A general from Saddam Hussein’s army has been captured in southern Iraq and is being pressed to provide strategic information, British officers said today.

A WOMAN who said she saw her son interviewed on Iraqi television as one of the US soldiers taken prisoner has begged US President George W Bush: "Please do something for my son".

Former South African President Nelson Mandela has called the United States “a threat to world peace” and said its belligerent policy toward Iraq was an obvious effort to appease the oil and arms industry.

India is considering returning some of its diplomats to Pakistan and making some ‘‘military gestures’’ to lessen tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals, a top US State Department official said today.

President George W Bush today condemned suicide bomber attacks in Israel ahead of an emergency meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

US military planes bombed and destroyed a building where top al-Qaida terrorist leaders were believed to have gathered, a US official said.

American special forces slipped into the Afghan capital to offer ‘‘advice and counsel’’ to triumphant opposition forces, and small numbers of US troops were operating against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

Iraq’s pursuit of chemical and biological weapons threatens to become a serious problem, US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said.