Lemrick Nelson is facing his third trial in connection with the stabbing to death of Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old rabbinical student, in 1991 during the Crown Heights riots in New York, one of the most vicious episodes of inter-racial violence between blacks and Jews.

Having paid a seven-figure advance for Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs, the former first lady's publishers are gambling on seven-figure sales when the long-awaited book hits the stands in early June.

US investigators in Iraq found the initials of navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher etched into a prison wall in Baghdad, officials said. Intelligence officials from Saddam Hussein's regime captured on Wednesday night may provide further clues.

Three of the men are among the 55 that the coalition forces have declared the most-wanted of the regime, including the leaders of military intelligence and the chief of air defence.

"We may not be the only ones in the world who have credibility, but I do think we have credibility for being objective and independent," he said.

The bar can allow smoking while it applies for a permanent exemption from the ban because it is a cigar bar. Only a few places in the city boast such an exemption (rumours that Grand Central Station would be one of them burned brightly and briefly before being stubbed out by City Hall), and this one wears its heritage with pride. "The Oak bar has a long tradition as a haven for cigar smokers," says the message on the cocktail menu. "The Oak bar not only allows cigar smoking, we downright encourage it."

The demand came as a scientist who claims to have been in charge of the Iraq regime's chemical weapons programme told the US military that Baghdad destroyed its chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment days before the war.

Relatives of victims of the Washington sniper, who shot 10 people dead last autumn, are leading a campaign to stop the bill. Denise Johnson's husband, Conrad, was murdered in October. A bus driver, he was standing on the top step of his bus preparing for his morning route when he was shot in the back by the sniper.

"I suggest to you it's a hit the same way that crack is," she said. "And it doesn't last long." A year later Bush was voted out of office.

The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, presented two budgets on Monday which many described as the "worse-case scenario" and an "even worse-case scenario".

The most segregated hour of the American week is 11am on a Sunday morning, when black and white Americans all get dressed up and go to separate churches to worship the same God.

It was late in the fourth quarter at Madison Square Garden on March 24 and the New York Knicks and the Toronto Raptors had everything to play for. With only two minutes and 11 seconds to run, the Knicks were leading 96-86 when an elderly man wandered along the side of the basketball court and grabbed the arm of the Knick's swingman, Latrell Sprewell, just as he was about to pass. Sprewell was stunned. "He was trying to say something but he was just mumbling," he explained afterwards. "I wasn't nervous but I was a little surprised. Like, is security going to come over here at some point or what?"

The law banning smoking in bars and restaurants came into effect two weeks ago at the behest of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

Asked if US forces had samples of Saddam's DNA, he said: "Oh, of course _ what you should know is that we have the forensic capability to chase these things down and we'll chase them down, every one of them, all the way."

On the face of it, Piestewa, from the Hopi tribe, does not fit the bill for the all-American war hero or heroine. She was a single mother of two who left her four-year-old son, Brandon, and three-year-old daughter, Carla, with her parents who live in a trailer in Tuba City, Arizona while she went to fight in the Middle East. But, in more ways than one, hers is the other American face of this war, fought by a military whose ranks have been swelled by poor, non-white women. A volunteer army comprising recruits who, whatever their patriotic credentials, have few other choices.

And so, to rousing applause, three new representatives - one black, one mulatto, and one white - were welcomed from the Caribbean island of San Domingo, now known as Haiti. The man who had overthrown that aristocracy of skin in Haiti was Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the most successful slave rebellion in history. The French revolution had already established the notion of liberté , egalité , fraternité ; Toussaint's uprising would test just how universal the rights of man really were, and just how enlightened its European sponsors would be.

Three white students are trying to reverse the rules which civil rights campaigners established decades ago by claiming that they were denied university places because of their colour.

With both the name and image of the survivor protected, the Central Park Jogger was transformed from an individual tale of suffering and survival into a signifier of urban meltdown and moral collapse. Two years after the release of Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities, the case symbolised everything that was wrong with New York - sexual violence, crime, alienation and racial division. A city undermined by insecurity, underpinned by inequality and both driven and riven by greed.

The case has split the Bush administration and could have far-reaching ramifications for the nation's racial landscape.

The veteran American war correspondent and Pulitzer prize winning television reporter, Peter Arnett, was sacked yesterday after he told Iraqi television that US military plans against Saddam Hussein were failing.

Haunted by accusations of anti-Americanism from the Vietnam era, and under pressure from a growing atmosphere of intolerance towards protesters, one anti-war group has unveiled a huge billboard with the message "Peace is Patriotic" against the image of an unfurling Stars and Stripes.