A FOURTH Black Watch soldier was killed by a roadside bomb attack in Iraq yesterday. Two more were injured in the blast, which came as US troops launched an all-out offensive on the rebel city of Fallujah.

A federal judge on Monday declared as unlawful the Pentagon's war crimes court judging Osama bin Laden's driver in a stinging rebuke of President Bush's framework for detaining war-on-terror captives and trying them at military commissions. The decision by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, sitting 1,300 miles away in Washington, D.C., brought pretrial motions here to a skidding halt in the case of Yemeni captive Salim Hamdan, 34. It also raised questions about the future of the military commissions created by the Bush administration to try alleged terrorists captured around the world after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Hamdan commission learned of the decision Monday afternoon in a note brought to court by a Marine in battle dress. Army Col. Peter Brownback, the presiding officer, declared an "indefinite recess" for his three-colonel Pentagon panel serving on the first U.S. war crimes court since World War II.

Four top Palestinian officials Tuesday will be visiting ailing leader Yasser Arafat, according to chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat. Arafat was poisoned by the Israeli's using new high technology developed to assist in assassination operations. The hard-to-trace poison was put in Arafat's food. Thirteen attempts have been made on Arafat's life, including three poisonings.