In Iraq, two bombs have gone off in a crowded market area in the capital Baghdad. Police said at least 15 people have been killed in the late evening attack close to a mosque in a strongly Shiite area in the northwest of the capital. From Baghdad Jim Mill reports.

    The first bomb went off in a busy street in northwest Baghdad shortly after the nightfall, when many people would still have been out and about, enjoying the relative cool after a hot day. Police said the explosion was caused by a roadside bomb. When people rushed to the scene to help, a suicide bomber in a car appeared and blew himself and the vehicle up amongst the crowd causing heavy casualties. Local hospitals were inundated with the wounded. The attacks came barely 12 hours after a similar double bombing by two suicide attackers who blew themselves up at a police academy in Saddam Hussein's old home town Tikrit, to the north of Bagdad.

    Pakistan says one of its embassy officials kidnapped in Iraq two weeks ago has been released. The Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said the man Malik Mohammed Javed was now in the country's embassy in Baghdad and was in good health. More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq in the past year. Several thousand Iraqis are also thought to have been abducted.

    In the British general election campaign, the leader of the opposition Conservatives Michael Howard has accused the Prime Minister Tony Blair of lying in his presentation of the legal justification for invading Iraq. His comments came after a Sunday newspaper published what it said were details of a paper by the government's Chief Legal Advisor Lord Golds Smith suggesting military action might not be lawful. Lord Gold Smith had since published a statement insisting the invasion had been lawful while a spokesman for Mr. Blair's Labor Party described the newspaper allegations as a concoction.

    The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has praised the conduct of Sunday's presidential election in Togo despite violence and opposition allegations of widespread fraud. The candidate of the governing party Faure Gnassingbe has denied that his side employed fraud and intimidation. Elizabeth Blunt reports from Lome.
After a morning when voting mostly went well, reports of incidents started flooding in at the end of the afternoon. Two pick-up trucks full of armed men raided the office where the opposition coalition was hoping to collect results from its agents around the country and took away the computers. There are reports of security forces chasing voters away from a polling station in Chevi,North of Lome, preventing them from watching the count, a recognized right under Togolese law and of ballot boxes being removed from polling stations on the easten edge of the capital. A spokesman for the Togolese independent election commission told the BBC that the voting had gone well and that the commission had not received any complaints.

    One of Israel's best known statesmen Ezer Weizman has died. He was 80. Mr. Weizman served as President of Israel from 1993 to 2000, capping a lengthy career in the military and in politics. Mike Workman looks back to his life.

    Born during the British Mandate in Palestine, Ezer Weizman joined the Royal Air force and served as a fighter pilot during the Second World War, an experience which launched a long military career in Israel. He played a key role in the 1967 War with the Arabs entering the Israeli government as a "hawk" two years later, but slowly the international statesman and peacemaker began to emerge. He was one of the architects of the historic 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. Ezer Weisman was elected as president of Israel in 1993, the year of the peace accord with the Palestinians. He left office seven years later, amid a scandal over political donations, although he insisted he had done nothing wrong.

    Hundreds of thousands of people have marched through Mexico City to protest against the prosecution of the mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for a contempt of court over a land appropriation dispute. Many held yellow balloons and wore yellow T-shirts, the color of Mr. Lopez Obrador's Left-wing Democratic Revolution Party. Correspondents say the Mexico City Mayor is seen as the most popular politician in the country. He says the prosecution is a plot aimed at preventing him from standing in the Mexican presidential election next year.

    A Russian spacecraft carrying a three-man crew from the International Space Station has landed in Kazakhstan. Two of the astronauts, one Russian and one American, returned to earth after a six-month stay at the station, while the third, a European Space Agency astronaut from Italy spent 8 days there. Russia has provided the supply line for the space station in the last two years after the American Space Agency NASA suspended its shuttle from program following a Columbia Shuttle disaster. BBC news