Some very depressed parts of the U.S. farm belt are all a-quiver about the possibility of ethanol being their economic saviour.

The Pentagon's inspector-general reported this week on how the Pentagon's own intelligence office cooked up some of the evidence of a Saddam-al Qaeda link that the Bush administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Beeb's Alistair Leithead looks at the knotty problem posed by Musa Qala, an Afghan town that's home to a controversial peace deal but recently over-run again by the Taliban.

From the BBC, a look at the startling speech Russia's President Vladimir Putin gave Saturday to an international security conference in Munich:

Afterwards in the corridors there were dark mutterings by some about a new Cold War.

Others were less gloomy, dismissing President Putin's performance as one of Russia's periodic bouts of letting off steam at its diminished world status.

But it has made an impression.

For the last few years, as one observer suggested, it was the former US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who was the man everybody loved to hate at this conference.

President Putin's performance has single-handedly switched the spotlight from the US to Russia.

Leave it to the prudent Swiss to have ingenious plans for protecting themselves from nuclear war. Here's a tour of the Sonnenburg tunnel cum bomb shelter.