The Washington Post reports that the United States provided intelligence to U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq in the past week. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the paper the U.S. would provide increasingly sensitive data to the U.N. team once it determined how they would be likely to use it, but that it also needed to protect its intelligence sources.

The U.N. inspectors are due to make their first formal assessment of Iraq's compliance with U.N. demands on Jan. 27.

Before meeting with the U.N. Security Council, the chief inspector, Hans Blix, indicated that his team had not found any clear evidence that Iraq has continued its pursuit of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Blix also indicated that many questions remained to be answered. (BBC)

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg's best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which argued that many of the world's most critical environmental concerns were being overblown by environmentalists, has been condemned as scientifically unsound by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. (Independent)