Work: A presenter on the BBC News channel. She is taking part in Around the World in 80 Days, a Children in Need challenge.

Life: Married to gastropub owner David. Daughters: Mia, eight, and Scarlett, four.

Balance: Cycling.

The United States will reduce the number of combat brigades in Iraq from 14 to 12 , totalling about 12,000 troops, in the next six months, the US military said, a step in President Barack Obama's plan to end combat operations by August, 2010.

The recent criticism of the UK's libel law by the United Nations sounds particular alarm. This criticism is perhaps not surprising given that, despite various liberalising innovations in our law over the past 20 years, our courts still represent an unduly attractive forum for libel claimants around the world to bring their actions.

Plans to keep the identities of SAS fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan secret were in tatters last night, following a coroner's landmark decision to allow the naming of two troopers killed in a Puma helicopter crash in Iraq in November 2007.

Visitors to Ben Turnbull's new exhibition should prepare themselves for not only a visual assault but an aural one too.

Iraq will be plunged into a new war if Israel or the US launches an attack on Iran, Iraqi leaders have warned. Iranian retaliation would take place in Iraq, said Dr Mahmoud Othman, the influential Iraqi MP.

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

Declaring that "loyalty to the truth" was more important than his affection for President George Bush, the softly-spoken former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, took to the airwaves yesterday to defend his bombshell new book, that has become an overnight sensation and accuses the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

Tariq Aziz, one of the most famous faces of Saddam Hussein's regime, is to go on trial next week accused of ordering the execution of 42 merchants for increasing food prices in 1992.

The latest bizarre episode in the life of George Galloway happened in public yesterday, when a rubber "stress ball" flung from an office window scored a direct hit on the MP as he campaigned in central London.

The fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad and the toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein – a symbol of US victory and might – was marked yesterday by death and destruction across the country and an admission from the White House that projected troop withdrawals would have to be delayed.