This Monday morning, in common with most email users, I will weed my way through offers of shareholding in companies so hot, they’ve doubled in value over the weekend, through offers of prescription painkillers sent in plain wrappers and through promises that my sex life will be vastly improved once I buy the product guaranteed to give me a bigger penis.

US president George Bush has personally approved a secretive eavesdropping programme more than three dozen times since October 2001, a senior intelligence official has said.

A KEY Republican committee chairman put the Bush administration on notice yesterday that his panel would hold hearings into a report that the National Security Agency eavesdropped without warrants on people inside the United States.

Negotiators from the two chambers of the US Congress reached an agreement today to extend the Patriot Act, the government’s premier anti-terrorism law, before its major provisions expire at the end of the month.

The man set to become the next US Attorney General vowed to abide by international treaties on prisoner treatment today.

US President George W Bush will stand by his decision to limit federal funding for embryonic stem cell research regardless of what scientific breakthroughs may occur, two administration officials say.