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by Baghdad
Aljazeera has aired a videotape showing a group of masked armed men belonging to a Shia Muslim resistance group holding an Iraqi police officer captive in Baghdad.
According to the captors, who belong to Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army, the captive is Brigadier Raad Muhammad Khidr - the former director of Baghdad’s al-Rusafa police department.
In the videotape, the masked men read a statement calling on the Iraqi interior minister to release all al-Mahdi Army (…)

by RON JACOBS
Little had changed overnight. The war continued in Vietnam. Another southern Vietnamese town had been taken over by the popular forces over the weekend. I left work at 2 in the morning on August 8, 1974 and headed home to sleep. After waking around 10 the same morning, I hitchhiked into Washington, DC. Something big was in the air. The Congressional committees involved in deciding whether or not to impeach Richard Nixon had been meeting all summer. The noose was tightening (…)

By Heather Cottin
Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, has charged that President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John David Ashcroft are guilty of "crimes against peace and humanity and war crimes."
Clark added that the U.S. government under George W. Bush was "assuming powers of an imperial executive unaccountable to law."
Clark’s statement was read to thousands who gathered to protest the (…)

Oil Company Says It Has Shut Down Basra Oil Terminal Due to Renewed Shiite Uprising
Iraq stopped pumping oil from its key southern oil fields Monday because of the violence plaguing the region during a renewed Shiite uprising, an official with the South Oil Company said.
About 1.8 million barrels per day, or 90 percent of Iraq’s exports, move through Iraq’s southern port of Basra, and any shutdown in the flow of Iraq’s main money earner would badly hamper reconstruction efforts.
A (…)

by Lisa O’Carroll
The Iraq prime minister’s decision to throw al-Jazeera out of Baghdad and ban it from operating for 30 days is "a serious blow to press freedom", Reporters Sans Frontières has said.
The Paris-based media watchdog demanded "an immediate explanation" for the move on Saturday, saying it was "extremely concerned about persistent episodes of censorship in Iraq".
Police ordered al-Jazeera’s employees out of their newsroom and locked the door on Saturday night after the (…)

by TOKYO
Four workers died and seven were injured after steam leaked from one of the reactors of Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in west Japan’s Fukui Prefecture.
No external radioactive leak is believed to have taken place, said the Kansai Electric Power Co. that owns the plant.
The steam leak took place at a facility housing the turbines for the No. 3 reactor of the plant, located in the town of Mihama,at around 3:30 p.m.(0630 GMT).
According to the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency (…)

By DEBORAH HASTINGS
Always, there was the heat. Steaming like a cauldron at 125 degrees during the day, parboiling at 90 degrees after dark. Enough to induce around-the-clock anger and misery. Enough to set anyone on edge.
No one wanted to be at this god-awful place, not the U.S. Marines who were the guards and certainly not the captured Iraqis who were the prisoners.
Their accommodations were three stone buildings gouged by looters of every semblance of modernity. For bathrooms, the (…)

By DAVID E. SANGER
ENNEBUNKPORT - American intelligence officials and outside nuclear experts have concluded that the Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts with European and Asian allies have barely slowed the nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea over the past year, and that both have made significant progress.
In a tacit acknowledgment that the diplomatic initiatives with European and Asian allies have failed to curtail the programs, senior administration and intelligence (…)

By Matt Wade and Tony Stephens
John Howard was not impressed. In Samoa for the Pacific Islands forum, he was confronted with an extraordinary repudiation of his foreign policy, especially the Iraq war, by 43 of Australia’s former military chiefs, department heads and senior diplomats.
A tight-jawed Prime Minister adopted a well-worn defence yesterday: "The argument that we took the country to war based on a lie is itself a misrepresentation and I continue to reject it."
The statement (…)

By Haaretz Service
Former deputy Mossad director, Shmuel Toledano, launched a harsh verbal attack on Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon on Sunday, saying that the IDF under his leadership had lost its morality and military ethics.
The attack took place during a lecture Ya’alon gave at the Council for Peace and Security, a group of 1,000 top-level reserve generals, colonels, and Shin Bet and Mossad officials.
During the lecture, Toledano asked the participants: "How can (…)