12/ 1/03 Monday
The Iraqi insurgency in Baghdad appears to have a central
leadership that finances attacks in the capital and gives broad
orders to eight to 12 rebel bands - some with as many as 100
guerrillas, U.S. Army generals said. Decisions on individual
attacks against U.S. occupation forces in the capital, however, are
left up to the men who carry them out, said Brig. Gen. Martin
Dempsey. There is still no sign of a military-style command
structure in the city or in Iraq as a whole, Dempsey added. White
House advisers are urging President Bush to head off a global trade
war by rolling back steep tariffs on imported steel. The U.S.
government is scrapping a rule imposed after the Sept. 11 attacks
that required men and boys from countries with suspected links to
terrorism to register multiple times with U.S. officials.
12/ 2/03 Tuesday
Israel's vice premier says Colin Powell should not meet organizers
of an unofficial Mideast peace treaty, arguing the Secretary of
State would not help the actual peace process. Put together in
Geneva, the informal agreement is the result of three years of
talks between former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators working in
private without representing their governments. After two days of
talks with NATO allies, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told American
reporters that he was encouraged by allied support for the U.S.
effort in Iraq. Near Samarra, in Iraq, an American soldier was
killed when a homemade bomb exploded underneath the Humvee he was
riding in along Highway 1.
12/ 3/03 Wednesday
The man accused of kidnapping a college student from a mall parking
lot was in a North Dakota jail following his arrest in Minnesota,
while a massive search effort failed to turn up any sign of the
missing woman. Japan's prime minister approved a plan to start
sending 1,000 troops for non-combat duty in Iraq. Guerrillas
attacked a police station in central Iraq, wounding six people, a
day after officials said they were considering creating a
specialized Iraqi paramilitary battalion to help fight the
insurgents. Two rockets struck the Ramadi Police Directorate, 100
miles west of Baghdad, as officers gathered inside to receive their
monthly salaries, said Maj. Samir Habib. Two policemen and four
civilians were wounded, he said.
12/ 4/03 Thursday
President Bush scrapped import tariffs he had imposed last year to
help the battered U.S. steel industry, defusing a threatened trade
war with Europe and Japan. The U.S. military has begun staging
raids on Iraqi smugglers to cut the cash pipeline to Iraqi
insurgents who are believed to pay attackers for bombings and
strikes against U.S. troops. A bomb exploded near a Baghdad mosque
as a U.S. military convoy passed, killing an American soldier and
two Iraqis, and injured 13 Iraqis. Lighting the national Christmas
tree, President Bush urged American troops who will be far from
home and family these holidays to take some solace in the Christmas
story and the nation's gratitude. "Separation from loved ones is
especially difficult this time of year," Bush said at the 80th
annual outdoor "Pageant of Peace" ceremony on the Ellipse. "People
in uniform can know that their families miss them and love them,
that millions are praying for them, and that America is grateful
for the men and women who serve and defend our country."
12/ 5/03 Friday
The first major snow storm of the season brought blustery winds,
rain, sleet and a blanket of snow to the Northeast, delaying
flights, and wreaking havoc on the region's highways. With the
nation's supply of flu shots dropping rapidly and at least 13
states facing an unusually severe flu outbreak, doctors are urging
healthy people to opt for a nasal-spray version of the vaccine and
save the traditional one for children and the elderly. N. Korea
warns it will respond to Japan's spy satellites; bomb explodes in
center of Kandahar, Afghanistan; Calif. Senate deals Schwarzenegger
setbacks; 'Baghdad Boil' afflicts U.S. troops in Iraq.
12/ 6/03 Saturday
Highways and sidewalks turned treacherous for the millions of
people living in the Northeast as the region's first big storm of
the season piled up a foot of blowing snow. Insurgents attacked a
U.S. military patrol in Mosul, Iraq, killing one U.S. soldier and
wounding two others, by setting off a roadside bomb as an American
convoy passed through the center of town. An American A-10 aircraft
struck a site south of Ghazni, 100 miles southwest of the capital
of Afghanistan, Kabul, where a "known terrorist" was believed to be
hiding; and apparently struck the wrong target - eight children and
2 innocent men were killed, instead. "During this season, America's
families are planning for the year ahead, and they have reason to
be optimistic," President Bush said in his weekly radio address.
12/ 7/03 Sunday
A South Korean company said it has decided to withdraw its 60
workers restoring electricity lines in Iraq, after a gun attack
killed two of its electricians working for the U.S. government
project. Workers for Seoul's Omu Electric Co. have been building
transmission towers in northern Iraq since October. The powerful
Northeast U.S. snowstorm winds down; it had plowed through the
region and piled more than 3 feet of snow in some places over the
weekend. In a setback to Middle East peace efforts, Palestinian
militants rejected a comprehensive truce offer to Israel despite
intense pressure from Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and Egypt to sign
onto a deal. Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath insisted,
however, that there is "a general readiness" for a truce and said
Qureia would go to the Israelis to see if they were willing to halt
military actions.
12/ 8/03 Monday
Rep. Bill Janklow, a dominating figure in South Dakota politics for
nearly 30 years, was convicted of manslaughter for speeding through
a stop sign at a rural intersection and colliding with a
motorcyclist. Janklow quickly announced that he will resign from
Congress on Jan. 20 - the same date he is scheduled to be
sentenced. President Bush signed a new prescription drug benefit
into law as part of historic Medicare changes that also will
confront seniors with numerous, sometimes-difficult choices on
their health care coverage. Bush said the new drug insurance "will
save our seniors from a lot of worry." But the bill's critics said
the worries have just begun for Medicare's 40 million older and
disabled Americans. Three U.S soldiers died in a road accident in
central Iraq.
12/ 9/03 Tuesday
The fifth U.S. helicopter was downed in Iraq in just over five
weeks; near Fallujah, brought down by small-arms fire or a
projectile fired from the ground; there were no U.S. casualties.
In eastern Afghanistan, six children were crushed to death by a
collapsing wall during an assault by U.S. forces on a compound
stuffed with weapons, the second time in a week that civilians have
died in action against Taliban and al-Qaida suspects. "The next day
we discovered the bodies of two adults and six children," Lt. Col.
Bryan Hilferty said. "We had no indication there were
noncombatants" in the compound. Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean for
president, a move that rocked the Democratic presidential field and
hastened Dean's evolution from a long-shot maverick to a leading
candidate of the Democratic establishment.
12/10/03 Wednesday
The Palestinian prime minister warned Israel against unilateral
moves, such as seizing parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
saying it will never be accepted by the Palestinians. "The fire
will burn, the terror will grow," Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed
Qureia said in newspaper remarks published Thursday. Critics said
the U.S. decision to bar opponents of the war in Iraq from
reconstruction contracts could complicate American efforts to
restructure Iraq's estimated $125 billion debt, as Europe reacted
swiftly and angrily to the decision.
12/11/03 Thursday
With the flu now spread to all 50 states and nearly half of those
considered hit hard, the government is scrambling to ship 250,000
vaccine doses to combat shortages, hoping to head off what could
become one of the worst outbreaks in years. In Tal Afar, Iraq, a
suicide car bomber wounded 58 U.S. soldiers and three Iraqis when
he charged the gates of an American military base and blew up his
explosives-packed vehicle as troops opened fire - most of the 58
soldiers injured suffered cuts, bruises and broken bones. A
Pentagon audit has found Vice President Dick Cheney's former
company may have overcharged the Army by $1.09 per gallon for
nearly 57 million gallons of gasoline delivered to citizens in
Iraq, senior defense officials say. Auditors found potential
overcharges of up to $61 million for gasoline that a Halliburton
subsidiary delivered as part of its no-bid contract to help rebuild
Iraq's oil industry.
12/12/03 Friday
Americans' demand for imported goods - everything from cars and
clothing to those hot toys for Christmas - climbed to an all-time
high in October, and in the process creating a record U.S. trade
deficit with China. Keiko, the killer whale made famous by the
"Free Willy" movies, has died in Norwegian coastal waters where he
remained after millions of dollars and a decade of work failed to
coax him back to the open sea, his caretakers said. The whale, who
was 27, died Friday afternoon after the sudden onset of pneumonia
in the Taknes fjord. Insurgents detonated a bomb alongside a U.S.
military convoy west of Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding
two others.
12/13/03 Saturday
Faced with the desertion of nearly half the new Iraqi army, the
U.S. military is thinking about raising the pay scale for Iraqi
soldiers as it trains more to join the force. The European summit
to forge a constitution for a united, post-Cold War Europe
collapsed after leaders failed to agree on sharing power within an
expanded European Union. The dealbreaker was a proposal to abandon
a voting system accepted in 2000 that gave Spain and incoming EU
member Poland almost as much voting power as Germany, which has a
population equal to those two countries combined. U.S. military
captured a man in the basement of a building in Tikrit, Iraq,
during raids seeking Saddam Hussein, and initial efforts to verify
his identity indicated he is the deposed Iraqi dictator. "It
certainly looks good," one senior U.S. official said, cautioning
more scientific testing, possibly DNA, was being done to try to
confirm the identity.
12/14/03 Sunday
"My name is Saddam Hussein," the fallen Iraqi leader told U.S.
troops in English as they pulled him out of a dank hole that had
become his home. "I am the president of Iraq and I want to
negotiate." U.S. soldiers replied: "Regards from President Bush."
The exchange was recounted by Maj. Bryan Reed, operations officer
for the 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division. Suicide bomber killed
eight Iraqi policemen in an attack on a station on Baghdad's
northern outskirts. It was revealed that late last winter, a
committee of vaccine experts designing this season's flu shot
considered their choices; they had two, and both seemed bad. Should
they stick with last year's formula, even though a new strain of
the bug was ominously building strength? Or should they try to make
a new vaccine and risk complications or delays that could result in
a shortage or maybe even no vaccine at all? In the end, the
committee voted 17-1 to bring back last year's version - causing
some of the influenza vaccine problems of this year.
12/15/03 Monday
American troops who came under attack killed 11 assailants in a
town 60 miles north of Baghdad. In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a
roadside bomb injured three soldiers. U.S. intelligence agencies
are turning their efforts toward rounding up remaining principals
of Saddam Hussein's regime who may be playing a more direct role
than the now-captured former president did in running guerrilla
operations in Iraq, officials say. Days after a scientific panel
urged the government to strongly warn pregnant women and children
about mercury levels in certain fish, the Bush administration is
proposing to give power plants up to 15 years to install technology
to reduce mercury pollution. The proposal, released by the
Environmental Protection Agency, would require immediate action in
some cases once the new regulations took effect a year from now.
12/16/03 Tuesday
President Bush's envoy on Iraq was upbeat after winning agreement
from Germany and France to ease Baghdad's huge debt burden - the
first concrete cooperation in rebuilding Iraq from two nations that
fiercely opposed the U.S.-led war. President Bush said Saddam
Hussein deserves the "ultimate penalty" for his crimes, but he
faced objections from Europe, the United Nations and the Vatican,
which are adamantly opposed to the death penalty. President Bush
signed a bill into law establishing federal rules for commercial
e-mail and penalties for unsolicited mass spamming. Known as the
CAN-SPAM Act, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited
Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 takes effect Jan. 1. The law
prohibits the use of false header information in bulk commercial
e-mail and requires unsolicited messages to include opt-out
instructions.
12/17/03 Wednesday
Flu sweeping across the country appears to be hitting unusually
hard at young children, and experts say occasional reports of
deaths among otherwise healthy youngsters are especially worrisome.
Some doctors in western states, where the disease has been worst so
far, say this may be the most intense flu season for children since
the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69. In Baghdad, guerrillas ambushed a
U.S. military patrol with small arms fire, killing one soldier from
the 1st Armored Division and injuring another. U.S. officials say
enough Al-Qaida operatives remain in Saudi Arabia to pull off
suicide bombings such as the ones that have hit in recent months;
and the State Department recommended that diplomats' families should
leave the country.
12/18/03 Thursday
European space controllers launched the Beagle 2 probe on its final
approach to Mars, a critical step in Europe's first mission to
explore the surface of the Red Planet. The British-built probe is
scheduled to land on Mars' surface on Christmas morning. Finding
Osama bin Laden remains enormously difficult, much more so than
capturing Saddam Hussein, say American intelligence officials,
lawmakers and analysts. Looking to jump-start his presidential
bid, Democrat John Kerry has loaned his campaign $850,000 and is
mortgaging his family home in Boston to provide a future infusion
of cash.
12/19/03 Friday
A voice purported to be Al-Qaida's second-in-command warns in an
audiotape that the terror group will target Americans "in their
homeland" and will drive the U.S. military from bases in the Middle
East. After winning concessions from Libya, President Bush urged
other nations to recognize that the pursuit of nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons brings not influence or prestige, but
"isolation and otherwise unwelcome consequences." In a trip
reminiscent of President Bush's Thanksgiving Day visit to Iraq,
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar left with a 16-member
delegation to meet with members of the 1,300-strong contingent in
Iraq, based in the southern town of Diwaniyah.
12/20/03 Saturday
A third of San Francisco remained without power after fire in an
electrical substation triggered a massive outage that snarled
traffic and forced frenzied holiday shoppers from malls. In an
apparent revenge campaign, attackers separately targeted two people
with close ties to the former regime of Saddam Hussein, killing one
in a hail of submachine gun fire, critically wounding another and
killing her 5-year-old son. In a significant switch in strategy,
U.S. troops plan to set up bases to provide reconstruction aid in
provinces plagued by Taliban attacks, the new U.S. commander in
Afghanistan said. Insurgents attacked pipelines and an oil storage
depot in three parts of Iraq, setting fires that blazed for hours
and lost millions of gallons of oil, officials and media reported.
12/21/03 Sunday
Security is being increased at airports, borders and ports as the
nation stands at "Code Orange," the second-highest alert level for
terrorist threats. The upgrade from "Code Yellow," or "elevated"
status, followed warnings from the government that al-Qaida
militants may be plotting attacks on America during the holidays.
Libya's prime minister told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that
the country wanted to change its "priorities and concentrate on our
economic affairs and economic development." Authorities blamed
illegal logging for killer weekend mudslides in the Philippines,
which were triggered by six days of pounding rains in provinces
near the Pacific Ocean late Friday to early Saturday. The
deforestation led to soil erosion on nearby slopes.
12/22/03 Monday
An earthquake rocked California's central coast Monday and shook
the state from Los Angeles to San Francisco, collapsing old
downtown buildings in this small town and killing at least two
people in the rubble. The 11:16 am quake - its magnitude measured
at 6.5 - pitched the roof of Paso Robles' 1892 clock tower building
into the street, crushing a row of parked cars in this San Luis
Obispo County town about 20 miles east of the epicenter. More than
40 other buildings were damaged. Ruling that some use of the
vaccine is experimental, a federal judge said that servicemen and
women should not have to take the vaccine unless they consent. Two
U.S. troops were killed in Iraq in a roadside bomb incident.
12/23/03 Tuesday
A mad cow disease scare in the United States spread quickly to
Asia, where nations including top U.S. markets Japan and South
Korea blocked the import of American beef products after a cow in
Washington state tested positive for the illness. Japan, the
number one importer of U.S. beef, imposed an indefinite ban and
planned to recall certain meat products already on the market,
while South Korea halted customs inspections of U.S. beef and
suspended sales for meat already on supermarket shelves. U.S.
helicopter gunships backed an artillery bombardment aimed at
insurgents in southwest Baghdad, as troops raided homes and
arrested a Sunni sheik said to be close to the most wanted man in
Iraq. A substantial majority of Americans skipped getting a flu
vaccine this year and many say they didn't feel they needed one or
feared a flu shot would do more harm than good, an Associated Press
poll found.
12/24/03 Wednesday
A federal appeals court temporarily blocked some of the Bush
administration's changes to the Clean Air Act, agreeing with more
than a dozen states and cities that claimed the changes could cause
irreparable harm to their environments and public health.
Residents of south central Washington town of Mabton rallied around
neighboring dairy owners as news leaked that a local farm, the
Sunny Dene Ranch, was the source of what could be the nation's
first case of mad cow disease. Soldiers from the Fourth Infantry
Division sang carols during a Christmas Eve service and supper in
their barracks in Tikrit; guerrillas mounted a string of bomb
attacks across Iraq, killing at least four American soldiers and
six Iraqi civilians.
12/25/03 Thursday
Scientists waited in vain for a sign that Europe's tiny Mars
lander, the Beagle 2, had survived a landing on the Red Planet.
Both a U.S. satellite and British radio telescope failed to pick up
its signal. Iraqi insurgents shelled a base northeast of Baghdad,
killing two U.S. soldiers and wounding four. A severe, magnitude
6.3 earthquake devastated the historic city of Bam of some 80,000
people in southeast Iran, leveling about 60 percent of the houses
in the area; a preliminary estimate said the death toll could reach
10,000. Authorities are looking for the source of infection for
the first case of mad cow disease in the United States now that a
British laboratory has provided initial independent confirmation of
the disease.
12/26/03 Friday
With the earthquake death toll in the thousands, Iran appealed for
international help and promised to waive visas for foreign relief
workers. Just days after discovering the nation's first case of
mad cow disease, the United States has lost nearly all of its beef
exports as more than a dozen countries stopped buying American
beef. U.S. agriculture officials said they have quarantined the
offspring of the slaughtered Holstein cow that tested positive for
mad cow disease amid an intensifying search for the stricken cow's
origins. Two U.S. troops were killed in bomb blasts and another
died in a traffic accident, bringing the death toll for U.S. troops
in Iraq this week to 11.
12/27/03 Saturday
Trudging through snow far deeper than they expected, in a
backcountry canyon in northern Utah, rescue crews searched for
three snowboarders feared dead in an avalanche, but found no trace
of them. In the biggest rebel attack since Saddam Hussein's
capture, suicide bombers and assailants with mortars and grenade
launchers blasted coalition military bases and the governor's
office in Karbala, in southern Iraq, killing 13 people and wounding
at least 172. The death toll included six coalition soldiers -
four Bulgarians and two Thais; six Iraqi police officers; and a
civilian. Investigators tentatively traced the first U.S. cow with
mad cow disease to Canada, which could help determine the scope of
the outbreak and might even limit the economic damage to the
American beef industry.
12/28/03 Sunday
More than 21,000 bodies have been retrieved since the earthquake
shook Bam and surrounding region in southeast Iran, according to a
provincial government spokesman. Near San Bernardino, California,
authorities found the bodies of five more people caught in a
mudslide that engulfed the St. Sophia church camp on Christmas, and
urged people in mountain areas scorched by fall wildfires to
prepare for heavy rains that could trigger more devastation. In
Iraq, roadside bombs in separate guerrilla attacks killed two U.S.
soldiers and two Iraqi children, including one explosion that went
off in a densely populated part of Baghdad.
12/29/03 Monday
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the United States will
ensure that other governments enforce a new American requirement
placing armed law enforcement officers on some flights to the U.S.
to prevent hijackings. Authorities said they are looking for links
between the Holstein infected with mad cow disease and a Canadian
cow that was diagnosed with the deadly illness in May. The FBI
warned police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs,
cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything
from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist
planning. U.S. agriculture officials so far are standing by their
detection system for mad cow disease, despite complaints from
consumer groups that testing is inadequate.
12/30/03 Tuesday
Officials insist Michael Jackson was treated with "courtesy and
professionalism" during his surrender to authorities last month.
The Bush administration is taking major steps to boost confidence
in the U.S. beef supply; the changes announced include a ban on
meat from cows that can't walk or stand on their own and a promise
to speed creation of a nationwide animal tracking system. As
survivors of Iran's earthquake scavenged for clothes and jostled
for handouts, President Mohammad Khatami thanked the United States
for aid but played down talk that Washington's contribution would
thaw frosty relations. "Humanitarian issues should not be
intertwined with deep and chronic political problems," Khatami
said.
12/31/03 Wednesday
From Times Square to the Las Vegas Strip, revelers gathered to ring
in 2004 under some of the tightest New Year's Eve security in U.S.
history, with snipers posted on rooftops and helicopters assigned
to patrol overhead. The mother of a teenager who once received a
life sentence for murdering a 6-year-old playmate has approved a
plea bargain that could allow the boy to be released in the next
month, said Richard Rosenbaum, Lionel Tate's attorney, and the
teenager had been awaiting his mother's approval and estimated his
client could be released from prison by Jan. 29. In Baghdad in
Iraq, a car bomb ripped through an elegant restaurant crowded with
diners at a New Year's Eve party featuring belly dancers, live
music and fine wine. The blast killed five Iraqis and wounded 35
others, including at least two Americans and one Briton.
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