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The Iraqi interior ministry announced that the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf was in the hands of police, who had arrested 400 fighters of the Mahdi army; but it was not so. Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the militia’s leader, said that he was willing to hand over the key to the mosque to senior Shia clergy, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who had gone to London for medical treatment. American troops backed by Iraqi government forces continued to close in on the mosque. Hundreds of thousands of refugees remained in camps in the Darfur region of Sudan because they feared to return to their villages lest they be attacked by Arab forces tolerated by the government; heavy rains added to their problems, while crops went unplanted. At talks in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, agreement could not be reached in sending a force to Sudan under African Union command. Two Russian aeroplanes crashed at the same time in different places, killing all 89 aboard. A version of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ was stolen by armed robbers from the Munch Museum in Oslo; another version was stolen from Norway’s National Gallery in 1994. The Socialist government of Spain announced plans to grant residence permits to about 800,000 illegal immigrant workers. Germany made plans to join Belgium, Holland and Finland in dropping the use of one cent and two cent coins, which cost more to produce than their face value. Researchers at the University of Mississippi found that blueberries cut down harmful cholesterol by means of a chemical called pterostilbene. China became a net importer of farm produce in the first six months of the year; grain harvests have been falling every year since 1998. The Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation was obliged to suspend live broadcasts because of a plague of fleas in its studios.
CSH
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