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President Bush will soon make a decision on whether to declare war on Iraq and attempt to topple Saddam Hussein. The markets are left asking whether the stuttering US economy is playing any part in the decision.

The world stands accused of double standards in its thirst to end the scourge of international terrorism. Aid donors and relief agencies, a report says, are concentrating increasingly on politically strategic countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Afghanistan has undergone momentous change in the decade which followed the US-led operation to remove the Taliban from power in October 2001. Billions of dollars in foreign assistance have poured into the country, most of it spent on military operations.

Could better co-ordination have prevented the Pentagon crash? US air defence was disastrously unprepared for the 11 September 2001 attacks, a special commission has said.

US President George Bush has said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks.

President Barack Obama has said publishing photos of the dead Osama Bin Laden threatens US national security. The al-Qaeda leader was killed by US special forces in northern Pakistan on Monday. His body was buried at sea.

New details, including reports on Osama Bin Laden dating from 2006, have emerged from 90,000 US military files leaked to the Wikileaks website. Several files track Bin Laden, although the US has said it had received no reliable information on him "in years".

The financial toll of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was laid bare yesterday when a congressional committee estimated the cost of both conflicts at $1.6 trillion (£771bn) and rising - $20,000 for every family of four in the US.

In the five years since 9/11, a clear-cut and well-supported "war on terror" declared by President Bush has become confused and divisive.

There is no evidence of formal links between Iraqi ex-leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda leaders prior to the 2003 war, a US Senate report says. The finding is contained in a 2005 CIA report released by the Senate's Intelligence Committee on Friday.

The report of the US commission investigating the 11 September 2001 attacks calls for a new global strategy to defeat the extremist ideology of al-Qaeda and promote a culture of openness and opportunity in the Muslim world.

It is perhaps fitting that the ancient ouroboros marks the beginning – and end – of Never Ending Stories, a major exhibition currently showing at Germany’s Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has published a CIA memo examining the implications of the US being perceived as an "exporter of terrorism". The three-page report from February 2010 says the participation of US-based individuals in terrorism is "not a recent phenomenon".

1968: Caught in an international emergency Soviet tanks rolled into the Czech capital on 21 August 1968. The government of the USSR was responding to a democratic movement led by Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek, which it felt threatened Communism's grip on Eastern Europe.

The brain appears to be a vastly interconnected network much like the Internet, according to new research. That runs counter to the 19th-Century "top-down" view of brain structure.

Japanese electronics firm Hitachi has unveiled its first humanoid robot, called Emiew, to challenge Honda's Asimo and Sony's Qrio robots. Hitachi said the 1.3m (4.2ft) Emiew was the world's quickest-moving robot yet at 6km/h (3.7 miles per hour).

An official report into the process of naturalisation in Switzerland says the current system is discriminatory and in many respects racist. The report, from Switzerland's Federal Commission on Racial Discrimination, recommends far-reaching changes.

Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, who described Islam as "fascist", has been acquitted of inciting hatred against Muslims. Amsterdam judge Marcel van Oosten accepted the Freedom Party leader's statements were directed at Islam and not at Muslim believers.

A football spectator who fellow fans alleged shouted racist insults at a black player during a German first division match faces a life ban. Fans of home team Energie Cottbus told police a man was insulting their Cameroon striker Francis Kioyo in Saturday's match against Bochum.

The city council of New York has voted to ban the use of the word "nigger". The resolution to ban the so-called "N-word" is largely symbolic as it carries no weight in law and those who use the word would face no punishment.

The eurosceptic and anti-immigration True Finns have taken nearly a fifth of votes in Finland's general election, reflecting a trend across Nordic and Western European countries.

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The low-frequency, seismic rumblings of volcanoes are being transformed into delicate musical scores in an effort to predict when they will erupt. Researchers in Italy have already created a concerto from the underground movements of Mount Etna on Sicily.