Travelling on the state railways will become more costly on 1 January though that was decided well

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Travelling on the state railways will become more costly on 1 January, though that was decided well in advance. Transport authorities in Milan and Florence have bumped up the price of a single ticket and many museums and monuments, including the Galleria Borghese and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, have rounded up substantially.Mr Landi said: "I think businesses and shopkeepers will resist the temptation as they are fearful of a consumer downturn because of 11 September and other factors and don't want to exacerbate it."Others are going further, asking business people and retailers to reduce prices and gain the confidence of nervous spenders. One consumer group has proposed that bars offer "two coffees for a euro" a considerable saving on at least one essential Italian item.. America warned Western allies yesterday that terrorists could strike at any European capital, maybe with nuclear weapons, as it gave a clear hint that the campaign against terrorism will be extended to countries beyond Afghanistan. "We need to face the reality that the attacks of 11 September, horrific as they were, may in fact be a dim preview of what is to come if we do not prepare today to defend our people from adversaries with weapons of increasing power and range," he said.Making his first visit to Nato headquarters in Brussels since 11 September, he offered his allies no assurances that they would be consulted before the campaign against terrorism was widened to include other countries. Instead he repeated his mantra that "the mission determines the coalition and not the coalition, the mission".Fellow Nato defence ministers were given little idea of which countries the US will target next or in what order.Although he did not specifically refer to Iraq, Mr Rumsfeld highlighted the "overlap" between nations supporting terrorism and those with "weaponised chemical and biological agents".He listed a number of nations "that have active al-Qa'ida cells Yemen is one, Sudan is one. Somalia is one where al-Qa'ida leaders used to spend sometime".

Even as he spoke Yemeni special forces were targeting al-Qa'ida suspects.Mr Rumsfeld said he had not received a blank cheque of support from his allies but that each nation would make its own judgement because of its "own circumstances". However he argued that it was in the interest of European allies to back US action. "Can anyone doubt for a moment that if terrorists or the regimes that support them possessed real missiles, armed with weapons of mass destruction, they would hesitate to use them?... Contemplate the destruction they could wreak in New York, or London or Paris or Berlin with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."Although Nato invoked Article five of its founding treaty, declaring that the attacks on America should be treated as an attack on all 19 member states, it has been largely sidelined from the military campaign.

Nato surveillance planes are flying over the US, but the alliance has had no front-line role in Afghanistan.However the Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, said when asked about a possible extension of the American military campaign to include Iraq that if there was evidence of al-Qa'ida "operating in or being supported by other countries, members of the alliance will want to look at that evidence".. On the last Friday in November, an unassuming 52-year-old man called Gary Ridgway was just finishing his week's work at the Kenworth Truck Company in Renton, an industrial suburb of Seattle. He had been working there as a painter all his adult life, and his workmates found him friendly enough, if a little quiet. There wasn't time for an answer.Several uniformed police officers appeared, swarmed all over Ridgway, slapped him in handcuffs, and drove him off He was, they said, under arrest for murder And it wasn't just any murder.

As the evening news breathlessly announced a few hours later, Ridgway was wanted for America's most notorious unsolved crime, the serial killing of as many as 49 young runaways, drug addicts and prostitutes who disappeared in the early 1980s along a notorious stretch of highway just south of the Seattle-Tacoma international airport.Some of the women had never been found. Others were pulled out of the nearby Green River showing signs of sexual assault and death by strangulation. Others still were only discovered months or even years later, their bodies carefully concealed or buried and reduced to such a state of decomposition that in many cases they were beyond recognition The newscasters could scarcely contain their excitement. Admittedly, Ridgway was being accused of only four of the deaths, the ones where DNA evidence was apparently strong enough to implicate him directly. But this was a case that had dragged on for almost 20 years without a decent break, bogged down by police bungling, political in-fighting, some tantalisingly elusive evidence, and sheer bad luck.