The Independent

A brief statement from US Central Command in Florida, said: "One Task Force Baghdad soldier died of wounds received at about 11.30am, Dec 7." It added that his name was being withheld until his next of kin had been informed.

Changes to the UN charter would make it easier for Britain and the US to go to war with Security Council backing against rogue states, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, says. By Colin Brogwn.

George Galloway won a comprehensive victory in the High Court yesterday in his libel trial against The Daily Telegraph over reports that he was in the secret pay of Saddam Hussein.

Allegations of widespread abuse by US forces in Fallujah, including the killing of unarmed civilians and the targeting of a hospital in an attack, have been made by people who have escaped from the city.

The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit has moved on from Fallujah to a bloody and largely unreported operation south of Baghdad to hunt 'the beheader' Zarqawi. Kim Sengupta found the marines combative yet contemplative, and haunted by the images that shocked the world.

The mortars flew into the governor's compound from the neighbouring houses. They found an oil tanker, which erupted in flames. Elsewhere in this northern city, rocket-propelled grenades strucka US convoy.

More than 100,000 children have been abducted, tortured and sexually abused before being recruited to fight in Africa's long-running civil wars in the past three years, a report revealed yesterday.

Individual American states are putting together a system to cap and trade greenhouse gas emissions, despite the Bush administration's opposition to the Kyoto protocol on global warming. Such a measure was backed by John Kerry during the recent election campaign.

US forces reached the centre of Fallujah yesterday after hours of street fighting and barrages from artillery, tank and helicopter gunships. As night fell, the Americans announced that they had captured key strategic targets and were carrying out house-to-house searches.

Muslim fundamentalist insurgents seeking to topple the government are holed up in a conservative city with little sympathy for secularism or pluralism. They raise the banner of Islam, and they call on the rest of the country to rise up and expel the oppressors.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis has turned the world of anthropology upside down. Steve Connor weighs up the implications

Scientists are celebrating the most important breakthrough in anthropology for a century: the discovery of a new species of apeman.

In the remote caves of an Indonesian island, archaeologists have made a momentous discovery. What the Indonesian-Australian excavation team found on the island of Flores was the ancient skeleton of a female who was only one metre tall.

Hauntingly beautiful, if man-made, the last great 'wilderness' of the north-west Mediterranean could soon disappear, reports John Lichfield from Les Saintes Maries de la Mer

China begins huge project in World Heritage Site, displacing up to 100,000 people and devastating unique tribal societies

She is the Russian President's most dogged foe and the nation's most famous investigative journalist. Andrew Osborn meets Anna Politkovskaya, whose searing critique cannot be read in her homeland

UK policy changed from containing Saddam's regime to changing it - only no one could be told

It appears that the last vestiges of perceived legitimacy regarding the decision of President George Bush and Tony Blair to invade Iraq have been eliminated with the release this week of the Iraq Survey Group's final report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. By Scott Ritter

With their report last week, the inspectors appointed by the Bush administration to search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have had to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun.

Beneath the sparkling five-star tourist sheen of Taba lies a richly historical region that is littered with memories of failed Middle East peace processes.

Now we finally know what we had long suspected. When US and British forces invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had no chemical weapons; he had no biological weapons; he had no nuclear weapons. In fact, he had no banned weapons at all.

Destroying the Bush administration's main rationale for war against Iraq, the chief US weapons inspector declared yesterday that Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction nor programmes to manufacture them at short notice when the US and its allies invaded in March 2003.

Yesterday, in one of its boldest moves, the European Commission agreed to begin talks on admitting Turkey to the EU. But fears run deep of a country of 70 million straddling Europe and Asia

Tony Blair last night suffered a fresh blow after Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, said the war in Iraq was "illegal".

Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.

Leaving for his much trailed trip to Sudan yesterday, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: "I am keen to see for myself the situation on the ground in Darfur."

First the bodies had to be ritually washed. The dark gold of the contested Imam Ali shrine - the outer wall of whose courtyard was damaged by overnight shelling - dominated the skyline from about a kilometre away.

The new Iraq was on a knife-edge last night as violence and political instability confronted the regime of Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister.

You would think that, after the last year and a half, the international community would have learned something about pulling together to meet a crisis. But not a bit of it.

Ministers from the world's richest and poorest countries struck an 11th-hour deal yesterday to boost trade by cutting farm subsidies and import tariffs worldwide.