Saddam Hussein

President Bush said Wednesday that there was no proof tying Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks, amid mounting criticism that senior administration officials have helped lead Americans to believe that Iraq was behind the plot. Bush's statement was the latest in a flurry of remarks this week by top administration officials after Vice President Dick Cheney resurrected a number of contentious allegations about Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

When Vice President Joe Biden slipped into Baghdad this month to commemorate the end of eight bloody years of war in Iraq, there was one face conspicuously absent from the host of solemn ceremonies and farewell meetings he attended: that of Ahmad Chalabi. The Iraqi politician, who lived in exile before Saddam Hussein's ouster, is shunned by Washington these days. But there has never been a foreigner more crucially involved in a decision by the United States to go to war than Ahmad Chalabi.

Following is the text of the letter that President Bush wrote to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Jan. 5. The letter was refused Wednesday by Iraq's Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz when Secretary of State James A. Baker III tried to get him to deliver it. Aziz said it contained language inappropriate for correspondence between two heads of state.

When Suad Dabbagh and two other women graduated from Iraq's Judicial Institute in 1979, they became the first female judges in a nation run by Saddam Hussein. The novelty led to a deluge of news photo and interview requests. But progress was short-lived. By the mid-1980s, when Hussein's government once again stopped accepting women in its judicial study program, there were only six female judges. These days, after eight wrenching years of invasion, occupation and rebuilding, the outlook is different: There are 72 female judges working in Iraqi courts.

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq -- A fire at a hotel in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya, possibly triggered by a gas leak or electric fault, killed 30 people, including many foreigners, and injured 22, police said on Friday. A security official said the fire in Iraq's relatively stable and violence-free Kurdish region, where medium-sized international oil companies are starting to work, was not a terrorist act and the cause was under investigation. The fire broke out late on Thursday in the Soma hotel on a commercial street in the city centre and raged out of control for several hours.

We have heard little from Saddam Hussein since the cease-fire. He seems to have become Saddam but wiser. GARY A. ROBB Los Angeles

The rapid rebel takeover has left Libya's capital teetering, with young men firing antiaircraft weapons into the air and gunmen at checkpoints hustling anyone they regard as mildly suspicious into overcrowded detention centers. Some people are beginning to worry about an unflattering comparison: Baghdad. Food and gasoline are in short supply. Tripoli residents complain of outages of electricity, telephone service and water. Commercial life has ground to a dramatic halt, with nearly all shops and businesses shuttered.

Based on an autobiographical novel by Latif Yahia, an army lieutenant who was forced to become a body double for Saddam Hussein's notoriously decadent son Uday, "The Devil's Double" strives to be an absorbing and suspenseful adventure. Despite numerous pluses — Lee Tamahori's vigorous direction, handsome cinematography, outstanding production design, an impressive dual performance by Dominic Cooper as Uday and Latif — the film is more wearying than entertaining. That's because as a character, Uday is not intriguing, and Michael Thomas' script places the emphasis on him when Latif has by far the more interesting story, much of it not covered in the film.

Twenty years ago this week, despite fears of "another Vietnam," the House and Senate voted to authorize the use of force against Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait. After days of impassioned debate, the House supported President George H.W. Bush's policy by a comfortable margin. The Senate's 52-47 vote was the closest margin for war by a chamber of Congress in U.S. history. The anniversary of the Persian Gulf War, a watershed event in modern American history, has gone almost entirely unnoticed.

At least 60 people were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up beside a line of people applying for police jobs in Tikrit, the hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, officials said. An additional 160 people were wounded when the attacker set off his explosives in a crowd of applicants and their families, according to police and medical officials. Mosques called for blood donations and some of the wounded were sent to hospitals as far away as Mosul, about 120 miles to the north.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki sat in a gilded chair Tuesday at the start of the three-day Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice. He rose to greet his guests in a newly furbished palace, built under the late dictator Saddam Hussein. Politicians came in their elegant dark suits; sheiks approached in their brown robes; generals marched in crisp uniforms, emblazoned with swords and epaulets. All kissed him twice on both cheeks. And Maliki smiled and whispered into their ears, or chuckled.

"Braving Iraq," which comes from the PBS series "Nature" and airs Sunday on KCET, is a story mostly of people, water, reeds and birds (but also of frogs, water buffalo and bugs) in which the people, as they are wont to, play both villain and hero. The chief villain is Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator, who turned to desert 90% of one of the world's great wetlands, the 6,000-square-mile Mesopotamian Marshes . The representative hero is Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi native who left for the United States in 1978 and returned after the 2003 invasion to help get the water flowing again.

A growing number of countries and groups this week have urged Iraq to spare Saddam Hussein's former foreign minister from a death sentence, but there has been notable silence from one world capital: Washington. The European Union, the Vatican, the United Nations, Russia, Greece and Amnesty International have asked Iraq to reconsider a court decision to execute Tarik Aziz. They have cited the 74-year-old's age, poor health and his secondary role in Hussein's inner circle and questions about the fairness of his trial.