World Highlights

¤ The United States does not believe Iran has a nuclear weapon but the danger Tehran will acquire one is an "immediate concern," US intelligence chief John Negroponte said.

Mr Negroponte, national director of intelligence, also told a Senate committee looking into the range of threats to the United States that al Qaeda is still plotting and preparing for attacks on the United States.

¤ Saddam Hussein boycotted his trial for a second day and his defence team also stayed away, saying the new chief judge wanted only to see the former Iraqi leader quickly hanged.

The chairs normally occupied by Saddam and his seven co-defendants were empty as Chief Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman heard two prosecution witnesses recount their torture by Saddam's security forces after a failed bid to assassinate him in the Shi'ite town of Dujail in 1982.

¤ The White House is expected to ask the US Congress for about $70 billion in new emergency funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and $18 billion for the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast, congressional aides said.

Congressional staffers were being briefed on the request, but the White House was not expected to send it to Congress for about two weeks, the aides said.

¤ Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he was expelling a US Embassy military official who authorities accuse of spying with a group of Venezuelan officers.

"We have decided to declare persona non grata or as we say here, to throw out of the country, a military officer in the US mission because of espionage," Mr Chavez said.

¤ An Iraqi teenager who died last month had the H5N1 bird flu virus, the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed, meaning the disease has now killed people in seven countries as it spreads across the globe.

The WHO said there was an urgent need to establish the severity of the outbreak among birds in war-ravaged Iraq.

¤ Poland's ruling conservatives said a power-sharing pact signed with two fringe parties would bring radical change in economic and foreign policy in the biggest forner-communist European Union member.

The deal averts a snap general election after months of instability and brings parties that were hostile to Poland's EU membership and foreign investment to the threshold of power.