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/ 15 October 2003
Not many days go by in Baghdad without a claimed sighting of Saddam Hussein, recklessly turning up in close proximity to the American forces, or rallying the faithful in his old haunts, depending on who is spinning the story. The multiplicity of sightings is all the more strange given that there was very little chance of ever seeing Saddam in the flesh while he was in power.
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/ 18 September 2003
”You don’t realise what you are doing until everything has changed,” says 16-year-old John Wagster as he explains his decision to embrace chastity. ”You are having oral sex, and you don’t realise it’s wrong. It’s like eating Pringles. Once you start, you can’t stop.” Only you can — or you should, according to Bush’s administration.
An empire built on female nakedness went the way of all flesh last week when Penthouse, the magazine that once epitomised the adolescent male fantasy, accepted its mortality and filed for bankruptcy.
Anti-war activists who visited Iraq before the United States invasion have discovered that they could face up to 12 years in prison and -million in fines for violating a pre-war travel ban.
Saddam Hussein’s sons were crucial to the dictator’s plans for the future of Iraq. Suzanne Goldenberg profiles the brothers killed this week in a three-hour gun battle by US special forces.
The United States soldiers swooped at 8am, fanning out along the embankment then storming the luxury riverside estate of their prey — the queen of spades on the US’s list of the 55 most wanted officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
It was a slow collapse. The statue of Saddam Hussein, huge and commanding, resisted the crowds tugging on the noose around its neck for two hours. Thirty years of brutality and lies were coming to a close — not decisively, not in full measure, not without deep fears for the future or resentment at this deliverance by a foreign army — but on a day of stunning changes.
Several hundred Iraqis have fled their homes to escape the conflict and Iraqi officials say 350 people have died in air raids since the start of the war.
Britain and the United States have all but fired the first shots of the second Gulf war by dramatically extending the range of targets in the ”no-fly zones” over Iraq to soften up the country for an allied ground invasion.
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/ 21 January 2003
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Camp David summit with United States President George W Bush at the end of the month could be the last time they look each other in the eye before plunging their alliance into a new war with Iraq. The UN weapons inspectors will just have presented their report.