Part of a terminal at Manchester Airport closed and a chemical alert was declared after security staff found white powder in a piece of luggage.

The departure area of Terminal 3 was closed after a man tried to carry the unidentified powder on to an aircraft.

The man was planning to fly from Manchester to London.

The man has not been arrested, but is helping with inquiries, said police. A police source said the incident was not believed to be terror-related.

Tests are being conducted on the powder.

This from the Loltorygraph, which includes a handy picture to help you recognise a female terrorist, should you meet one in the course of a daily citizen terror prevention patrol.

FEARS that Islamist terrorists plan to hijack an Indian passenger jet and crash it into a British city helped to prompt this weekend's heightened terror alert.

MI5 was told by the Indian authorities early last week about a suspected plot by militants linked to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan to hijack an Air India or Indian Airlines flight from Mumbai or Delhi.

The warning, which came after the capture of a suspected Islamic leader, was contained in a detailed "threat assessment" sent to MI5 by the Indian Intelligence Bureau. It did not state that Britain was a specific target. But police security sources said it had raised fears in London that a British city might be attacked.

One can dream, correct?

Mais c'est un scandâââle!!

It is said that there was, or is, a condom manufacturer which retailed its products in three sizes: Jumbo, Colossal and SuperColossal. It is thus with Home Office terror alerts, which start at "substantial", move up to "severe" and end up at "critical" - which is supposed to mean that the terrorists are about to strike, but which actually means that they just did. For appearances' sake, there are two lower categories, but they would imply that the security services had done their job so well they deserve to have their budget slashed and half their staff redeployed to analysing traffic-flow data. Effectively, therefore, a "substantial" terror risk is as low as it goes.

In early 2006, a mysterious cosmetics trader named Rakhman began showing up at salons in St. Petersburg, Russia, hawking a popular anti-aging drug at suspiciously low prices. He flashed a briefcase filled with vials and promised he could deliver more -- "as many as you want," he told buyers -- from a supplier somewhere in Chechnya.

Rakhman's "Botox" was found to be a potent clone of the real thing, but investigators soon turned to a far bigger worry: the prospect of an illegal factory in Chechnya churning out raw botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in the beauty drug and one of world's deadliest poisons. A speck of toxin smaller than a grain of sand can kill a 150-pound adult.

No Chechen factory has been found, but a search for the maker of the highly lethal toxin in Rakhman's vials continues across a widening swath of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. U.S. officials and security experts say they know the lab exists, and probably dozens of other such labs, judging from the surging black market for the drug.

no intelligence to suggest a terrorist attack was imminent.

So if theres no evidence that there is any liklyhood that things are worse,

No, not evidence. Intelligence. There is an absence of intelligence; a problem which seems widespread among the political classes

keep to the Fen Causeway

Jack Straw rejected advice that the invasion of Iraq would be unlawful without explicit UN authorisation.

The then foreign secretary told his chief legal adviser Sir Michael Wood he did not "accept" his judgement that a further UN mandate was needed.

Although politically desirable, it was not legally necessary, he argued.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith ultimately advised prime minister Tony Blair that existing UN resolutions on Iraq did authorise the use of force.

and the winning comment

BBC News - Straw rejected advice that Iraq invasion was 'unlawful'

He said Mr Straw also told him "I have often been advised things were unlawful and gone ahead anyway," paraphrasing a note by Mr Straw in which he refers to domestic cases he had been involved with as home secretary.

(My Bold)

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Just been digging through the raft of documents released today at the Iraq Inquiry and I came across this wee gem.

Foreign Office legal chief Michael Wood [he hadn't yet been knighted], wrote a letter on August 15, 2002 to FCO deputy PUS Stephen Wright on the legality of any military action.

His final paragraph has a line that has been crossed out, though we know not by whom. The line is this:

"Unless the Attorney General agrees that there is a proper legal basis for military action, individual members of the Armed Forces and civilian officials (at all levels) would also be potentially liable to charges of murder".