A Christian martyr. A car bomb killed 10 people at a Shiite shrine in Najaf, Iraq, and a suicide bombing killed 85 people at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad. BBC NewsThe U.S. military announced that 1,313 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the sectarian violence of March. “Civil war,” said Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, “has almost started among Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and those who are coming from Asia.”BBC NewsChron.comThe case against Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman for CBS who was arrested in April 2005 after filming the wreckage of a car bomb, was finally dismissed for lack of …

Eighty-six corpses–most shot, some strangled–were found around Baghdad over a 30-hour period. CNN“We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more,” said Iyad Allawi, the former interim prime minister of Iraq. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”BBC NewsDonald Rumsfeld denied that Iraq was in a civil war.CNNThe United States launched Operation Swarmer against the Iraqi insurgency. While the operation was described as the largest air assault since the beginning of the Iraq war, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were captured.TimeA videotape …

The U.S. State Department issued a report criticizing human rights abuses in China, North Korea, Iran, and Cuba. It also criticized the rights records of Jordan and Egypt, two countries where the United States has sent detainees to be interrogated. The report noted that the United States’ “own journey towards liberty and justice for all has been long and difficult,” and is “far from complete.”The New York TimesThe IndependentA bombing at a Shiite market in Sadr City, Iraq, killed at least 50 people; Shiite vigilantes responded by abducting four men, beating and executing them, and hanging them from lampposts.The New …

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA’s unfounded, unjustified, and unreasonable claims about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction; the report was oddly silent, however, about the Bush Administration’s well-documented and apparently successful campaign to intimidate the CIA into coming up with justifications for the President’s fraudulent case for the invasion.New York TimesSenator Trent Lott was outraged by the CIA’s “totally ridiculous, uncalled for, and counterproductive” redactions of the report and called for an independent commission to oversee the classification of government information.New York TimesJapan’s defense ministry said that it will issue its annual defense whitepaper …

President George W. Bush held a prime-time press conference and refused several times to apologize or accept responsibility for his government’s failure to prevent the September 11 attacks; theNew York Timespresident defended his decision to conquer Iraq and said that the Iraqis were “deceptive at hiding things. We knew they were hiding things. A country that hides things is a country that is afraid of getting caught. And that was part of our calculation.”New York TimesBush also said that “freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face …

The British government declined to prosecute Katharine Gun, the linguist who leaked a United States National Security Agency memo asking British intelligence to spy on United Nations diplomats before the invasion of Iraq; there was speculation that the government was trying to avoid another embarrassing debate about the legality of the war.New York TimesClare Short, a Labor member of parliament who resigned from the Blair cabinet over Iraq, charged that British agents had spied on United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan just before the invasion of Iraq, and said that she had seen transcripts of Annan’s conversations.IndependentAnnan was said to …

United Nations weapons inspectors discovered 11 empty chemical warheads in southern Iraq; the inspectors said that the warheads were not included in Iraq’s weapons declaration, but Iraqi officials said that they were. Inspectors also searched the private homes of two Iraqiscientists, one of whom was upset that his clothing and his wife’s medical Xrays were examined. The inspectors later expressed surprise that the Bush Administration was making such a big deal out of the empty warheads, which have a range of 12 miles; Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. team, said the warheads were not important, and a French …

Iraq delivered its 12,000-page weapons declaration to the United Nations, and American officials said they will be ready to mount an invasion by next month. General Amir al-Saadi, one of Saddam Hussein’s closest advisers, challenged the United States to come up with proof that Iraq has resumed nuclear-, biological-, or chemical-weapons programs. “We don’t understand the rush to judgment,” the general said. “A superpower should study and take its time in judging, especially as everyone is looking on as it prepares for a huge military campaign, for an aggression against Iraq. It should behave wisely.” President Bush said that America …

One day after Iraq’s parliament rejected the terms of the Security Council resolution calling for resumed weapons inspections, a letter from Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri agreeing to the demands was delivered to the United Nations. The letter was somewhat hostile, referring to the Americans and the British as a “gang of evil,” and it declared that the Security Council “has now been transformed into a kitchen house for big power bargaining, providing cover for war, destruction, blockades, and starvation to be inflicted on peoples.” The letter also contained the following proverb: “He who remains silent in the defense of …

Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey withdrew from the November election after new evidence emerged that he had accepted “improper gifts” from a contributor; Torricelli said that he did not want to jeopardize Democratic control of the Senate. A new poll found that most Americans are opposed to invading Iraq if it means significant Iraqi civilian casualties; a majority of those polled also said that they were more concerned about the economy than about Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction and that Congress should be more critical of President Bush’s war plans. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle said that …

The Supreme Court of the United States decided that it was no longer okay to execute retarded people, because a “national consensus” has emerged that such judicial killings are cruel and unusual punishment and are thus, in light of “evolving standards of decency,” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. The Court offered little guidance for determining what constitutes “retarded.” After a series of Palestinian suicide attacks, including an attack on a home in Itamar, a Jewish settlement near Nablus, in which a mother and her three children were murdered, Israel’s security cabinet voted to seize the entire West …

President Hugo Ch�vez of Venezuela was deposed in a coup led by several generals and the country’s business elite. An interim government was established under the leadership of Pedro Carmona Estanga, the head of a major business association. Latin American leaders denounced the “interruption of the constitutional order.” American officials welcomed the coup and said that it was a victory for democracy. Oil prices immediately dropped. Within days, great crowds of supporters occupied the presidential palace and Ch�vez was back in power. “I hope that Hugo Ch�vez takes the message that his people sent him,” said Condoleezza Rice. President Bush …

Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate that President Bush had decided to overthrow Iraq’sSaddam Hussein but had not yet settled on a strategy and was considering his options. The administration was reportedly planning to create an “inspection crisis” by demanding that Iraq admit arms inspectors and then using the expected refusal to justify an attack. “I do not think I am at a point where a decision has been made about where to go next, leave alone the precision of how we will be going about doing this,” said General Tommy Franks, who would be leading any such …

President Bush released his $2.13 trillion budget, which includes a massive arms buildup and severe cuts in popular domestic programs as well as additional tax cuts for the wealthy. The Pentagon complained that it needed more money. New government statistics revealed that the number of Americans making more than a million dollars doubled between 1995 and 1999 while the percentage of their income paid in federal taxes dropped by 11 percent; Americans who made less than a million dollars per year paid 2 percent more in federal taxes. Interesting details continued to emerge from the Enron scandal, such as the …

Advanced Cell Technology Inc. of Worcester, Massachusetts, announced that it had cloned a human embryo in order to mine it for stem cells; the company said that it had taken “extreme measures” to prevent the embryo from being placed in a womb. Independent experts dismissed the cloning experiment as a failure. Mad cow disease continued to spread in Japan. Scientists at Oxford University said up to 1,500 Britishsheep could have been infected with the disease. A new study confirmed that abuse of stimulants used to treat attention-deficit disorder, such as Ritalin, was rampant among children and teens. “People don’t realize …

Forensic experts in Honduras found a mass grave containing 15 bodies on a former American military base used to train Nicaraguan Contras; prosecutors expect to find up to 80 dead leftists who disappeared during the 1980s. John Negroponte, who was the American ambassador to Honduras during the Contra war, was awaiting confirmation as the new U.S. representative at the United Nations. Slobodan Milosevic berated a judge and others at The Hague after genocide was added to the charges he faces there. An Israelideath squad using American-made weaponsassassinated Mustafa Zubari, also known as Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular …

Astrophysicists found evidence that the speed of light and other laws of nature might have changed over time. Donald Rumsfeld, the American secretary of defense, explained that his much-ballyhooed “revolution in military affairs” was not a revolution at all but was instead a “transformation”: “When they see that word,” he explained, seeking to comfort critics in Congress and among the troops, “there’s a tendency to think that you go from this to something different.” In fact, he said, you can do something rather modest, like improve communications, which “could be characterized as transformed or transformational.” President George W. Bush declared …

The United States decided not to sign a new anti-germ-warfare treaty, bringing to at least five the number of international agreements the U.S. has rejected in recent years, including the Kyoto Protocol, the Landmine Convention, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. President George W. Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to work toward a disarmament framework that would reduce nuclear weapons while allowing the U.S. its missile-defense scheme; a few days before their discussion, Putin remarked that Bush was “a fairly good-hearted person, nice to talk to, I …