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The new 25-member European Union has heralded its historic expansion with celebrations across the new bloc. The 15 old members welcomed in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia at midnight.
The most high-profile festivities took place in Ireland, current holder of the rotating EU presidency.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern welcomed the new members and hailed a "day of hope and opportunity".
In bright spring sunshine, the (…)

A year on from ’Mission Accomplished’, an Army in Disgrace, a Policy in Tatters and the Real Prospect of Defeat
Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary Iraqis. In Baghdad Patrick Cockburn sees the battle for hearts and minds comprehensively lost.
By Patrick Cockburn
Wisps of gray smoke were still rising from the wreckage of four Humvees caught by the blast of a bomb which had just killed two US soldiers and wounded another five. It seemed they had been caught in a (…)

A landmark World Trade Organization ruling this week that U.S. cotton subsidies cause artificially low international prices is leading to predictions that cotton producers from Brazil to Western Africa may now have an incentive to increase production.
By Alan Clendenning / AP Business Writer
LEME, Brazil — In an annual ritual that has barely changed since the 1930s, legions of farm workers pick cotton by hand while creaky old flatbed trucks stuffed with the harvest rumble to local (…)

The Ministry of Defence has launched an investigation into allegations that British soldiers have been pictured torturing an Iraqi prisoner.
The photographs, obtained by the Daily Mirror newspaper, show a suspected thief being beaten and urinated on.
Downing Street swiftly condemned the pictures, echoing concerns it earlier expressed over images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US troops.
The pictures involving American troops provoked international outrage.
They included a hooded (…)

By LEE KEATH The Associated Press Friday
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Volunteers hunting for bodies in Fallujah find a woman and her daughter in their home, killed in the siege but undiscovered for days. Chanting mourners bury two boys caught in the crossfire of a Baghdad gunfight. A morgue in Basra overflows with torn and burned bodies from a suicide bombing.
Victims - young and old, women and men, insurgents and innocents - have been piling up day by day, making April the deadliest month for Iraqis (…)

This evening, ABC’s Nightline broadcast will be devoted to reading a list of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq. But some viewers won’t be able to see the program: The Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns several ABC affiliates, has announced that it will not air Nightline on its stations tonight.
A statement on Sinclair’s website explains: "While the Sinclair Broadcast Group honors the memory of the brave members of the military who have sacrificed their lives in the service of our (…)

American truck driver flees captors three weeks after being abducted
Eleven U.S. troops were killed in attacks across Iraq, including a mortar barrage today in which six Americans died and 30 others were wounded. Meanwhile, kidnapped U.S. truck driver Thomas Hamill escaped his Iraqi captors, prying open a door of the house where he was held when an American patrol passed by.
Running a kilometre to the patrol, Hamill identified himself and led the soldiers to the house, where two Iraqis (…)

Doug Lorimer
"Fallujah will be their Stalingrad. The Euphrates will be a river of their blood. Now the resistance is spreading all over Iraq and everyone is coming to Fallujah to help us. It will not be conquered." These comments by Amar Abbas, a Fallujah electrical engineer, were quoted by the April 26 London Daily Telegraph.
Abbas and other members of his extended family had been forced to flee Fallujah when the US marines launched their offensive on April 5 to retake the city, which (…)

Jim Wolf, Reuters
The top U.S. military officer declined on Sunday to rule out the possibility that U.S. forces might be guilty of a pattern of abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had not yet read an Army report said to document "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings and sodomy.
Asked how he could be sure that any such abuses were not "systemic," Myers said on the CBS (…)

Steve Mckenzie
THIRTY cases of torture and murder by British and American troops against Iraqi POWs are being investigated by defence chiefs.
The probe will examine photos of members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, who appear to be urinating on a terrified Iraq captive.
The dossier of terror includes :
Claims that POWs were thrown to their deaths from a bridge. A videotape of the killings is said to have been destroyed.
The drowning of 16-year-old Ahmad Jabbar Kareem, who was (…)