Global warning

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last night refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in a war on Iraq, as terrorist threats gripped London and Washington.

Surface-to-air missiles were deployed to protect the Pentagon one of the targets of the September 11 attacks and F-16 fighters were placed on 24-hour alert near the Capitol building in Washington, amid intelligence-led threats of an impending al-Qaida attack on American soil.

Osama bin Laden yesterday threatened, in a message to an Islamic news agency, to personally take part in a suicide bomb attack on North America.