq stepped up its charm offensive towards the United Nations weapons inspectors yesterday by quickly letting them into one of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces when they turned up for a surprise search.

A little way off the Californian coast, near the island of San Clemente, the men of the USS Constellation’s squadrons were last week going through their paces to ready themselves for war.

Ariel Sharon’s minority government survived a series of no-confidence votes in the knesset last night, only to be confronted by a fresh challenge that left the hardline administration looking highly unstable.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard told BBC radio on Wednesday that Zimbabwe should be fully suspended from the Commonwealth.

SABMiller Plc, the world’s second-biggest brewer, said on Tuesday that earnings continued to grow despite some tough markets, giving its shares a boost, but brewing industry analysts were not all impressed.

The Iraqi National Congress was to meet Friday in London with former army officers, opponents of President Saddam Hussein and a US official to discuss ways of toppling his regime.

Helen has not heard from her parents for two years since they left El Salvador to work illegally in the United States. She has run away from her aunt’s house to live with a gang. ‘My parents think I’m a little angel,’ she says, making horns with her fingers above her head, ‘but really I’m a little devil.’ She is 13 and she has already killed a man.

The hoarse, breathless voice of Osama bin Laden knocked the White House back on the defensive yesterday at a time when it is trying to focus national attention on a looming confrontation with Iraq.

Drug manufacturers are set to launch sexual pick-me-ups that will last from Friday night to Sunday morning. The weekend sex drugs — to be launched next year — will have the same impact as Viagra, but will have effects that will last for days, not hours.

Police in Britain arrested more than 30 suspected Internet paedophiles in a swoop targeting computer users accessing pay-per-view child sex websites based in the United States.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said that he felt ”a degree of compassion” for young Palestinian suicide bombers, a day after one blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 19 Israelis.

The scene is set for psychoanalysis. The comfortable sofa is oatmeal. A box of tissues is within easy reach, held in place by two wooden dolls — one crying, the other with its arms crossed, sulking. A collection of ethnic masks hangs grimacing from a wall.

The beauty queens had only been gone a few hours, forced to flee Nigeria by raging violence. But as the Rev Joseph Hayab raised his hands to preach in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, thoughts of Miss World were an eternity away.

The British government has launched a formal investigation into allegations that a white Zimbabwean businessman — one of the richest men in Britain — has broken UK and European sanctions by supplying aircraft parts to the Zimbabwean air force.