With the US capture of Hilla and the ancient ruins of Babylon the coalition consolidated its hold on southern Iraq yesterday and the military focus shifted to the north — in particular to Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit.
Britain and the United States projected a post-Saddam television service towards the homes of millions of Iraqis yesterday, broadcasting what officials insist is ”balanced” news of the conflict from a converted US military transport plane above the war zone.
Nuclear weapons inspectors expressed concern yesterday that warehouses containing highly radioactive material under UN seal may have been broken into at al-Tuwaitha, the nerve centre of Saddam Hussein’s secret nuclear bomb project.
US forces in Baghdad have secured the Iraqi interior ministry for the CIA in the hope of finding documents on the ousted regime’s human rights abuses and the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to intelligence sources.
”His image put up more resistance than he did,” said a commentator in the leftwing Beirut newspaper al-Safir, referring to those symbolic moments in Firdaus Square, Baghdad, when an American tank recovery vehicle came to the assistance of the jubilant Iraqis trying to topple the giant statue of Saddam Hussein.
The use of cloned and donated human embryos for medical research risks being outlawed in the EU after the European parliament voted against it yesterday.
Tread carefully, was the message from market analysts in the United States this week. As coalition forces swept into Baghdad, stock exchanges across the globe cheered and rallied. But the prospect of a large US budget overrun due to war spending, and the pneumonia scare in Asia, loomed darkly in the background.
Who’s the longest hitter in professional golf? For years now there has been only one answer: Tiger Woods. But it is no longer true, and not by some distance.
Police in Zimbabwe on Thursday released the representative for the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) after arresting two more party lawmakers, said the representative and a lawyer.
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.