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Doubts remain over the safety of 400 medical and industrial radiation sources stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear complex in Iraq, despite an inspection completed in June 2003 by the International Atomic Energy Agency. There are fears that some may have been stolen, which may explain reports of locals suffering symptoms of radiation poisoning such as nosebleeds and diarrhoea. A proposal to outlaw the theft of a person's DNA is one of many recommendations in the British government's first ever White Paper on genetics, published in June 2003.

The now-ousted Spanish government immediately blamed the March 11, 2004 explosions in Madrid, Spain, which killed at least 200 people and injured many more, on the Basque separatist group ETA. However, the European press, as well as many ordinary people, questioned whether they instead were al-Qaeda's response to Spain's support for the United States in Iraq. Five British terrorist suspects held by U.S. authorities in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay for two years arrived back in Great Britain March 9, 2004 after having been released without charge. Their detention, wrote Great Britain's newspaper "Guardian" the following day, had been long, shameful and lawless, and they were never given either prisoner of war or criminal suspect status. Home Secretary David Blunkett, the paper continued, quoted the Lord chief justice Lord Woolf's call that in "defending democracy, we must not forget the need to observe the values which make democracy worth defending." The paper concluded: "It is good to have heard these calls. It would have been even better if they had been heard and acted on much earlier in the Guantanamo Bay debacle."

The article reports on violence in the British-controlled area around Basra, Iraq. A few protesters were shot dead and a police barracks stormed by British troops after Iraqi police arrested, and then refused to release, two of their comrades. It revealed the alarming potential for chaos in one of the country's most peaceable areas--which happens to be a heartland of the country's Shia rulers and the repository of most of Iraq's oil. Tensions started boiling on September 18th, when British soldiers arrested the Basra boss of the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery Shia nationalist, who twice last year set southern Iraq ablaze. They accused him of organising roadside bombs that have killed nine people, including two British soldiers, in the past two months. Basra may be the most tightly controlled of the four southern "British" provinces. Of the rest, Muthanna, home to a small Australian garrison, is fairly tranquil, but dominated by the local officials of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Farther east, much of Maysan, including the city of Amara, is out-of-bounds to British troops; the SCIRI's Badr Brigades and the Sadrists vie for control of Maysan as well as neighbouring Dhi Qar province, especially its main town of Nasiriya, where a small garrison of Italian troops is loth to leave its base. Britain hopes to quit Muthanna, and perhaps Maysan, this year, and Dhi Qar and Basra next year. As this week's violence shows, it will not be a glorious exit: nowhere in southern Iraq is the central government in firm control. Yet with so few forces to control so vast and vexed a region, the British have never pretended to be doing much more than paper over the cracks.

Reviews the British newspaper the 'Observer' and its anti-Arab stance against Iraq. Paper's support for the war in Iraq a sign that the magazine no longer abides by its former editor David Astor's principles of freethinking; Crimes against the Iraqi civilians in the form of economic sanctions; Veiled racism that propels every western attack on Arabs; U.S. and British stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Double standards.