Iraq Revisited: Secret Talks Between the British Government and Oil Companies Before the War (Bignell)

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

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Ivory Coast Latest: The Battle for Abidjan (Howden)

What began as the week when Laurent Gbagbo would finally concede defeat ended with the Ivory Coast strongman defying the world from his bunker in Abidjan. After watching his area of control shrink to only a few pockets of the lagoon city, his forces pushed back dramatically overnight on Friday with an assault on the French ambassador's residence. 

AFP reported yesterday that Abidjan's Golf Hotel, headquarters of the internationally recognised President-elect, Alassane Ouattara, had come under attack. The UN evacuated 17 British citizens from the high commissioner's residence, which is close to the Gbagbo compound.

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Belarus: Regime Bars Lawyers for Political Prisoners (Morrison/Taylor)

Lawyers who have dared to defend imprisoned pro-democracy activists in Belarus have been disbarred, in what human rights campaigners say is a deliberate move by the government to hamper fair trials. 

At least five lawyers who have stepped up to represent jailed opposition leaders have been struck off by Belarus's Ministry of Justice, which controls who can enter the legal profession through a strict licensing system.

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Libya Feature: Scenes from Tripoli (Fisk)

Up to 15,000 men, women and children besieged Tripoli's international airport last night, shouting and screaming for seats on the few airliners still prepared to fly to Muammar Gaddafi's rump state, paying Libyan police bribe after bribe to reach the ticket desks in a rain-soaked mob of hungry, desperate families. Many were trampled as Libyan security men savagely beat those who pushed their way to the front.

Among them were Gaddafi's fellow Arabs, thousands of them Egyptians, some of whom had been living at the airport for two days without food or sanitation. The place stank of faeces and urine and fear. Yet a 45-minute visit into the city for a new airline ticket to another destination is the only chance to see Gaddafi's capital if you are a "dog" of the international press.

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Libya Feature: In His Last Days, a Cruel Dictator Seeks a Facelift (Fisk)

So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya --- the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued --- like the dictators of Tunis and Cairo --- by his own furious people.

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Tunisia Analysis: Mis-Reporting the Story (Whitaker)

The Tunisian uprising is beginning to get more coverage in the English-language media, so this may be a suitable moment to look at the sort of coverage it is getting. 

Considering the horrific violence meted out by the police over the weekend, the Ben Ali regime is being given an extraordinarily easy ride.

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