■ <B> RAMALLAH. Israeli court to free Palestinian deputy PM. </B>An Israeli military court yesterday ordered the release of Palestinian Deputy Prime minister Naser al-Shaer, a top Hamas official, after more than a month in detention, his lawyer said. An Israeli army spokesman said he was checking the information. Israeli forces seized Shaer at his house on August19. He had not been at home, and was put on Israel’s wanted list, in late June when the military detained dozens of Hamas lawmakers and a number of cabinet ministers after militants abducted an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid from Gaza. Thirty-one Hamas legislators are still in Israeli custody.

■ <B>LATHEN. Germany train crash victims remembered. </B>Church bells tolled solemnly at a memorial service yesterday for the 23 people who died when a high-speed magnetic train smashed into a maintenance vehicle on a test track in northwestern Germany. Germany’s President Horst Koehler represented the federal government at the ecumenical service, which was held in a Roman Catholic church in Lathen near the 20-mile test track used to demonstrate the magnetic levitation, or maglev, train.The victim’s relatives filed into pews at the front of the church, which was decorated with funeral wreaths. Investigators say they are focusing on human error as the likely cause of Friday’s crash, in which the train was sent on its high-speed run with a 60-ton maintenance vehicle still sitting on the elevated track.

■ <B>DEAD OR ALIVE? False rumors hunt for bin Laden. </B>He was blown up in the caves of Tora Bora. He was on dialysis and dying of kidney disease. He was in the hands of Pakistani intelligence and about to be turned over to the United StatesRumors of Osama bin Laden’s death or capture go back years, and they have always proved greatly exaggerated. The latest which came Saturday, when a leaked French intelligence document citing a “usually reliable” source said the Saudi secret service was convinced the 52-year-old al-Qaida terror chief had died of typhoid last month in Pakistan.Officials from Riyadh to Paris to Washington rushed to insist they had nothing to substantiate the report, but not before news of it reached every corner of the globe and renewed the debate about why the world’s largest dragnet has failed to get its man. The denial was echoed by a purported spokesman for the Taliban, the former Afghan regime that sheltered bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks.The French report is not the first to allude to bin Laden suffering from a life-threatening illness. For years, intelligence services took seriously assessments that bin Laden might be suffering from kidney disease, and there were even reports he was forced to lug a dialysis machine from one mountain hideout to another.

■ <B>WASHINGTON. Public report angers Bush. President George W. </B>Bush blasted political opponents for selectively leaking from a secret intelligence assessment on global terrorism and then made public the report’ main conclusion that the Iraq war had become a “cause celebre” for Islamic extremists. Democrats had seized on leaked portions of the National Intelligence Estimate to criticize the administration’s handling of the Iraq war and members of the US Congress had pressed the White House to declassify the entire document.

■ <B> IRAN NUCLEAR ROW. Solana and Larijani to meet. </B>European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator were due to meet in Berlin for talks aimed at resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme, the Iranian embassy said. “Mr Larijani will be arriving in Berlin in a few minutes,” said an official at the Iranian embassy.

■ <B>WARSAW. Political crisis. </B>Poland’s Prime minister faced calls to resign after television aired what it said were secretly filmed meetings where his top aide held talks with an opposition MP on what she wanted for switching sides. The ruling conservatives of Prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski are trying to build a new majority coalition after ditching their leftist partners Self-Defence last week in a row over the budget and a decision to send troops to Afghanistan.