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Several rockets were launched into the al-Rasheed hotel in Baghdad, three floors below the room where Mr Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy civilian chief at the American Pentagon, was sleeping; an American was killed and 15 people were wounded. A day later, 12 were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the International Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad using a vehicle marked as an ambulance and 23 in attacks on four police stations. During the night, between the attacks, three American soldiers were killed, bringing to 112 the number killed since major hostilities ceased on 1 May. The United Nations secured commitments of £8 billion in loans and grants to help reconstruction in Iraq; the United States has pledged £12 billion, leaving a shortfall of £13 billion in the estimated amount needed. American-led forces and Afghan allies killed 20 members of al-Qa’eda during fighting in the Gomal district of Paktika province in south-eastern Afghanistan. Russian stocks fell by 10 per cent on the arrest of Mr Mikhail Khordorkovsky, the country’s richest man. Sony announced it was cutting 20,000 jobs around the world. Wild fires fanned by the Santa Ana wind destroyed more than 1,000 houses on either side of Los Angeles; the fires were fuelled by trees killed by swarms of small beetles. Margaret MacDonald, a 44-year-old British woman, was jailed for four years and fined £100,000 for running a business that employed 600 prostitutes throughout Europe. Police in Istanbul arrested four people in a bus converted into a mobile brothel; prostitution is legal in Turkey only in registered brothels. The 50,000 sheep stranded for 80 days in a ship in the Gulf, after being rejected by Saudi Arabia as too scabby, were landed in Eritrea after Australia agreed to pay its government to take them.
CSH
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