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Clashes between Italian occupation troops and a Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, have erupted in the centre of the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya.
Aljazeera’s correspondent in the city reported the clashes began on Thursday morning and were still underway hours later.
He said the storming of Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s offices in the city by Italian troops provoked the unrest.
"No details were reported about casualities on both sides," he added.
In another incident, four policemen (…)

Aggression, corruption and courage - a night in hospital offers a microcosm of life in city
Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Unconscious, a woman lies in the emergency ward as doctors struggle to save her life after she was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. Her teenage son and daughter, her husband, and four other male relatives crowd round the hospital trolley.
When a young house doctor writes out a chit for more plastic bottles of saline solution or more disposable needles, one of the (…)

By Samson Mulugeta
Thousands of villages in the Sudanese region of Darfur have suffered in a war that is, by most measures, the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today.
Bahai, Chad - Umm Fahara Mohammad was fetching water at the well in her Sudanese village when she heard gunfire and the thunder of galloping horses. She flung her clay pot aside and sprinted to hide in nearby bushes. Two of her cousins collapsed in the dirt, shot dead without warning, she said.
Mohammad (…)

Some 600 Jordanian trucks have been robbed and 200 killed in Iraq by armed thieves or U.S. forces since the war began in March last year.
The president of the Jordanian syndicate of truck owners, Abdel Rahim al-Jamal, said Wednesday that land transportation services had sustained severe losses in human lives and vehicles as a result of armed robberies and U.S. fire inside Iraqi territory.
Al-Jamal asked the Jordanian government to take measures to curb the attacks on Jordanian trucks, (…)

An Islamist militant group threatened Thursday to attack Muslim countries that send troops to Iraq as proposed by Saudi Arabia and welcomed by the United States.
"We will not remain silent if troops are sent to Iraq by any Arab or Muslim country, especially by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and others," said the statement by the group calling itself the Islamic Tawhid Group, posted on an Islamist Web site.
"We will strike with an iron fist all the traitors of Arab governments who (…)

By Paul Geitner
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) France dropped its objection to having a NATO training mission inside Iraq but refused Thursday to accept Washington’s demand that its commander be an American.
A French diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the issue as the ’’last hitch’’ holding up agreement on the mission at NATO headquarters.
After two days of debate, NATO officials said they were optimistic the 26 NATO countries would reach a consensus by Friday on how the (…)

By JAY BOOKMAN
Follow links for greater depth. The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.
The pieces just didn’t fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.
In recent days, those missing pieces have (…)

One of four soldiers charged with pushing two Iraqis into the Tigris river, where one of them drowned, says he was ordered to do so by higher-ups, an army investigator said.
US Army Specialist Terry Bowman said he "was told by his chain of command what version to give" to investigators, Sgt Irene Cintron of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command said during a teleconference from Iraq on Wednesday.
The US military has been convening a hearing to determine whether the soldiers will be (…)

TEXAS: Michael Moore’s controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 reaches US President George W Bush’s backyard but the Oscar-winning filmmaker has nixed plans to come to this one-stoplight town to officiate.
Word that Moore was coming to Crawford, a hamlet of 705 people, had drawn a dismissive response from the White House but sparked anger and worry among some locals, including one who left his message in cow manure.
The filmmaker had planned to travel to Crawford, bringing a copy of (…)

By William Branigin
BOSTON, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, fresh from his official nomination to be the party’s standard-bearer in November, prepared Thursday to deliver the most important speech of his life, a prime-time address to the Democratic National Convention that aides said would seek to convey an image of strong leadership for troubled times.
Kerry, 60, who has served for most of the last two decades as the junior senator from Massachusetts, went to the (…)