Searchers at an Iraqi military firing range have unearthed human bones and articles of clothing they say belong to a mass grave of people executed in the 1990s.

Salam is the scion of a senior figure from Iraq's Baathist nomenclature. He was brought up at least partly in Vienna, which is the OPEC headquarters; his father was therefore an oilman, and possibly a former head of Iraq's OPEC mission.

"This is not a game for you only, but for all of Iraqi sports," Raad Hamoudi, the Iraqi national soccer team's star goalkeeper of the 1980s, told his old team, Police, before it took the field in the first professional match in Iraq since the war ended. "I want you to forget the hatred and any vengeance you may have in your heart. I want you to think about the present and the future."

The U.S. executive selected by the Pentagon to advise Iraq's Ministry of Oil suggested today that the country might best be served by exporting as much oil as it can and disregarding quotas set by the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries. His comments offered the strongest indication to date that the future Iraqi government may break ranks with the international petroleum cartel.

The place smelled of death, of rot. The ground you walked on -- you could feel, in the pit of your stomach, that you were walking on somebody's grave. The faces, the wails...
Maybe it's superstition, or maybe old bones still can hold power over the earth, but I tell you, if evil has a texture, a feel to it, you could feel it there. And you could see everybody else around you feeling it, too.

BERLIN ( Reuters ) - Secretary of State Colin Powell will meet German leaders on Friday seeking support for a United Nations resolution to end sanctions on Iraq with the offer of warmer bilateral relations in return.
Powell holds talks with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on Friday morning, expected to start mending relations soured by disagreement over the U.S.-led Iraq war as long as Germany supports the United States on post-war Iraq.
The United States is looking for support for a U.N. Security Council resolution that would lift blocks on Iraqi oil exports and Powell made it clear he hoped for backing from Germany, one of the non-permanent members on the council.

Reuters via Yahoo News - Film uncovered after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what seems to be new evidence of brutality under his rule -- three men being executed in gruesome fashion by being blown up with explosives packed around their bodies.
Convicted in 1985 of a bomb attack that killed children in Baghdad, Saddam's security police wired them up to explosives in the desert and simply blew them up, one by one - the whole proceedings captured on a film obtained by Reuters on Thursday.
The footage shows men in the uniforms of Iraqi security officers strapping what appears to be explosive to one of the blindfolded men and attaching wires to a large vehicle battery.

Controversial Egyptian singer Shabban Abderrahim, who hit the headlines with a song called I hate Israel , once again plans to rock the pop world with the release of a single called Saddam's hell is better than America's paradise , the Al-Hayat newspaper reported.
In the song he refers to Iraqis being ungrateful because they tore down the statues of their former leader.
He has also dedicated a second song, A man full of dignity , on his forthcoming album to former Iraqi Information minister Mohammed Said al-Sahaf...

United States military forces in Iraq will have the authority to shoot looters on sight under a tough new security setup that will include hiring more police officers and banning ranking members of the Baath Party from public service, American officials said today.
The far more muscular approach to bringing order to postwar Iraq was described by the new American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, at a meeting of senior staff members today, the officials said. On Wednesday, Mr. Bremer is expected to meet with the leaders of Iraqi political groups that are seeking to form an interim government by the end of the month.

" Dare I say it - I'm pretty comfortable in that environment. Our special forces are the best in the world and our level of physical and psychological training is very high so we can cope with that sort of thing . . . easily, really. The Americans know that too and they love working with us for that reason. From our point of view, it is excellent to work with the Americans because . . . we get a reach into their intelligence and equipment, which is first rate."
Nonetheless, the approaches of the Australian and US special forces differ greatly, he said.
" The US special forces are very big and good at operating in chaos - and that's largely because creating chaos is one of their tactics. We often look for another way than always going in straight away with a lot of punch. "
Another Australian special forces member, who declined to be named, said: " We look for different ways of doing things - you could say we are more lateral.
"We don't always see the way through as killing the opponent straight away, whereas the Americans almost certainly do - in this war we used a lot of psy ops [psychological operations] very successfully. I believe we managed to convince many [Iraqi soldiers] to go back to their families, to think again, not to fight . . . I'm not sure the Americans would claim to have done that."

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said Iraqi intelligence agents infiltrated al-Jazeera, the Arab world's most widely watched television station, in an attempt to win favorable coverage.
Al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout told Reuters the network was unaware of "any member of al-Jazeera who is working for any foreign intelligence" organization.
The Sunday Times said documents uncovered by opponents of Saddam Hussein after he was ousted by a U.S.-led invasion force last month showed Iraq's intelligence service had three agents working inside Qatar's al-Jazeera television network.
According to the documents, one alleged agent passed on two letters written by Osama bin Laden, blamed for the 2001 attacks on the United States, to his Iraqi handlers. Two cameramen were also said to be Iraqi agents.

Did you make a mistake in opposing the war with Iraq, keeping Iraqi oil flowing to Syria and allowing weapons to go across your border into Iraq?
We were not close to [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] and did not have an embassy in Baghdad. I never met him or talked with him on the phone. What you said about the oil is true. We had economic relations with Iraq. What you said about this government allowing armaments to go to Iraq is not correct. [But] arms were smuggled into Iraq by individuals; the government had nothing to do with it.

Did Iraqi regime leaders come here during the war?
Yes, some of them came to the border. They weren?t allowed to come in. Some of them were captured by the Americans.

Didn?t some come here?
Somebody came before [the war].

Their families?
We allowed families to come to Syria, women and children. But we were suspicious of some of the relatives?that they had positions in the past and were responsible for killings in Syria in the ?80s ...