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The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover”. Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be “brought out” to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was “solidly with the president”.

The five-page document, written by Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Paraphrasing Bush’s comments at the meeting, Manning, noted: “The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin.”

Last night an expert on international law who is familar with the memo’s contents said it provided vital evidence into the two men’s frames of mind as they considered the invasion and its aftermath and must be presented to the Chilcott inquiry established by Gordon Brown to examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Iraq war.

As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.

The gains drove the yield on the gilt to its lowest level in six weeks after Britain’s biggest business lobby group said financial-services companies may cut 13,000 jobs in the third quarter, stoking demand for the safest assets. Gilts also rose as a report showed the economic slump led to the smallest increase in net mortgage lending since records began in 1993.

“The 10-year is leading as we’ve got a buyback,” said Jason Simpson, an interest-rate strategist in London at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. “And if the Bank of England is looking at lending numbers as a clue to whether quantitative easing has been successful, it’s not going to get much joy. This underlines the need for more purchases.”

The yield on the 10-year gilt dropped seven basis points to 3.61 percent as of 4:36 p.m. in London. The 4.5 percent security due in March 2019 climbed 0.6, or 6 pounds per 1,000-pound face amount, to 107.19. The yield on the two-year note rose five basis points to 1.2 percent.

The Bank of England said it was offered 4.3 billion pounds of gilts maturing between 2020 and 2032 today, 1.22 times the amount it bought. It will purchase 3 billion pounds of securities due between 2015 and 2019 on July 1, bringing its spending since the quantitative-easing policy was introduced to 105.5 billion pounds.

Purchase Plan

Simon Ford, who founded a “gift experience” company that prospered in the United Arab Emirates’ boom years, said he had been forced to escape as he feared being sent to debtors’ prison under strict bankruptcy laws.

He is one of thousands of British and other expatriates who have lost work and businesses and are leaving Dubai as it experiences its worst crisis since the UAE’s founding 40 years ago.

One bank has predicted the city’s 1.4 million population could shrink by almost a fifth. More than 85 per cent of its population is foreign.

Financial planners fear a second wave will get under way this weekend as parents who have lost jobs but waited for the end of the school year follow younger professionals to the airport.

Madoff appeared in court today before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin for the first time since his March 12 guilty plea for an epic swindle that may have reached $65 billion.

“I don’t ask for any forgiveness,” Madoff, 71, told Chin. He said he deceived his brothers, his two sons and his wife, none of whom was in the court. The courtroom burst into applause as Chin imposed the sentence.

“We have received reports of attacks on two well clusters in the Estuary Field in the western operations. We have shut in some production as a precautionary measure while investigations progress,” a Shell spokesman in Nigeria said.

Nigeria’s main militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), said earlier its fighters had attacked an oil platform in Shell’s Forcados fields in the southern state of Delta.

Shell said the attacks being investigated were not in Forcados itself but in its western operations, all of which feed into the Forcados oil export terminal.

Forcados is one of Nigeria’s benchmark crude oil grades but production has been subject to delays for months due to militant attacks on oil facilities and disruptions to production.

The ICBM was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara at 3:01 a.m. and carried three unarmed re-entry vehicles to their targets near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, said Lt. Raymond Geoffroy.

The missile, configured with a National Nuclear Security Administration Test Assembly, was launched under the direction of the 576th Flight Test Squadron, whose members installed tracking and command destruct systems on it to collect data and meet safety requirements.

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Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Jim Wilkinson, a one-time senior aide to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, is part of a campaign, spearheaded by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), to quell the upsurge of “populist” anger directed at the financial sector. But the story leaves out an important part of his résumé: He’s a GOP PR operative with a history of disseminating misleading information and once served as the deputy communications director in the Bush White House.

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Zelaya insisted as he arrived in regional neighbour Costa Rica that he remained the president of his Central American nation, but just hours later the Congress voted in the parliamentary speaker as the country’s new leader.

The first such major upheaval in several decades in the impoverished country was triggered by a tense political standoff between Zelaya and the country’s military and legal institutions over his bid to secure a second term.

“I will never give up since I was elected the president by the people,” Zelaya said from San Jose, accusing Honduran troops of kidnapping him and denouncing what he called a “political conspiracy.”

But Congress said it voted unanimously to remove him from office for his “apparent misconduct” and for “repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions.”

In his place they appointed speaker Roberto Micheletti as the new leader to serve out the rest of the term, which ends in January. New general elections are planned for November 29.

Zelaya, elected to a non-renewal four-year term in 2005, had planned a vote Sunday asking Hondurans to sanction a future referendum to allow him to run for reelection in the November polls.

The planned referendum had been ruled illegal by the country’s top court and was opposed by the military, but the president said he planned to press ahead with it anyway and ballot boxes had already been distributed.

The Supreme Court said Sunday that it had ordered the president’s ouster in order to protect law and order in the nation of some seven million people.

“Today’s events originate from a court order by a competent judge,” the country’s highest court said in a statement read by spokesman Danilo Izaguirre.

The drama unfolded just about dawn on Sunday when some 200 troops swooped on Zelaya’s home. He was bundled away in his pyjamas and flown out of the country.

A leading government official, Armando Sarmiento, told AFP that at least eight cabinet members were also detained including Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas.

As planes and helicopters overflew the capital, several hundred Zelaya supporters ignored warnings to stay home and flooded onto the streets of Tegucigalpa shouting out, “We want Mel,” the president’s nickname.

A new strategy involves a subtle reconfiguring of the bug’s DNA. Scientists working in labs near Oxford have devised a genetic modification that sterilizes the male Aedes, transforming the critter into his own worst enemy. He can still mate—but he can’t breed. Any offspring dies before becoming fully developed. The idea is to release a huge, all-conquering swarm of the doctored insects into the wild, let them find partners among the native females and wait for the mosquito population to decline. Preliminary trials, looking at both safety and effectiveness, have already taken place in Malaysia. Within a few years, the Franken-insects could be airborne.

The idea of GM mosquitoes was first floated 20 years ago. But it’s only recently gained the support of mainstream health officials. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $38 million into the research. In May, experts from around the world gathered in Geneva for a meeting sponsored by the World Health Organization to discuss progress and develop global guidelines for testing. Some environmental groups are alarmed at the development, and a confrontation looks certain. This is one they may lose. Unlike GM crops, whose benefits have more often gone to farmers, GM insects address a global health problem that causes great human suffering and death.

Dengue fever may be only the start. Researchers are tweaking the genome of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, the species that carries the malaria parasite, which kills at least a million people each year. Scientists hope to produce, say, a mutant bug with a superboosted immune system capable of killing off the parasite or loaded with an extra gene to block its development.

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