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The Iraqi government declared 60 days of emergency rule. After days of aerial attack, 15,000 American troops launched an assault on Fallujah with heavy street fighting. Women, children and old men had been told to flee the city. Earlier, rebels stormed three police stations in the towns of Haditha and Haqlaniyah, 140 miles north-west of Baghdad, killing 22 policemen, some of whom were lined up and shot. The day before, 17 policemen and 12 civilians had been killed in attacks in Samarra, and later 11 policemen were killed in Baquba. President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority spent days near death in a military hospital outside Paris. When President Bush was asked about the prematurely reported death of Mr Arafat, he said: ‘My first reaction is, God bless his soul.’ Military aeroplanes belonging to the government of the Ivory Coast launched an attack on the town of Bouake that killed nine of the 4,000 French peacekeepers in the divided country; France retaliated within hours, destroying on the ground Ivory Coast’s newly expanded air force. France then used military force to counter angry attacks on its 14,000 citizens in Ivory Coast. In Madrid, Judge Baltasar Garzon jailed two Algerians and a Moroccan, bringing to 33 the number held in investigations into an alleged plot to blow up the national court in the capital; the men have not been charged, but can be held for up to two years under Spanish anti-terrorist legislation. To celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, President Vladimir Voronin of Moldova addressed a rally of 4,000 in the capital, Chisinau, arranged by the Communist party, which came to power in Moldova in 2001. The dollar weakened until more than $1.29 could be bought for a euro. An 89,000-ton oil tanker, the Liberian-registered Tropic Brilliance, got stuck athwart the Suez Canal, blocking the passage of dozens of ships and defying the efforts of tugs to shift her. In western Uganda 194 hippopotamuses died of anthrax.
CSH
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