She tells me how she saw her 11-year-old brother, Muhannad, had run up to an American military convoy trying to sell something to the soldiers, but was run over as he crossed the road.

The Americans did not stop.

The news of this terrible accident spreads quickly. In the distance, a group of women dressed in black are running across the desert towards the road.

The women are crying, wailing for their lost child. The men hold them back. A child beats his head on the ground until it starts bleeding. The unmistakable smell of death lingers in the air.

"Look, this is going to get tense," I overhear an American soldier telling one of his colleagues. "We have to get the body out of here."

Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, said on ''Fox News Sunday'': ''We need somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 other troops. ... I want to see French, German, I want to see Turkish patches on people's arms sitting on the street corners, sitting there in Iraq.''...

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said on ''Face the Nation'' that he did not know whether dispatching more US troops would be the best solution, noting, ''We need help from our friends and allies, India, Pakistan, other friends of ours, including our European friends.'' He said he noted a ''growing sense of unease'' among his constituents about the situation.

Despite all of the books' gestures to multiculturalism and gender equality, Harry Potter is a conservative. A paternalistic, One-Nation Tory, perhaps, but a Tory nonetheless...

A careful racial inclusiveness includes obviously Asian and black characters as students. But cultural identities are heavily connected to social background, and these have been scrubbed out by Rowling. Hogwarts celebrates Christmas and Halloween, but there are no feasts for Rosh Hashanah or Diwali. This is not so much multiculturalism as naive monoculturalism.

Rowling does attempt to make pointed racial commentary, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with an attempt by Hermione to emancipate the "house elves" who serve wizards. In fact they appear to be slaves - and Rowling rams home the point by having them speak in a witless, sub-Gone With the Wind patois.

"They don't celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Diwali at Hogwarts," Wilder, aged three, explained to an inquisitive neighbour who was leaning over the garden wall and quietly choking on the smoke. "And are you aware that in the entire Harry Potter canon there isn't a single disabled child?"

"Differently abled, I think you mean, Wilder," corrected Tyler, aged five. "But it's the blatantly racist depiction of the house elves which bothers us most. Rowling seems to be sanctioning both the brutal, exploitative system of slave labour and the iniquitous racial segregation which existed within the antebellum plantations in the deep south of America until the latter decades of the last century."

"It wouldn't surprise us much," added Wilder wryly, "if her next book was called Harry Potter and the Annexation of the Sudetenland. Come on," he screamed, turning back to the fire, "burn, you Nazi bastards."

"Apparently the 'patriots' at Fox believe in the US Constitution except when it comes to an unemployed graphic designer calling them on their unrepentant, blatant Republican bias, exposing it for what it is and having the cojones to educate the American public about it."

Just before the Iraq war, David Dimbleby came to Washington to interview Donald Rumsfeld. They talked for half an hour. As you would expect, the questioning was persistent, forensic. Americans who heard the interview were shocked. The world's most powerful nation does not have the world's most powerful press. Specifically, it has no daily forum for the close questioning of politicians - no Today programme, no Channel 4 News, no Newsnight.

Incredibly - in this cultural and political superpower, in this supposed beacon of world freedom - radio stations were reduced to running interviews with experts from the BBC on their airwaves; a plucky station in Boston laid on an hour-long discussion and phone-in to follow the broadcast, during which I had to explain to the listeners that this kind of thing happened all the time in Britain.

BALAD, Iraq (AP) - On a scorching afternoon, while on duty at an Army airfield, Sgt. David J. Borell was approached by an Iraqi who pleaded for help for his three children, burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from war in Iraq.

Borell immediately called for assistance. But the two Army doctors who arrived about an hour later refused to help the children because their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops.

Now the two girls and a boy are covered with scabs and the boy cannot use his right leg. And Borell is shattered.

Thousands of people have died and continue to die because of these distortions, in the case of the war in Iraq. Millions will end up losing vital services because of the lies about the tax cut. This administration's lies about health policy, education policy, about environmental policy, about labor policy, about its judicial appointments, about communications regulatory policy, business regulatory policy, etc., etc., will have profound negative consequences on the lives of tens of millions of real people.

Added Barbara: "We pray that the weapon of mass destruction, Islam, be torn down. Lord, we declare that your blood is enough to forgive every single Muslim. It is enough."

Globally, George W. Bush has become history’s most hated US president. After being gifted near-total support by Osama bin Laden, Bush has sunk to unprecedented scorn. In the global village, American’s unelected chief is under quarantine.

Why? Because outside the United States, the Truth is being told. The world media and the internet seethe with serious reporting and outrage against escalating deceit.

In the US, the corporate media has polluted the information flow. So we are compelled, more than ever, to compile and refute the lies, and to spread their antidote far and wide.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have confirmed the theft of at least 6,000 artifacts from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities during a prolonged looting spree as U.S. forces entered Baghdad two months ago, a leading archaeologist said yesterday.

...the official count of missing items had reached 6,000 and was climbing as museum and Customs investigators proceeded with an inventory of three looted storerooms.

The June 13 total was double the number of stolen items reported by Customs a week earlier, and Gibson suggested the final tally could be "far, far worse."

the Fox commentator and radio host is being slapped around by some online folks who ordinarily would agree with his conservative philosophy. But when it comes to dissing the Net, them's fightin' words!

He seems to blame much of society's ills on the strange, dark world of the Net while ignoring the positive side of instant communications and blathering bloggers.

Los Alamos National Laboratory said this week that it has lost track of two tiny glass containers of plutonium oxide and believes the radioactive material was thrown out.

Specialist Castillo said: "We're more angry at the generals who are making these decisions and who never hit the ground, and who don't get shot at or have to look at the bloody bodies and the burnt-out bodies, and the dead babies and all that kinda stuff." Sgt Quinones added: "Most of these soldiers are in their early twenties and late teens. They've seen, in less than a month, more than any man should see in a whole lifetime. It's time for us to go home."

Huxley may have left this world with no room in his brain for such beings as Ashcroft, Cheney, Poindexter, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Delay, Rove, Osama, Saddam, Mullah Omar, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Sharon, Arafat and the Saudi princes. But Orwell had "the power of facing unpleasant facts" -- as he once stated in one of his greatest essays "Why I Write" -- and he could, after Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and Tojo, easily imagine a world where the absolute dregs of our species were calling the shots.

A BBC Scotland expeditionhas uncovered a major haul of artefacts from a failed attempt to create a wealthy Scottish empire in the Panama jungle.

The 17th century scheme - known as the Darien Venture - cost 2,000 lives, lost about half of the country's wealth and is said to have changed the course of Scotland's political history.

The United States says it is working with African governments to try to find a stolen passenger jet that it fears may end up being used by terrorists.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted the US had few leads over who was behind the theft of the plane, from an airport in Angola last month, but was keen to gather any information available.

Edgy American troops killed two Iraqis on Wednesday after Saddam Hussein's former soldiers tossed stones during a protest outside the headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation leaders.

Hours later, an attacker gunned down a U.S. soldier, capping one of the most violent days in the capital since American forces quelled looting after the fall of Saddam's regime.

Earlier, at a meeting of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the United States accused Iran of repeated "violations and evasions" of international nuclear safeguards.

Iran denies any wrongdoing, and says its programme only concerns nuclear energy - not weapons.

The American-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is "in chaos" and suffering from "a complete absence of strategic direction", a very senior British official in Baghdad has told The Telegraph.

The comments paint a grim picture of American incompetence and mismanagement as the Coalition Provisional Authority struggles to run post-Saddam Iraq.

The unknown thousands are beginning to be quantified. Expert assessors in Vienna last week estimated the losses from the museum storerooms at between 6,000 and 10,000.

Outside the Iraq Museum, the picture is equally grim. At Baghdad University, classrooms, laboratories and offices have been vandalised, and equipment and furniture stolen or destroyed. Student libraries have been emptied. Nabil al-Tikriti of the Univer sity of Chicago reported in May that the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs lost 600-700 manuscripts in a malicious fire and more than 1,000 were stolen. The House of Wisdom and the Iraqi Academy of Sciences were also looted. The National Library was burned to the ground and most of its 12 million books are assumed to have been incinerated.

In the galleries of Mosul Museum, cuneiform tablets were stolen and smashed. The ancient cities of Nineveh, Nimrud, and Hatra lost major sculpture to looting. The situation is far worse in the south. Some 15-20 large archaeological sites, mostly ancient Sumerian cities, were comprehensively pillaged by armed gangs.

UN officials have watched the behaviour of the US forces in Afghanistan with increasing dismay, and say that it is frequently reckless. "This doesn't help us at all," one said. "The people are basically pro-America. They want US forces to be here. But American soldiers are not very culturally sensitive. It's hardly surprising that Afghans get angry when the Americans turn up and kick their doors in."

Bacha Khan said: "The Taliban are getting stronger and stronger. This is because US troops are misbehaving. I want my bodyguard's killer brought to justice. I'd also like my son back."

Such is the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, compounded by the return to the country of a large number of former Afghan communist refugees, that United States and Pakistani intelligence officials have met with Taliban leaders in an effort to devise a political solution to prevent the country from being further ripped apart.

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used.

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi.

The results startled even the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys. How could so many people be so wrong about information that has dominated news coverage for almost two years?

Latter-day justifications about 'liberating' the Iraqi people or demonstrating the strength of America to the world do not obscure this fact. They lied us into a war that, beyond the death toll, served as the greatest Al Qaeda recruiting drive in the history of the world. They lied about a war that cost billions of dollars which could have been better used to bolster America's amazingly substandard anti-terror defenses.

Up to 10,000 people demonstrated in the centre of Basra yesterday demanding that the British Army allow Iraqis to run the city.

The demonstrators, led by Shia clerics, had marched through the main streets carrying banners against occupation and declaring: “Answer our demands or you will regret it.” They rallied outside the British forces’ HQ, where three children dressed in white shrouds chanted “Down, down tyranny, down, down Jews” and “Leave our land”.

The VIPs brought with them so many bodyguards that a separate party had to be arranged for dozens of large men wearing ill-fitting suits and sunglasses who balanced sub-machineguns in one hand and drinks in the other. A gleaming brass cannon — a First World War cannon captured from the Turks — stood proudly in the courtyard, but that at least was purely ceremonial.

At the real party, there was a strong sense of travelling back in time. A brass quintet from the Black Watch played Colonel Bogey from the gallery, and guests surveyed with astonishment the pictures on the walls. They included portraits of the Queen taken 30 years ago, a photograph of Westminster Bridge taken long before traffic was a problem, and a cheery, bewhiskered Beefeater who looked like something from a BOAC travel brochure.

Many Americans so enjoyed the TV-driven nationalism of the Iraq War, for instance, that they didn’t want it spoiled by reality. During the conflict, they objected to news outlets showing mangled bodies or wounded children or U.S. POWs. Presenting the ugly face of war was seen as unpatriotic or somehow disloyal to “the troops.”...

...Now, even as U.S. forces in Iraq slide closer to the guerrilla-war quagmire that some skeptics predicted, Americans continue to say they trust George W. Bush to handle the situation. Some military analysts close to the Bush administration are beginning to feel differently, however.“We’re hanging on by our fingernails,” one told me recently.

But Americans still prefer to feel good about the war. They want to believe that the U.S. invasion was just, and that Saddam Hussein really was poised to use weapons of mass destruction. By large majorities, Americans either believe that these weapons have already been found or they don’t care that the Bush administration may have misled the world.

Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences.

We asked the oficer closest to us how we should exit the intersection. He pointed and said to exit to the NE, into the spraying police opposite him. as the crowd pressed toward us I yelled to him to let us through (south on 2nd) because we had three small children. He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed directly at me. I was at an angle to him and the spray hit my right eye and our three year-old who I was holding in my right arm. In the same motion he turned the can on my wife who was holding our 10 month old baby and doused both of their heads entirely from a distance of less than 3 feet.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Baghdad a week and a half ago, at the next table next to me was Saddam's personal translator. I sort of did a double take, I said, hi, how are you? I knew the guy. I'd known him for years and years. I said, are you okay? Fine, fine no problem, he was having a beer with friends. And he walked out. This is the same restaurant that later on I saw Paul Bremer walk into with several special forces men to protect him and his guests for dinner. I have to ask myself sometimes what's going on. Ahmed Chalabi says that Saddam is moving in an arc, he maybe moving in a circle or square for all I know but it's clear he's still alive.

George Bush and Tony Blair...cited a “new” report from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that allegedly stated that Iraq was “six months away” from building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” declared the president.

For public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the media bothered to check out the story.

Looters digging for treasure have riddled ancient sites in southern Iraq with holes, according to the first major survey since the end of war. Tens of thousands of artifacts are feared lost and the destruction has obliterated much of the archaeological value of the sites.

Principles of just war and civilized warfare were formulated many centuries ago, beginning, as far as I know, with St. Augustine. But the modern state has reverted to barbarism and the logic of total war. The U.S. Government has played a large role in this development, and it’s no accident that this has largely occurred under presidents who led the way in expanding the domestic powers of the Federal Government and in destroying constitutional limits on government action.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi artifacts were looted after the war from remote areas in Iraq, and many sites continue to be ransacked, a group of American experts said yesterday after making a systematic assessment of the damage to Iraq's archaeological heritage...

...Perhaps more damaging than the loss of museum antiquities is the loss of artifacts from remote sites not yet catalogued and studied. Cuneiform tablets -- ancient writing on clay -- were a unique feature of ancient Mesopotamia, and many tablets may have been pillaged, broken and discarded by looters unaware of their value, said Elizabeth Stone, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The scientists said the museum at Babylon had been looted and the library burned. A museum in Ctesiphon on the Tigris River also had been looted...

...Responding to the conflicting reports about damage to the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago expert on ancient Mesopotamia, said damage far exceeded the 33 items recently reported. That number, he said, reflected the items taken only from the main galleries.

After congratulating the soldiers on their victory over Saddam Hussein, Bush announced that the new budget passed by the Senate includes a $14.6 billion reduction in veterans' benefits. He then held aloft a pair of oversized scissors and snipped a ribbon bearing the words "Veteran's Benefits."

'Darling,' said Tony wheedlingly, stroking Gordon's tousled hair, 'I need you to give me more money.'

Gordon instinctively moved away. Damn it, this wasn't fair! Tony was taking advantage of his post-coital mellowness again.

'What is it this time?' he said, struggling to be cold and resolute.

'It's this damned Iraqi war,' murmured Tony, nibbling Gordon's ear. 'It's going to be costly, you know.'

'That again! Are you so sure it's the right thing?'

'I am, my dumpling.' He reached round to cup Gordon's b...

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

Judging by my mail, patriotism has little to do with a fondness for one's country. Yes, many Americans like America. They reflect affectionately on Arizona's painted deserts and the wooded hollows of Tennessee, on the music of Appalachia and New Orleans, the rude vigor and brashness of a remarkable people, the rich accents of Brooklyn and Mississippi, all the things that give a sense of home and attachment in a large world. But they do not want blood. They speak quietly. Apparently they are not patriots. They do not use the word.

The email patriots are different. They growl and threaten, and seem less to appreciate their country than to hate others. They remind me of nothing so much as bar-room drunks looking for a fight. Their letters seethe with bitterness and begin with denunciations of liberals and the communist media (by which they mean any that fail to agree with them). They don't eat French fries. They hate. They would make, and in fact did make, excellent Nazis.

I played you game the gulfwar 2. and it sucked nuts. I should FUCKING FIND YOU AND BUST A CAP IN YOUR ASS YOU FUCKING PACIFIST. FIRST OFF I'D PASS A FIST THROUGH A PACIFIST YA JACKASS. YOU'VE PROBALLY NEVER SEEN WAR YOU SHIT HOLE. I HOPE YOU GET RAN OVER BY A MOTHERFUCKING CEMENT MIXER YOU STUPID DICK WAD. THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? (Etc. etc. etc.)...

LOOTED antiquities are being smuggled from Afghanistan by the lorry-load, with huge quantities of objects making their way to Britain, experts said yesterday.

Scotland Yard has just seized several hoards of recently illegally excavated ancient treasures worth millions of pounds. They include sculptures in stone, bronze and terracotta that may have come from temple sites, and that range in date from the third millennium BC to the 5th century AD.

There were more than a couple of references to the curriculum they used, which the teachers have told me is ultra-right-wing Christian (also lousy). The last speaker, a pimply boy in an achingly square suit, really played the crowd, and it was no surprise when later he stated that he was going to Bible college to become a pastor.

As soon as this last kid sat down, he got right back up again, and with shaky piano accompaniment, he crooned "God Bless the USA." That song is terrible no matter how it's done, but he sang it as though it were a hymn. Often, his wobbly voice would give out, either from emotion or lack of oxygen. I suspect the former, because others in the crowd were becoming visibly moved, and the woman sitting directly in front of us actually put her face in her hands and wept.

"Unfortunate Child, do not mistake me for living thing, nor seek in me the warmth denied you by your parents. For beneath my plush surface lies a hardness as impervious and unforgiving as this World's own indifference to your mortal struggle. Hold on to me when you are sad, and I will weigh you down, but bear this weight throughout your years, and it will strengthen your limbs and harden your will so that one day no man dare oppose you."

Teacher: "Throw a jacket over him and play around him!"

Student: "But sir...he could swallow his tongue!"

Teacher: "What the hell are you? Some kind of fucking doctor?

BUNIA, Congo, June 6 — As French soldiers drove through Bunia on Friday, hundreds of Congolese cheered them on, shouting ''Courage!'' and ''Liberez!'' (free us) to the troops they believe can restore peace.

As the only camera crews actually working inside Basra, Al-Jazeera captured footage of civilian carnage, which they unflinchingly screened. (The BBC obscured the faces of the mangled children; Al-Jazeera was less squeamish.) Nobody turned a hair at this - but when they broadcast images of dead or captured coalition soldiers, there was an international outcry, and much cynical invoking of the Geneva Convention. This sat uneasily against the repeated images of civilian casualties...

...The film ended on a sickening note. Despite repeated guarantees that journalists would not be targeted, coalition troops bombed the Al-Jazeera Baghdad office, killing the station's most prominent reporter, Tarek Ayyoub.

Police investigating the desecration of a Muslim woman's body in a hospital mortuary covered with rashers of bacon, today revealed they have seized around 2,000 photographs, negatives and slides of dead people believed to have been taken at the mortuary.

The mass of images was found in a raid on the house of a man aged 53 man arrested in connection with the inquiry into activities at west London's Hillingdon Hospital mortuary.

Walker points out that the true scale of the looting is not clear as much of the museum is still sealed and has not been properly inspected. And archaeologists say their greatest loss may be the thousands artefacts, (sic) including inscribed clay tablets, that were never documented or photographed.

...2,000 to 3,000 objects may be missing from the National Museum in Baghdad alone and that the entire contents of the National Library are lost beyond retrieval.

In addition, more than 1,500 modern paintings and sculptures from the city's Museum of Fine Arts are still missing and only 400 have been recovered, according to Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director general for culture at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization...He said that earlier reports by U.S. officials that as few as 25 pieces had been lost were “a distortion of reality” because they described only major pieces taken from the public galleries of the museum but not objects in the reserve collections.

Iraq's antiquities department head Jaber Khalil said here Tuesday that thousands of artefacts were stolen from Iraqi museums, dismissing reports that fewer objects were looted than initially feared.

“There is a deliberate campaign to play down the damage done to Iraq's antiquities,” Khalil told AFP on the sidelines of a regional conference on retrieving Iraqi antiquities looted from Baghdad...“There are 38 very valuable pieces that were stolen from the Baghdad museum, while objects stolen from its warehouses are in the thousands,” Khalil said.

There is nothing conservative about the “neoconservatives.” They care nothing for such classic conservative principles as Natural Law, limited government, tradition, prudence, and constitutional order. But just as the Communists used to borrow liberal rhetoric for their own purposes, while convincing many innocent liberals that they were merely fellow “progressives,” the neocons have used conservative rhetoric, in the service of a foreign power, for their own purposes.

And their chief purpose is war. Preferably a big one. It’s to be fought not by Israel, but by the United States. They have already dubbed it World War IV. For once we should take them at their word.