Violations of human rights by the US are undermining international law and eroding its role on the world stage, a leading campaign group says. Human Rights Watch says the US can no longer claim to defend human rights abroad if it practises abuses itself. It urges the creation of an independent US commission to examine prisoner abuse at Iraq's US-run Abu Ghraib jail. Washington is currently investigating alleged abuses at that facility and at its jail in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Israeli troops have shot dead a Palestinian man who was driving his pregnant neighbour to hospital during an army night-time raid in the Gaza Strip, witnesses and medics says.

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), a US task force charged with searching Iraq for Saddam Hussein’s supposed arms stockpiles, has officially ended its hunt for weapons of mass destruction in the occupied country.

The deputy police chief of Baghdad and his son, also a police officer, were assassinated today, an interior ministry official said.

US soldiers mistakenly opened fire on Iraqi police and civilians after an ambush south of Baghdad yesterday, killing five people. The incident came less than 24 hours after a mis-aimed US bomb was dropped on a home in the north of the country, killing another five Iraqis. Combined, the incidents will feed calls that US forces set a date for their withdrawal, a demand made by several Iraqi political factions during the run-up to the January 30 elections.