As well as the success of our own Sudoku championship, there are numerous indications that this most addictive of pursuits is going strong. Sudoku collections vie for space with the latest Harry Potter instalment in all good bookshops. Ever more Sudoku websites are popping up, including one where you can test your abilities with other players around the world. Even Jade Goody is at it.But if you're still having trouble getting the hang of Sudoku and feel a bit left out, we offer you the sage words of our new champion, Edward Billig, on how to approach this most sophisticated of mental challenges: "You just look at numbers and work out what's missing."Well said, Grand Master..

The political consensus over how Britain should respond to the terrorist atrocity on London continues to hold. Yesterday the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, and his Conservative and Liberal Democrat counterparts met to discuss a programme of anti-terror legislation on which all three main parties can agree It was a productive meeting. They emerged to announce that there are "no main outstanding issues of difference" between them. This means we are likely to see new laws governing terrorism offences introduced to Parliament, with cross-party support, in October. It is commendable that our political representatives are working together to ensure public safety from the threat of terrorism.

Less commendably, the Government is working hard at the moment to forge political unity on a quite separate question: Iraq And this too has profound implications for public safety. A report by the Royal Institute of International Affairs think-tank, better known as Chatham House, has concluded that the US-led invasion of Iraq put Britain at much greater risk of terrorist attack. Government ministers are, naturally, hypersensitive to this charge. And they have prepared a superficially convincing argument as to why it is erroneous to make any link between the London bombing and Iraq. They claim that Britain and the entire Western world was under threat from terrorism long before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 And this is, of course, true. Attacks on Westerners by - or inspired by - al-Qa'ida occurred in Kenya, Tanzania, New York and Bali, before the tanks started to advance on Baghdad. Britain would certainly have been a target for fanatical Islamic terrorists even if we had refused to co-operate with the invasion of Iraq.