A Sea Knight helicopter crashed near Baghdad today, sending flames and a huge plume of black smoke into the sky, the fifth helicopter lost in Iraq in just over two weeks.

The United States and South Korea detected a seismic event at a suspected nuclear test site in North Korea, the White House said today after North Korea claimed it had conducted an underground nuclear test.

Lebanon’s prime minister, caught in a vice of conflicting demands by Israel and Syria, side-stepped Israeli insistence that international forces be deployed on the Syrian border and said today that Lebanese troops already there posed no threat to its prickly Arab neighbour.

A suspected hacker tapped into a US military database containing social security numbers and other personal information for 33,000 Air Force officers and some enlisted staff.

The mysterious tunnels of Iraq are said to stretch for scores of miles under the Iraqi capital, linking palaces, military strongholds and safe houses for leaders, treasure or weapons of mass destruction.

IN the first seven days of fighting in Iraq, accidents and friendly fire — not enemy actions — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the reported deaths of US and British troops.

American forces were today hunting for Osama bin Laden with hi-tech sensors which can ‘‘see’’ in the dark and pierce 100ft of solid rock.

American-made Stinger surface-to-air missiles remain in small numbers in Afghanistan, left over from when the US supported rebels fighting the Soviet Union more than a decade ago.