As half the US troops in Iraq prepare to leave, the generals vow not to repeat mistakes of first Gulf War. Martin Chulov reports.

JR Simplot, the billionaire founder of the Boise, Idaho-based agriculture business that bears his name and who helped make French fries a staple of the American diet and waistline, died on May 25 at the age of 99. After pioneering the first commercial frozen French fry in the late 1940s, Simplot eventually became a major supplier of Idaho potatoes to McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's.

Saddam Hussein, the ousted Iraqi dictator who was hanged in 2006 for crimes against humanity, feared he would pick up sexual diseases while he was United States custody, according to extracts from prison writings published in an Arabic newspaper.

More than 900 people have been killed in clashes between militiamen and security forces in Baghdad's Sadr City, which broke out last month, a senior Iraqi official told reporters on Wednesday. "There were 925 martyrs in Sadr City and 2 605 others have been wounded", said Tehseen Sheikhly, a spokesperson for the government's Baghdad security plan.

Militants bombarded Baghdad's Green Zone with rockets on Sunday, taking advantage of the cover of a blinding dust storm to launch one of the heaviest strikes in weeks on the fortified compound. The strikes appeared to defy a renewed call for a ceasefire by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has seen many of his masked gunmen leave the streets of the Sadr City slum.

Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr pulled back from confrontation with the government on Friday, asking his followers to continue to observe a shaky ceasefire and not to battle government troops. Sadr said his recent threat of "open war" was directed only at United States forces, not the Iraqi government.

Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday threatened an "open war" against the Iraqi government unless it halted a crackdown by Iraqi and United States security forces on his followers. The spectre of a full-scale uprising by Sadr sharply raises the stakes in his confrontation with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

A series of bombings blamed on al-Qaeda in Iraq tore through market areas in Baghdad and outside the capital on Tuesday, killing nearly 60 people and shattering weeks of relative calm in Sunni-dominated areas. The bloodshed struck directly at United States claims that the insurgents' power is waning.

Two car bombs killed more than 50 people in Sunni Arab areas of Iraq on Tuesday, a sudden spasm of violence in places that had been comparatively quiet while battles raged in the Shi'ite south. In one of the deadliest strikes in months, one car bomb killed 40 people and wounded 70 others in Baquba.

President George Bush on Thursday announced a suspension of United States troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer to allow the military to reassess the security situation. The announcement came amid a spike in violence in Iraq in recent weeks.