Coalition on terror growing stronger, says Powell

The coalition put together by the US to fight terrorism was not, as some suggested, fraying at the edges but "getting stronger", the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, told Congress yesterday. In combative form, Mr Powell said that creating that coalition would "have been hard to stop" as allies came forward in the days after September 11th to offer their support in a fight they recognised was not against Islam but against the threat to civilisation itself.

Such was their success in rallying support, even most recently at the Shanghai APEC summit, he told the House Committee on International Affairs, that the Secretary of Defence was having difficulty working out what to do with the forces being offered to him.

Earlier Mr Powell, who on Tuesday met the Sinn FΘin chief negotiator, Mr Martin McGuinness, congratulated the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, on the developments in the North.

The US has evidence that the Taliban may poison humanitarian food supplies to Afghanistan and attempt to blame the US, a Pentagon spokesman claimed yesterday.

Briefing journalists on the military campaign, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem said it was "beyond our comprehension" that anyone would think such a tactic would succeed. He accused the Taliban of using civilian cover for its troops and mosques for its vehicles.

The admiral said that although the attacks on the front lines close to Kabul were continuing for a fourth day, the campaign on the ground there and outside the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif appeared to be "moving slowly", consisting largely of artillery exchanges.

On Tuesday the US used some 90 planes, 75 of them carrier-based, to attack five areas involving troop emplacements and camps, command and control facilities, armour and vehicles, as well as maintenance facilities.

Six more people who had been in the "hot zone" at Washington's central postal facility were hospitalised on Tuesday night with flu-like symptoms but anthrax infection has not been confirmed. The six include five postal workers and a union representative.

In New Jersey at the Trenton post office and the neighbouring one in Ewing County, through which at least three of the contaminated letters passed, four workers have been diagnosed with anthrax. To date three people have died in the attacks, nine have been diagnosed as infected, and 28 tested positive for exposure.

Amid increasing public criticism of the application of one standard of precaution for members of Congress and their staff, and another, less stringent, for postal workers, the Postal Service has announced that it will now test all Washington employees, is buying gloves and masks for all its workers, and will install electronic beam equipment to destroy all bacteria in mail.

But the head of the service appeared to go to the other extreme in warning the entire nation to beware of its post. "We're asking people to handle mail very carefully," the Postmaster General, Mr John Potter, told ABC's Good Morning America. "There are no guarantees that that mail is safe," he said.

Tests of 200 staff at the White House remote mail facility near Washington have not yet produced any positives.

On Capitol Hill yesterday the House agreed to a compromise version of emergency legislation sought by the White House. The Senate is expected to clear it by today. The legislation, a reconciliation of slightly different approaches in both houses, would expand the FBI's wire-tapping and electronic surveillance authority, impose stronger penalties on those who harbour or finance terrorists and increase punishments of terrorists.

DΘaglβn de Bread·n, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, adds from Strasbourg: Two Dublin Members of the European Parliament, Mr Niall Andrews of Fianna Fβil and Mr Proinsias De Rossa of Labour, have called for a halt to the bombing.

"They are bombing a country already devastated by 20 years of war. Afghanistan is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis which needs to be addressed," Mr Andrews said.

Mr De Rossa said bombing should be suspended to enable delivery of humanitarian aid under the auspices of the United Nations.