Rifle seized by Americans in Iraq

After months of talks, US and Iraqi officials had reached agreement on a pact that would require US forces to withdraw from Iraq by 2011. But all this could now change with the discovery of a rifle (pictured above) in Mosul, 390 km north of Baghdad.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is considering a draft deal with Iraq that would provide a new legal basis to keep American forces there after a UN mandate expires on December 31st, the Pentagon has said.

The rifle ‘goes a long way to showing that the threat to the United States is far from neutralised,’ Lt. Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee today. The situation in Iraq is still dire,’ he said.

Obama pledges more alliteration in War on Poverty

Tiergarten park, Berlin – Democratic nominee Barack Obama pledged more hope and handshaking, lovingkindness and leaflets for America’s poor if elected to office this November.

‘My heart is glad, and my flesh rests in hope,’ America’s premier orator told Berliners. ‘The sorrows of the poor shall be multiplied no more.’

Mr Obama continued: ‘It is an ineludible truth that the defeat of inertia is inestimable.’

If elected president, he could assure his fellow Americans, together with the people of the world, that his administration would feature ‘less provocation and more proximation, fewer promises and more profusion, profundity, progress and peace.’

These last remarks have led some supporters to hail Mr Obama as the first presidential candidate to lauch a War on War.

Mr Obama was speaking in front of the attractive Siegessaeule, or Victory Column, a 70 meter high monument that celebrates Prussia’s speedy obliteration of the Danish, Austrian and French armies between 1864 and 1870.