America's Senate ponders whether the Lockerbie bomber was set free on grounds of compassion or commerce

• AMERICA'S Senate is set to open hearings on July 29th addressing the possibility that lobbying by BP played a pivotal role in the decision made by British and Scottish governments last year to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man to have been convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie. The officials who were most involved in the decision to grant Mr al-Megrahi his early return to Libya, where he was treated to a hero’s homecoming, flatly deny that Britain had cut a deal to help British firms secure oil deals with Muammar Qaddafi. They insist that he was let home on compassionate grounds, after being diagnosed with cancer.

• A VERDICT in the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, or “Comrade Duch”, to be handed down on Monday the 26th, is likely to represent the first conviction on war crimes handed down to any member of the Khmers Rouges, who ruled Cambodia with unprecedented brutality from 1975-79. Duch was not among the regime’s highest rank of political cadres, but for his role in presiding over S-21, or Tuol Sleng, a notorious torture prison in Phnom Penh, he has become one of its most emblematic figures. His 16-month trial before a UN-backed tribunal, which has descended into disarray in its final months, was supposed to establish a model for the prosecution of the other surviving leaders of the Khmers Rouges. ...