Was it worth it? For Omar, a 15-year-old orphaned by US Marines on Friday night, his shirt and trousers saturated with his parents’ blood, the answer was no.

Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, set out last week to counter accusations that -million worth of contracts for reconstruction in Iraq that he is to award to US companies, some with strong Republican links, were examples of cronyism.

Mankind is reaching out to the Moon again — on a rocket with less thrust than a puff of breath. So feeble is the engine of Europe’s Smart-1 probe, it will take more than a year to reach the Moon.

Thousands of terrified civilians are fleeing Baghdad as US troops edge closer to the city.

Sunday Times journalist Bonny Schoonakker, one of the few South Africans reporting from Baghdad, has been expelled from the country by the Iraqi government, the Saturday Star reported in Johannesburg.

A journalist for Swaziland’s state-owned radio, who pretended to be broadcasting and reporting from Iraq, is to face disciplinary proceedings for misleading the public.

Nine men on tiny Pitcairn Island, home of descendants of the mutineers from Captain Bligh’s Bounty and one of the most isolated places on the globe, have been charged with sex offences on island girls.

For years, the story of the Republican Guard has been told as an epic in waiting, the story of an elite, well-equipped, motivated force, loyal to Saddam Hussein, outgunned by the US, no doubt, but ready to force America to fight and slog and shed blood if it tried to take Baghdad.

International aid agencies yesterday criticised the British military for the slowness of the humanitarian aid effort in southern Iraq, especially the chaotic distribution of emergency water supplies.