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Major UK cities - certainly London and Manchester - have existed as proper brick-built towns since the Roman empire around two thousand years ago. That's a LOT of digging, building and rebuilding. Hence it is very difficult to put anything in a city without being noticed - you have to knock something down, or at least disconnect something, first. It's quite common for a builder to discover two thousand year old foundation stones when putting up a new house. So bumping into 50-year-old three-mile-long nuclear bunker isn't exactly going to take much detective work.

Also we have a lot of people in a very small space- our country has 60 million people in an island only 600 miles long. We don't have any unpopulated deserts, mountain ranges or ice shelves where you could go and build an Evil Lair and not be noticed. Anywhere you do anything in the UK, you are going to get spotted by the general public.

During World War 2 there was a massive campaign to make it the average citizen's "duty" to keep quiet about strange millitary goings-on. This carried through to the Cold War. Nowadays, though, the main targets aren't secret bases, they're office blocks and hotels, so this duty of secrecy has faded.

Being a small country, we've never had the room to build enormous Area 51 style secret bases. Guardian (Manchester), Anchor (Birmingham) and Kingsway (London) only have about three miles of tunnels each, and they're the largest in the UK - absolutely tiny in comparison to the ranch estates possible in the USA. So our old bunkers are too small to be useful today and too crammed-in to be extended.

They're of no practical use. That's why you hear about them- because you're allowed to, they're useless. Heck, Guardian doesn't even have exchange equipment inside it any more - only the fiber cabling. Guardian is basically used only as a handy tunnel to save digging up the road- it isn't "secret", it's more "convenient and otherwise worthless" (the problem is, of course, that it was so convenient that they put *most* of Manchester's fibre down there, including most of the backups).

Whereas the US bunkers are presumably big enough and extendable enough to still be in use. So Joe Public isn't going to be poking his nose in there any time soon.

from theTimes

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EMERGENCY services, homes and businesses were hit after an underground fire in Manchester city centre cut 130,000 phone lines.

The blaze, in a tunnel by the junction of George Street and Princess Street, destroyed cables connected to the national phone network.

Related News:

No time limit for Manchester phone lines fix
Fire wipes out internet in Manchester
BT tunnel fire cuts off Manchester phone lines
BT fire disrupts emergency services
Businesses hit by BT fire
Phones Out of Action after Fire in Tunnel
Tunnel fire knocks out phone network

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There's also some evidence that living in an environment that's too sterile can actually be harmful - your immune system needs a workout, and if you don't give it one it can go wrong... causing allergies, asthma, etc.

Very true...

Babies who get fevers are healthier

Exposure to pets reduces allergies and asthma (there's a more recent study from Germany specifically about infant exposure to cats and asthma, but I couldn't find a link)

Computers Replace Musicians In West End Musical
Posted by timothy on 10:03 AM -- Saturday February 14 2004

Albanach writes "The Scotsman newspaper is reporting that despite opposition from the Musician's Union, Sir Cameron Mackintosh will proceed with his plan to replace one half of the musicians in his musical Les Miserables with a computer synthesiser. The Times claims that using Sinfonia will allow the show, the third longest running musical in history, to replace 11 musicians saving 5,000 GBP ($9,450 US) per week. Sinfonia consisits of 2 PCs, one master and one backup, controlled by an trained operator using a musical keyboard."

I read the jokes about Universal Soldier, super soldiers etc etc...but once we start down that path, how far are we from genetically engineered soldiers?

Not very far.

Google Cancels Spring IPO
Posted by Hemos in The Mysterious Future!
from the or-have-they dept.
securitas writes "Google fans and potential investors will be disappointed to learn that they must wait a while longer before they can own a piece of Google. The Times of London's James Doran reports that Google's IPO plans are on hold. CEO Eric Schmidt appears to think that market conditions are not right. When pressed for details about the delayed IPO, Schmidt said, "An IPO is not on my agenda right now." A commentary about the delayed Goog

I hope to heck that
SCO wrote the virus.

Before US /.'ers start idolising Ricky Gervais, I think they should be made aware of this

David Brent still working...at Microsoft!
Brent fever hits Microsoft UK
David Brent gives his office tips to Microsoft

How many places are "out of reach of broadband"? As opposed to "not profitable enough to enable broadband for"?

Most places have landlines. Ok, I know there are some really remote locations that do not -- like Cwm Brefi. Isn't it just a question of upgrading the existing telephone exchanges to increase coverage? No new wires, right?

I don't much care whether my broadband comes via cable, DSL, or wireless. This airship idea sounds great but it's years off. I think I'm going to go door to door trying to reach our DSL trigger level (35 signed up, need 100 -- damn old people!).

[In October 2003, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow] declared, "... I am confident that this economic recovery will now be sustained and will produce loads of new jobs. Everything we know about economics indicates that the sort of economic growth expected for next year, 3.8 to 4 per cent, will translate into two million new jobs from the third quarter of this year to the third quarter of next year. That's an average of about 200,000 new jobs a month.... Jobs are always a lagging indicator which follows economic growth. I would stake my reputation on employment growth happening before Christmas."

As if anyone remaining in the Bush administration has a good reputation to begin with.

I do not think anyone on slashdot (especially someone who has debugged badly written code) should encouraged. Medical science has shown (for all common sense purposes), that alcohol shrinks the brain reducing cognitive abilities and motor functions. This (again for all common sense purposes) is an undesirable thing. Here is some info about the recent Johns Hopkins study:


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-920 73 0,00.html

Me, I haven't had a drink in 3 weeks. Still drinking lots of coffee though! Eventually I will switch to water and roasted grain beverages.

*CHEERS* [Raising my sparkling non-alcholic apple
cider]

If a Magistrate ordered a car stopped after looking at a real-time video feed via satellite/cellular from the scene of the incident, most people wouldn't mind that because then the police wouldn't have the arbitrary power to stop any vehicle anywhere such as the fast lane or whilst going around a mountainous curve, it would be up to the Magistrate.

GM, Ford, etc. already store car key immobiliser encryption codes which are needed to make spare keys. I'm sure they can also store your vehicle's Engine Management System Private key which can be used to calculate a timestampted engine-off signal to remotely override your vehicle's ignition computer with a Magistrate-authorised signal sent via INMARSAT/IRIDIUM or cellular. The vehicle's Engine Management System would then calculate whether the decrypted engine-off signal hashes to the current time (so that engine-off signals issued in the past cannot disable a vehicle in the future). If it checks out the Engine Management System will shut down and maybe then pop a thermal switch or two.

In Europe, there's a massive problem with drug dealers carjacking luxury cars such as Mercedes S-class and Audi S4, driving them at >190mph to bust through police checkpoints and get to drug-dealer ghettos. This will worsen as vehicles get faster and run-flat tyres become popular

There's a huge problem with car theft in the UK, we've got lots of bored teenagers, but at least they don't gang-bang yet like across the pond, there aren't enough guns here for that yet. The thing is they tend to only steal older cars that use carburation (no EMS). This system would therefore be aimed at professional criminals or people running away from the Law. If Linus, Alan Cox and Stallman were shot by a carjacker who then drove off at speed, we'd all change our minds about these technologies.

more stuff from the Beagle 2 weblog

Listening out for Beagle 2
The 76m Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory is ready to try and find Beagle 2 on Christmas evening. At 10:40 pm GMT Beagle 2 will begin to transmit an on/off sequence each minute - like very slow Morse Code - and about nearly 9 minutes later the signals should reach Earth. The transmitter power, at 5 watts, is little more than that of a mobile phone, but the team at Jodrell Bank have installed a very sensitive receiver to pick up the Beagle 2 frequency. See more details on the Jodrell Bank website>

Betting on Life on Mars
Ladbrokes, the bookmaker, has cut its odds of finding life on Mars from 33-1 to 25-1 after a flurry of bets following the successful separation of Beagle 2 from Mars Express. Whilst these might not be true odds, the firm has taken the decision to minimise payouts in case Beagle 2 finds any evidence. Bets have been placed on the "Life on Mars" outcome since 1969. Link to Times story

What bothers me every time this comes up is 100's of people saying "the bush administration says to hell with all the alzheimer's patients." The simple fact is that ADULT stem cell research has yeilded MANY beneficial results, like this one piece of recent news. Or this about bone marrow derived stem cells. Or this about turning SKIN cells into BRAIN CELLS for alzheimers patients! Why does the news media at large ignore this huge potential and only focus on how the pro-life movement "want's to end stem cell research altogether" ?

Execpt that the insurgants are probably don't require any electronic equipement at all. To do what they do only requires someone to be there and want to cause damage. One doesn't need to communicate with radios, just go up to your fellow insurgant and say hey lets bomb something or hey lets shoot something up. Sadly most bombs and AK-47's do not have any electronic parts in them at all.

And even if the US equipment was "hardened" some of it would undoubtly fry anyway as it became "unhardened" due to use and maintaince. Causing the soldiers to freak out as all of a sudden things stopped work.

An EMP would only work against an enemy that was designed to fight like we fight. Lots of large tanks and planes and tons of electronics. If someone fights in another style, an EMP and for that matter a lot of the US weapons systems turn into useless junk. There are stories on how "battle simulations" go horrible haywire when someone decides to do things like stop using radios.

And don't get me started on how bad of a PR move that would be. Blowing up all the radios and TV's of the regualar Iraqis. Yea, that's how to win them over to our side.

I love PA - its great in a kinda crap way. The Sunday Times reviewed it a few weeks back as an example of the better comics available online and had a small "may contain some indoor language" warning alongside the reprint and the web address.

So I checked out the strip and I'm SURE it was THIS ONE.

That sick kids are exposed to this kind of filth with their free games is most refreshing!! And on a Sunnday too!!! Wholesome!

"After a week with a Windows machine I get the feeling that this system is designed by people who know a lot about computers. Macs, on the other hand, seem to be designed by people who know a lot about people."

That pretty much sums it up right there for me. Apple will continue to appeal to those who like machines designed with a person in mind while Windows users will tend to want something that pushes technology boundaries whether that's useful or not. Any Mac user who gripes about Windows having a lousy interface is missing the point of being a Windows user. Any Windows user who gripes about Apple's technology lagging is missing the point of being a Mac user. I prefer the latter, but that's me. I find the real key to productivity is not cutting-edge technology but logical design.

well we Brits may be the only other major contributor of troops in Iraq, but that doesn't mean to say the British people support the war. In fact, according to this article at the Times newspaper (A generally conservative UK paper) only 1 in 4 Brits support the shrub's handling of Iraq, and he can expect to meet significant protests when he comes to see us next week. Personally I expect to see people burning the stars and stripes on the streets of London, and while I have many American friends, and think that American people in general are nice, friendly and sincere, I think your government is borderline fascist, with an unhealthy mix of Christian fundamentalism and neocons. Interestingly mussolini once said that fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it involves the merger of corporates and the and state and if corporatism doesn't neatly describe the current state of US politics and also coincidentally in so called "red" china then I don't know what does.

This article details, amongst other things how US taxpayers are eploited by US corporates to subsidize their ventures in China. Through the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank, corporate investments in China are subsidized, and any losses incurred are socialized -- while the profits remain private and legitimate market competition is undermined.

Of course many of the people who directly benefited financially from this are directors of companies who invested in China who now have significant influence on the current administration, not least Dick Cheney who now is I'm sure also benefiting quite nicely from Halliburton's sorry, America's, current adventure in Iraq.

I don't know which country you are living in, but in the UK, outsourcing is a major concern in the IT industry, with over 44,000 contractors unemployed. If you do the arithmetic, you will figure out that is a loss of at least 750 million pounds/year in income tax/VAT.

The biggest fear now is that the outsourcing will spread from the IT industry and call centres to financial jobs such as accountancy and stockbroking. I'd recommend you visit the following sites:

Prescott enters outsourcing furore

The Sunday Times also had an article:

Where is your job going?

And a discussion group for UK contractors who are trying to fight the IR35 legislation Shout99

These should provide a more detailed snapshot of the current state of the IT industry.

Bill Nighy is the front runner. Tom Baker was just voicing his opinion. See the Times.

It is estimated that the 250,000 Microsoft chat rooms worldwide will get two weeks' notice to close down. The company says chat room users will be able to communicate using Microsoft Messenger instead.

• In a chatroom, I'm only in that chatroom.
• On Microsoft Messenger, I'm in all groups that ever talk to me.

Extract from Times Obituary :

You haven't read The Australian or The Times, then.

While it's generally true that Murdoch tends toward the tabloid style that he perfected, he does have quality newspapers in his capabilities (because quality newspapers take much longer to become profitable [the opposite is true in the US, though], Rupert avoids them; the Australian wasn't profitable until the 1980's).

Insightful??

This story was actually broken by the Sunday Times, and followed up by the BBC.

From the BBC report:

"The chip plan emerges in the first part of an initial feasibility study, an 85-page document drafted by the Association of Chief Police Officers on the orders of transport secretary Alistair Darling."

There's also a response from Tory trade spokespman Tim Yeo. Might be worth at least provisionally believing it.

However, the same story was in The Sunday Times.

The reporting is less sensational. You may object to the Times on the grounds of it being Murdoch owned, but the reporting is pretty good.

The reporting is less sensational. You may object to the Times on the grounds of it being Murdoch owned, but the reporting is pretty good.

(Please mod this up before the thread dies!!)

Nobody believes stuff printed in The Sun, but occasionally it does pass on info found in more reputable papers the day before!

The original story is linked here from Times Online for your pleasure.

I think you'll find that the Sunday Times also had this story this week as one of their headlines this Sunday.

The original article was in the Sunday Times, which has a better reputation than the Sun.

Some have commented that The Sun is not the world's most authoritative journal available in the ok. You're right, it's not.

However, similar articles have been in the broadsheets over here:

The Times

BBC News

The Observer (this one slightly older)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-79051 2,00.html (subscription required)

I have no idea how reputable this source is as I dont live in the UK but this was all i could find (besides others that linked to this site). Actually I havent even read it because I dont feel like subscribing, but the title of the article is

"Goodbye speed cameras, hello a spy in every car",

and the quick summary provided says:

"Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer"

Also here is a PDF of the "Electronic Vehicle Identification" of which the article talks about

(reg req'd)Goodbye speed cameras, hello a spy in every car

(reg req'd)The Informer: a car that will tell the police everything

AA gives green light to spy-in-car proposal

(reg req'd)Goodbye speed cameras, hello a spy in every car

(reg req'd)The Informer: a car that will tell the police everything

AA gives green light to spy-in-car proposal

Actually it was Tony Ball, the chief executive of BSkyB, making a keynote speech at the Edinburgh Television festival, and he has also been saying this for a long time.

Here's how The Times reported it, and here's how the BBC News website reported it.

Although undoubtedly he is partly making these statements because of self-interest, I think he makes a good point. Firstly because the BBC is not supposed to simply compete with commercial channels. It is supposed to be aboutv public-service broadcasting and independent programming. I truly believe it is wasting public resources. It is still behaving as if it is the only broadcaster in the country, which it simply isn't.

If other free-to-air channels will broadcast such important things as US TV like 24 etc anyway, then it is a waste of public funds for the BBC to buy them, and this is essentially Tony Ball's point.

Personally I don't view the license fee as good value for money. Greg Dyke et al. have lowered the tone of its output significantly in recent years. The quality of news reporting has been significantly dumbed down. Sky News is now viewed by many people as being every bit as good as BBC News 24.

The reporting of the Iraq war may or may not have been biased against the government; I would much rather watch something which acknowledged its bias than smoething which, like the BBC, high-mindedly claims "unbiased reporting" when if you think about it no such thing exists. However, in the dossier affair in my opinion they have shown their true colours. It wasn't news. Pure and simple. Why did they give the argument between them and the government such prominence as they did (top story) when almost noone else was? Incidentally it was the Labour government, and not the Murdoch press that kept on about it.

I hope that next time the BBC's charter comes up for renewal the license fee is not kept. If you do not live in the UK and you like BBC programming, you should be aware that the World Service is already funded from general taxation (from the Foreign Office budget in fact), and that the cost of programming is significantly supported by selling it abroad.

In the UK there is a similar site at EveryonesConnected.

It claims to have 50,000 members, but when I signed up this week, my ID was ~30,000, so I expect that this is a little exaggerated. It appears that relatively few active members, because when I had a look round, the same faces popped up again and again.

They require you to sign up two of your friends before you have full access (to peoples profiles etc.) I guess this provides some peer pressure to be honest about yourself.

There is also a business networking site here, which is mostly poplulated by people in North America at the moment.

Most investment banks already use IM in the form of Bloomberg messaging and Reuters (MSN) Messenger. Bloomberg messaging is a fairly old system and not logged, but the new Reuters system is designed to be compliant. From the Reuters client page:

Meet compliance requirements
Access the tools necessary to meet industry regulatory requirements, including a complete audit trail of all messages sent and received by your users.

Drag racing dates back to the 1950s, but police claim it has become far more widespread since The Fast and the Furious turned Vin Diesel, a former bouncer, into a Hollywood star two years ago.

The sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, released in America last weekend and in Britain on Friday, has been accompanied by a rash of high-speed fatalities.

...

The outlaw thrill of street racing is tempered by the human cost and not just among the competitors: last weekend a 78-year-old man was knocked down by a speeding driver who told police officers he had just seen 2 Fast 2 Furious. In northern California police arrested six racers who blocked an interstate highway, driving at 120mph. Each had a ticket stub from the movie in their pocket.

...

âoeThe number of illegal races surged when the first film came out, quietened down, and then we get a sudden rush when the second (film) arrives. Coincidence? I am not so sure,â a [police] spokesman said.

Here's another option for you.

Bit of shame, because the UK population votes for the government and then is compelled to pay a tax to the BBC so it can attack and deride that very same govt. Hey, it even uses large amounts of this tax to create (and subsequently re-create) digital channels that most of the UK population can't receive (thought that is changing thanks to rivals Sky and the ill-fated ITV Digital).

The BBC also uses it's massive income stream to start new channels and enterprises that effectively destroy legitimate competition (e.g. Artschannel channel), and uses it's multiple channels to cross-advertise other BBC channels (so not really advert-free).

News stories are not always well researched or written (c.f. the one about broadband barrage balloons reported on Slashdot - pure puff and ill-considered comments).

The sheer size and bias of 'auntie' (as it is 'affectionally' known) makes many other media organisations feel free to take rather obvious pot-shots at it (e.g. The Times newspaper has a story that the BBC was known as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corp by the British Navy and sailors switched to Sky News to avoid the overwhelmingly anti-UK bias on the BBC - of course this might have something to do with Murdoch owning both The Times and Sky News).

The BBC's 'unique way of funding' has crippled objective political reporting and media output in the UK; pro- and anti- govt propaganda bounces back and forth between so-called independent news organisations; as do irrelevant TV programmes (independent TV does a reality show, the BBC does a reality show and props it up through its many output formats and channels, etc.).

Did I hear someone say that the BBC's musical radio channels are the best in the UK? Of course they are! However, this might have something to do with the BBC having the almost all the national music channels in the UK. Effective competition again stifled by the fact that BBC radio does not have to make a profit because it is funded in it's own 'unique way', i.e. by enforced taxation; oh, and they shut down pirate stations using govt-biased legislation (I'd like to say that this legislation is BBC-biased but I'm not sure emergency crews would agree, then again it does get some geek-points for coolness.) Though even I would admit that BBC music radio is 'ok' sometimes, nothing will eras the memories of DLT and never-ending Fleetwood Mac from the p***-poor Radio 1 of old (and, alas poor controller, it isn't much better now).

They don't do anything new or innovative (except deliberately mess up the scheduling for top-class programming like Seinfeld, Larry Sanders, Star Trek: TNG etc. so no-one realises how bad BBC stuff really is, oh, and show pictures of dead soldiers). Not unless they are coming up to the regular review of the BBC tax by parliament; such a review is coming up, and those of us who loathe the BBC (but still have to pay it's tax but never watch any of their TV channels) can only hope an pray that the govt finally sees sense and makes them pay their own way in this world. Hey, it might happen!

Forgive the rant (but it's not as bad as

I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly) is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?

The British press and politicians all appear to know exactly who the unnamed source was: British law is very strict about revealing state secrets, hence the secrecy. But all hell is breaking loose in Downing Street at the moment.
Here is The Times' take on it, top-selling right-wing paper in Britain.

Here is another from a middle-of-the-road paper, The Independent.
This story is relevant too.

And here it is again from Channel 4 News in London.

That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first.

That's perfectly alright. Thank you for your polite and timely reply.

Is his position yours as well?

Not quite. glrotate says "There were no Scuds." I'm saying that there is no evidence of any Scuds yet, so we should proceed on the basis that there were none until the claims are independently verified.

As for your questions on Professor Herold, no, I can find no statisticians leaping to his defense on the Afghan numbers. But likewise, I can find only STATS criticising them, and lots of people quoting STATS. STATS claim to be a "non-partisan" stats group: well, how many stats groups or statisticians claim to be "partisan"? Every one of them is "non-partisan", just like every man in jail is innocent. The Iraq Body Count team may have only used a very small percentage of incidents from what you and I would consider unreliable sources (Saddam loyalists et al.), with a resulting insignificant impact on interpreted results.

My long background in medical stats has given me a healthy dread of the nasty little games statisticians play. If you'd like to see a good example of how distinguished "non-partisan" statisticians are happy to send innocent people to their graves for a buck, try googling for "thimerosal".

So please forgive me if I cannot accept a summary from some group I've never heard of, criticising the past work of one academic, as a basis for rejecting the work of all future work of any team he ever works in again. I'm aware that you would need to buy the report in order to prove their methodology to me, and even I'm not so presumptuous as to insist on that.

We therefore seem to be at something of a standstill.

Still, if you ever do come across a copy of what critieria they used to judge "reliable" and "unreliable" incidents on the Iraq numbers, and it shows I was wrong, I promise to admit it here, and remove the sig immediately.

Until then...

Um. I would be careful of who I get my news from. Tbrnews.org is run by these clowns who appear to be neo-nazis.

So while the site may actually link to some decent material, perhaps you ought to get it elsewhere if you can...

The original BBC article has been edited since its first post and no longer talks about the problems faced by easyCinema. However, there is more writeup on easyCinema's problems in a separate report. The report states that in the UK, the studios take up around 90% of the box office proceeds. This practise was ruled upon in 1994 in Britain as "reasonable". It looks like for Stelios's venture to succeed bigtime, he needs to have the studios change their way they recuperate their costs ie with fixed prices for the cinema's. Fixed pricing though puts more of the movie flop expense on to the cinemas, who would have to become more careful as to which movies they pick. I doubt he will have success with fixed cost movie reels from the studios.

Still, he has managed to swing a deal with Sony (Columbia Tristar) to pay 1.30GBP (~$2.00) per person for two of their films.
I think the guy is going to have a very tough uphill struggle to make this succeed. The French film financing board, the CNC are looking closely at their success.

The original BBC article has been edited since its first post and no longer talks about the problems faced by easyCinema. However, there is more writeup on easyCinema's problems in a separate report. The report states that in the UK, the studios take up around 90% of the box office proceeds. This practise was ruled upon in 1994 in Britain as "reasonable". It looks like for Stelios's venture to succeed bigtime, he needs to have the studios change their way they recuperate their costs ie with fixed prices for the cinema's. Fixed pricing though puts more of the movie flop expense on to the cinemas, who would have to become more careful as to which movies they pick. I doubt he will have success with fixed cost movie reels from the studios.

Still, he has managed to swing a deal with Sony (Columbia Tristar) to pay 1.30GBP (~$2.00) per person for two of their films.
I think the guy is going to have a very tough uphill struggle to make this succeed. The French film financing board, the CNC are looking closely at their success.

Niggers are eating each other.
Read it.

Paul

Here's another article on this. I don't know if it's any more informative, but the picture is just hilarious. It appears as though they are shooting lasers out of their heads.

If you read Hans Blix's report, you'll find that Iraq failed to give any reasonable explanation for what happened, for instance, to the tens of thousands of tons of Anthrax.

Iraq's role in international terrorism is well known and the first hard proof [bbc.co.uk] was found last week.

Saddam link to al-Qaeda in doubt
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
BRITISH Intelligence officials have expressed doubt that Saddam Hussein established any working relationship with al-Qaeda despite the discovery of documents showing that an "envoy" for Osama bin Laden visited Baghdad in 1998.

The documents were found by The Sunday Telegraph at the bombed-out Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's Intelligence service, and were hailed yesterday as positive proof of an Iraqi link to al-Qaeda. They mentioned the arrival of a confidant of bin Laden who had travelled to Baghdad from Khartoum in March 1998. Bin Laden was based in Sudan until 1996.

Officials told The Times that there had been intelligence indicators about that time of a possible visit to Baghdad by someone purporting to represent al-Qaeda. There had been no evidence of any follow-up meetings to suggest that Baghdad had forged a long-term partnership with al-Qaeda.

Also check out This Times Online article.