Six coalition soldiers and two CNN employees were killed in Iraq, as the UN said it was returning staff to study the feasibility of swift elections.
And in Washington, the White House denied ever warning that the Iraqi leader posed an "imminent" threat to the US.
Three US soldiers were killed on Tuesday and another critically wounded when a large explosion rocked the restive Euphrates valley town of Khaldiya, patrolled by the 82nd Airborne Division, the US military said.
The attack brought to 243 the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq since US President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.
Three coalition soldiers were also killed and three injured by a homemade bomb that hit a night patrol south of Baghdad. A US military spokesman refused to confirm their nationalities.
And a translator/producer and a driver working for the Cable News Network were killed in an ambush in Iraq on Tuesday, the US television company said.
A witness in Khaldiya, 95km west of Baghdad, said US troops also shot dead one Iraqi and wounded another after the explosion halted their convoy.
One Iraqi also died and "several" were hurt in the incident. And in Haditha, 250km west of Baghdad, an Iraqi policeman and an assailant were killed in an attack on a police station.
Despite the latest violence, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in a statement released in Paris that he had concluded "that the UN can play a constructive role in helping to find a way out from the current impasse.
"As soon as I have been persuaded that the Coalition Provisional Authority will take adequate measures to assure security, I will send a mission to Iraq as I have been requested," he said.
Annan pulled UN expatriate staff out of Iraq after an August bombing killed his envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others at the world body's Baghdad headquarters.
Coalition spokesman Charles Heatly told AFP that security measures demanded by the UN would be met.
The coalition has been placed on the defensive over its plan to hand over sovereignty by June 30 to an unelected government by growing support for a leading Shiite cleric's campaign for immediate polls.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most influential Shiite cleric, has indicated he will withdraw threats of civil unrest if a UN team rules there is insufficient time to organize fair elections before the handover.
Meanwhile in Washington, the White House -- smarting from the failure so far to find Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction -- denied it had ever warned that the Iraqi leader posed an "imminent" threat to the US.
Yet US President George W. Bush declined to repeat his prediction that US-led forces scouring Iraq will discover the prohibited weapons he cited as the chief reason for the March 2003 invasion.
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," Bush said during a brief public appearance with visiting Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
The case for war has drawn election-year scrutiny because the former head of the US-led effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, David Kay, said recently that he did not think such stockpiles existed on the eve of the invasion.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who also refused to say he thought Kay's successor would succeed, mounted a defense of the administration's pre-war warnings about the threat posed by Saddam.
"I think some in the media have chosen to use the word `imminent.' Those were not words we used. We used `grave and gathering' threat," he insisted.
But the alleged WMDs are not in Syria, as Kay also suggested, said top Syrian officials.
"Accusations leveled at Syria [in respect to Iraqi WMDs] are unfounded," Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Naji Otri told Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite TV.
Otri also said there was also no basis to charges that foreign fighters were crossing from Syria into Iraq to attack coalition forces.
"We have absolutely nothing to do with what is going on in Iraq now in terms of operations in response to the occupation of Iraq," he said.
Syrian Information Minister Ahmad al-Hassan on Sunday blasted Kay's allegations as "baseless deception and lies."
The aim "is to cover up their failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, the pretext they advanced for going to war," Hassan said.
In London, a judicial inquiry into the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly has cleared British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his government of "dishonorable conduct" or embellishing its September, 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, the Sun newspaper reported yesterday.
The tabloid said it had seen extracts of the conclusions of the report which Lord Brian Hutton was to make public at 12:30pm yesterday. Blair was to make a statement in parliament 90 minutes later.
Kelly, a respected Ministry of Defence expert on biological weapons, killed himself last July a few days after he was exposed as the source of a BBC radio report in May which alleged that Blair's government had "sexed up" a September, 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
His suicide hurled Blair into the worst crisis since taking office in 1997.
Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96. The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she lived. Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who cofounded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice. “The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
RSS