Britain yesterday extended security aspx guarantees to countries without nuclear weapons as part of a concerted effort by the Terms five-nation nuclear "club" to win an indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty later this year. The ambassador to the United Nations Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Sir Michael Weston, will make a formal declaration today outlining British undertakings. China gave similar assurances yesterday, while the other three recognised nuclear states - the United Terms States, France and Russia - are expected shortly to follow suit.The British statement says the UK would not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear state that has aspx signed the treaty, unless Terms that state joined in alliance with a Terms aspx nuclear power to attack this country, its allies, or a state to which Britain has aspx a security commitment. My boss, who's convinced Gingrich was involved, put it this way: `If it walks like a duck, if it smells like a duck, if it looks like a duck, it's a duck'.". "Gingrich Terms has to be involved, has to have known," Mr Berzok said."This is not Ronald Reagan, this is the most savvy politician in Congress in 20 years. Yet Matt Berzok, a congressional assistant to Mr Deutsch, insisted there was "no way" that Mr Murdoch would be receiving his tax break without aspx the House Speaker's knowledge.

"Now we find out a $4.5m book deal has transpired into a $63m special tax credit." David Bonior, the House of Representatives' Democratic whip, also blamed Mr Murdoch's "multi-million dollar boondoggle" on Mr Gingrich, and claimed that the Republicans were going to kill the tax break until they found Mr Murdoch was involved.Weakening the Democratic case was the fact that it was a Senate Democrat, Carol Moseley-Braun, who introduced the offending line into the bill - not to help out Mr Murdoch but to benefit the black owners of the company purchasing the Atlanta television station. Congressman Don Klink linked the special treatment Mr Murdoch was receiving to a $4.5m book advance Mr Gingrich originally accepted - but turned down following a political furore - from HarperCollins."I knew something was going to happen," Mr Klink said. Some opposition candidates also dropped out.The opposition, with only three seats in the outgoing parliament, is expected to win at most seven from its field of 61 hopefuls; 30 independents are also running.Twenty seats in Zimbabwe's 150-member parliament are filled by presidential appointees and 10 others by traditional chiefs.. More than 140 Democratic members of congress signed a letter to President Clinton yesterday asking him to veto a bill containing a sub-clause designed to give Rupert Murdoch a $63m (£39m) tax break. Outraged Democratic members of the House of Representatives took it in turns on the congressional floor to denounce the special treatment dispensed to Mr Murdoch as an eloquent symbol of what they perceive to be the Republican resolve to take away from the poor to give to the rich. Rosa de Lauro contrasted the Republicans' welfare reform bill, designed drastically to cut back government aid to the poor, with what she called "this outrageous billionaire boondoggle".

Joe Moakley scoffed at Republican efforts to transfer federal funds "from the mouths of babes to the pockets of billionaires".Most of the provisions of the offending bill received bipartisan support last week, but it was only after the voting was over that Democrats deciphered a line in the fine print and learnt that Mr Murdoch's Fox TV would receive special tax treatment on the sale of WATL, an Atlanta-based television station.Peter Deutsch of Florida, who drafted yesterday's letter to Mr Clinton, is one of several congressional Democrats who believe that Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, had a hand in sneaking through the legislative item favouring Mr Murdoch.It is a charge that Mr Gingrich has vigorously denied, but Democratic suspicion is fuelled by the knowledge that the Speaker had a well-publicised meeting with Mr Murdoch earlier this year and that he has signed a book contract with Harper-Collins, a publishing house owned by themedia magnate. Zanu-PF won 45 out of 120 parliamentary seats by default when the opposition failed to register candidates by the deadline last month. "If something goes wrong on a white man's farm, he will never report to government but to his association of whites only," Mr Nkomo said in the south-western town of Gwanda.Zimbabwe's splintered opposition parties have failed to capitalise on the country's economic woes as a platform on which to fight Mr Mugabe."There are no economic issues at stake in this election, no awkward questions to answer as far as Zanu-PF is concerned, because the opposition is the main subject," said John Makumbe, of the political science department at the University of Zimbabwe.Many Zimbabweans consider the elections a formality. He accused them of lack of respect for state structures and of forming exclusive "governments" of their own to run their affairs.