• The late Pope John Paul seriously considered resigning in 2000 because of poor health and also mulled changing Church law so popes would bow out at age 80 and not rule for life, his ex-secretary discloses in a new book. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Pope's private secretary for 40 years, also restates his conviction that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination attempt on the pontiff in 1981 because he was seen as a threat to its power.

• A top Russian general called a US plan to place an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic a real threat to Moscow, but a senior US official denied that was its purpose. The US State Department said the two European countries had agreed to start detailed discussions with Washington on hosting anti-missile defences.

• Iran has barred entry to 38 inspectors from the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency after hardliners demanded retaliation for UN sanctions imposed on Tehran last month.The IAEA confirmed Iranian word of the ban but said this would not handicap its monitoring of a plant where Iran plans soon to expand from experimental into industrial-scale output of nuclear fuel in defiance of a UN Security Council resolution.

• South Africa should forcibly isolate patients infected with a highly drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis to stop the disease from spreading on the AIDS-hit continent, researchers said yesterday. South Africa's outbreak of extreme drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), which has killed at least 74 people in the last several months, may force authorities to override patients' personal rights in favour of the greater public's health, the study in the journal PLoS Medicine said.