Fresh controversy about Donald Rumsfeld's personal dealings with Saddam Hussein was provoked yesterday by new documents that reveal he went to Iraq to show America's support for the regime despite its use of chemical weapons.

The formerly secret documents reveal the Defence Secretary travelled to Baghdad 20 years ago to assure Iraq that America's condemnation of its use of chemical weapons was made "strictly" in principle.

The criticism in no way changed Washington's wish to support Iraq in its war against Iran and "to improve bi-lateral relations ... at a pace of Iraq's choosing".

"We were laughing," he said, all tough and unconcerned, wearing his bandaged wrist like a trophy and using a single crutch to support the leg he said was kicked and beaten with a stick. "We knew we hadn't done anything. One of the Americans said in Arabic, 'Incheb!' Shut up!" Ibrahim was full of himself, laughing at the Americans to their faces, getting beaten for his defiance, and then asking for more. "The more I laughed, the more he hit me. It shows what kind of a weak man he was to hit a boy," he sneered.

The Americans, in their efforts at zero tolerance, intimidation, containment, detentions, night arrests, and operations to arrest high-school kids, provoke only frustration, outrage, and distrust.

The Americans have been refurbishing schools, but it's often just a paint job.

One of the Queen's corgis has been bitten so badly by an English bull terrier owned by Princess Anne it has had to be put down, it is reported...

...Princess Anne appeared before magistrates in November 2002 and pleaded guilty to a charge that one of her dogs attacked two children in Windsor Great Park.

In that attack, a 12-year-old boy suffered a bite on the collarbone and two bites to the left leg while a seven-year-old boy was left with scratch marks on a leg, his back and an arm.

The children's parents were angry that the princess escaped with a fine and the dog was not put down.

The One Ring to Rule Them All is a powerfully tempting force, but it doesn't compare to the strain of sitting through a three-hour, 20-minute movie without taking a whiz...

"I was trying to hold on," said 19-year-old Jetta Martin, who went to the first showing of the film on Wednesday at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, but she bolted when Frodo the hobbit was in peril at the end of the second hour. "I put my faith in Sam and went to the bathroom."

Peter, who does not want to be identified, displays galleries of the strangest presents bought or made for him and his colleagues.

They include a toilet roll and cotton wool "figure" and an old book complete with chewing gum and human hair.

We were so cozy with dear old Saddam that we decided to feed him satellite images so he could locate where the Iranian troops were. We pretty much knew how he would use the information, and sure enough, as soon as we sent him the spy photos, he gassed those troops. And we kept quiet. Because he was our friend, and the Iranians were the "enemy." A year after he first gassed the Iranians, we reestablished full diplomatic relations with him!

We allowed and encouraged American corporations to do business with Saddam in the 1980s. That's how he got chemical and biological agents so he could use them in chemical and biological weapons. Here's the list of some of the stuff we sent him (according to a 1994 U.S. Senate report):

* Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax.
* Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin.
* Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord, and heart.
* Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs.
* Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness.
* Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance.

...one of the beauties of the whole suicide-bomber tactic is that the attacker kills himself--the enemy can’t even claim the kill. It’s a nice clean way to use up one of your soldiers. He won’t be a POW. and he’s not likely to spill anything the enemy can use during interrogation, because nobody’s figured out a way to interrogate kung-pao sized chunks of burnt Jihadi scattered over a 20sm blast radius. It’s probably the ideal way for a guerrilla army to spend a life. No wonder Arafat pays such high bounties to the “martyr’s” family.

So our guys will keep getting pecked to death, a bomb here, an RPG there...and after a few weeks of sweating it out, they’ll take their first chance to fire back at the “guerrillas,” and if that means blowing away every civilian in four blocks, well, so much the better. I’m not saying this is a good way to fight, you understand--I’m saying it’s what’s going to happen, sooner or later.

And when it does, it won’t be a victory for our firepower. It’ll be a victory for the chickenshit bushwhackers who provoked us into a massacre.The awful, awful truth of this scenario is that no matter who kills who, the guerrillas win.

''Bloody Hell ... Tony Blair's not looking so good, and he's only been in the hole for three weeks. He's not going to last as long as Saparmurad Niyazov."

He was returning home near the capital Islamabad when a bomb went off, seconds after his convoy drove over a bridge.

Mr Musharraf said he was certain he was the target.

It is the second serious attempt on the president's life since he ordered a crackdown on Islamic militants nearly two years ago.

My wife, Shahin Cole, suggested to me an ironic possibility with regard to the Shiites. She said that many Shiites in East Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere may have been timid about opposing the US presence, because they feared the return of Saddam. Saddam was in their nightmares, and the reprisals of the Fedayee Saddam are still a factor in Iraqi politics. Now that it is perfectly clear that he is finished, she suggested, the Shiites may be emboldened. Those who dislike US policies or who are opposed to the idea of occupation no longer need be apprehensive that the US will suddenly leave and allow Saddam to come back to power. They may therefore now gradually throw off their political timidity, and come out more forcefully into the streets when they disagree with the US.

   

"To accidentally massacre one group of innocent children may be regarded as a misfortune. To massacre a second looks like carelessness."

Postwar Iraq is the two hospitals he visited that didn't have any drugs, or the schools that don't have lights or heat. Some neighborhoods have trash and sewage in the street. Cars line up for blocks waiting for gas. All the while, Iraqi frustration is high.

He said many residents feel they were promised a better way of life once Saddam Hussein's regime fell, but that hasn't materialized.

"They're just totally frustrated. They really feel like they were conned. That's what we're hearing over and over," he said. "People are PO'd. They're so grateful that we got rid of Saddam . . . but we've bungled it so badly since the war itself.

Led by Captain Jesus H. Christ, son of God, a force of thirty U.S. B-2 Stealth Bombers landed this morning at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, after a “hugely successful” mission over Baghdad...

Whenever President George W. Bush ventures abroad to meet foreign officials the question is not what will he get accomplished but whether or not he will be murdered. The man cannot set foot outside the United States without a bodyguard of thousands of armed men and women. He literally cannot make a public appearance for fear of his life.

No other world public figure rivals George W. Bush in low esteem. The man is despised everywhere. He is a universal hate object. You might think that distinction would have been conferred on Bush's friend, the thug-ugly Vladimir Putin, whose hands are red from his atrocities in Chechnya, but no, the globally reviled politician is the American president.

Remember back in 1998, as the Clinton administration geared up to bomb Baghdad, when we were inundated with talk of Saddam's palaces. How Saddam lived in luxury, while ordinary Iraqis suffered. He had swimming pools while most Iraqis didn't have clean water. He was usurping Iraq's resources for his own excesses. And on and on.

Bremer and the military commanders he rode into Baghdad with wasted no time in picking up from where Saddam left off as they swiftly occupied the dozens of palaces across Iraq. Out went Izzat Ibrahim from the marbled palace in Tikrit, in came Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division. Out went the Republican Guard; in came the marines...

...Iraqi television has gone from airing the ramblings of Saddam and his deputies to airing the statements of Bush, Bremer, Rice, Rumsfeld and a slew of US military commanders. One American soldier working on establishing the "new" Iraqi media said many of the Iraqi journalists are referring to the US commanders working with them as "Little Saddams."

The US has put scores of Saddam's thugs on the payroll of the new regime. Many of them kept their same positions, just with a new supervisor: Uncle Sam. And one of the most striking similarities between Saddam and Bremer is that neither of them seems too eager to have democratic elections in Iraq.

   

Last week, while Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who has railed against pork in the federal budget, was accusing his colleagues of "spending money like a drunken sailor," Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., was telling a home-state audience about the cash in the NASA bill for Mississippi's Stennis Space Center.

Alaska always does well in the bill - this year's version includes $600,000 for the Challenger School in Kenai, a fishing village of 7,000....

West Virginia, home of Sen. Robert Byrd, the top Democrat on the Senate committee, also gains from NASA's budget. Byrd and U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., scored a number of additions, from extra cash for NASA's Independent Verification & Validation Facility, where the agency vets software, to $200,000 for Wheeling Jesuit University for "Classroom of the Future."

Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, whom Williams called "a very powerful appropriator," and his House colleagues grabbed dollars for their state, from extra money for programs at the Marshall Space Flight Center to $1 million for the Little River Canyon Field School in the southern part of the state.

"The worst thing about these results is that the growing role of these quasi-fascist parties will be shifting the focus of the Kremlin policy accordingly. It is clear to me now that we are sliding more and more toward a police state," he added.

The new strategy applied by the US military "appears to be succeeding in diminishing the threat to American soldiers," reports the Times. "But it appears to be coming at the cost of alienating many of the people the Americans are trying to win over." The Times quoted one of the Iraqi civilians lining up at a checkpoint in the Iraqi town of Abu Hishma as saying: "I see no difference between us and the Palestinians. We didn't expect anything like this after Saddam fell."

stepped-up attacks on contractors in recent weeks have slowed down infrastructure work at a time when sabotage against oil pipelines and oil facilities continues. Restoring a sense of normal life to the capital, with a population of more than 5 million, is critical for winning support for the coalition. U.S. officials worry that frustrations from long gas lines and power outages play into the hands of insurgents.

When Krusty the Klown visits the Simpsons he gives the blessing in Hebrew: "Baruch atah adonai, eloheinu, melech ha'olam hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz". Homer's reaction is: "Heehee! He's talking funny talk!"

Despite his exhaustion, Jackson is not resting on his laurels and said if complex rights issues can be resolved he would like to direct "The Hobbit", J.R.R. Tolkien's prequel to the "Rings" trilogy set some 50 years earlier.

"I'd be interested in doing it because I think it would give continuity to the overall chapter," he said.

While many of the lead "Rings" characters do not appear in "The Hobbit" story, the wizard Gandalf, played by Ian McKellen, and Gollum, the cave dweller corrupted by the powerful ring, do and should make a comeback. Arwen, the elf princess played by Liv Tyler, could also feature again, Jackson said.

O'Keefe "worked to build a consensus" for renewed U.S. manned spaceflight beyond shuttle and station. The return to the Moon by U.S. astronauts possibly by the end of the next decade became "by default" the least expensive and risky of the paths proposed for the U.S. space program.

Bush will call for renewed U.S. activities leading to leadership of space exploration "in the Earth-Moon system" that could include manned lunar landings, the employment of a series of commercially-available launch vehicles and upper stages, new robotic lunar probes that will include orbiting communications and navigation relay satellites, and the development of a "flexible" manned spacecraft that is likely to be a form of the proposed Orbital Space Plane, but no new advanced launchers, large Apollo-style space vehicles or reusable replacements for the shuttles. Creation of a manned lunar base would evolve from more limited landings, if at all.

   

   

   

The screaming and chanting went on for one hour. They would march passed (sic) the church, down Main Street, back around the post office, and down Main Street again. It was clear they wanted to be seen and heard. In fact, it was quite scary because the desert is normally a place of perfect peace and silence.

Suddenly, at 7 a.m., the shouting got dramatically louder. I looked out the front window of the house where I live, next door to the church, and there they were--all 75 of them, standing yards away from my front door, in the street right in front of my house and our church, shouting and screaming to the top of their lungs, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Their commanders had planted them there and were egging them on.

I was astonished and appalled. I suddenly realized that I do not need to go to Iraq; the war had come to my front door. Later, I heard that they had deliberately decided to do their exercises in front of my house and our church because of my outspoken opposition to the war. They wanted to put me in my place.