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Police inquiries into Islamic threat must improve, says Clarke By Duncan Gardham (Filed: 10/02/2006) Charles Clarke accepted yesterday that there had been a "lack of confidence" in the case against the radical cleric Abu Hamza and pledged to improve the way the police conducted investigations. The Home Secretary's remarks followed a claim by his predecessor, David Blunkett, that he had been accused by police and security services of exaggerating the threat posed by Hamza. The former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in north London was jailed for seven years this week for incitement to murder, stirring up racial hatred and...

Republicans vow retaliation in ethics feud Democrats are told to expect rash of inquiries into actions By KAREN MacPHERSON BLADE WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON - Angry House Republicans yesterday warned their Democratic colleagues to expect a spate of inquiries into possible ethics violations in retaliation for forcing GOP leaders to jettison controversial new rules for ethics probes. The Republican admonitions came a day after House GOP leaders, under intense pressure from Democrats, made a rare policy reversal and grudgingly scrapped ethics rules they had pushed through the House only a few months ago. Republicans contended the rules made the ethics process...

Head of U.N. Program in Iraq Accused of Improperly Accepting Purchasing Rights. UNITED NATIONS -- Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein's government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials. Sevan said that such an assessment would prove too costly and that U.N. member governments bore primary responsibility for policing the program, according to senior U.N. officials...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Just weeks ago, California's secretary of state was on a rising political trajectory that had some people whispering his name as a possible Democratic contender for governor. Kevin Shelley now finds himself the target of state and federal investigations, fighting to save his reputation and some of the reforms he pushed for the November election. He faces scrutiny on three fronts. State and federal agencies are investigating contributions to his 2002 campaign to determine whether taxpayer money was illegally funneled to his election bid. Meanwhile, the state is auditing how his office spent federal election money...

The urge to investigate defined the capital during the Clinton years. But no more. For nearly a decade, special counsel inquiries and adversarial congressional hearings dominated the headlines, etched bitter partisan lines, led to the impeachment of a president and made the nation's political debates resemble hand-to-hand combat. Now, some things have changed. The law that provided for special counsels has expired. President Bush (news - web sites)'s fellow Republicans control both houses of Congress. The General Accounting Office (news - web sites), the investigative arm of Congress, has stepped back from challenging the White House after losing a court...