- Arab leaders said Friday they can't ask one of their own -- Iraq's Saddam Hussein -- to leave office, despite advice from the United States and the feeling among many in the region that it's the only way to avert war. Privately, however, Arab diplomats said the idea has been under informal discussion ahead of an Arab League summit that convenes today in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik.
- A prominent Iraqi defector credited by President Bush and other senior U.S. officials with helping to reveal the full extent of Baghdad's secret biological, chemical and nuclear weapons told U.N. inspectors in 1995 that the vast majority of Iraq's deadliest weapons had already been destroyed, according to a confidential copy of the notes of the meeting. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the former head of Iraq's secret weapons program and a son-in-law of President Saddam Hussein, told a United Nations delegation in a secret meeting in Amman, Jordan, on Aug, 22, 1995, that Iraq had halted the production of VX nerve agent in the late 1980s and destroyed its banned missiles, stocks of anthrax and other chemical agents and poison gases soon after the Persian Gulf War.
- Iraqi forces guarding Baghdad are armed with chemical weapons and may have orders to use them, U.S. officials say, raising the grim prospect of U.S. troops closing in on the capital city and facing a battlefield filled with deadly agents. Because these Iraqi units are protecting the approaches to Iraq's largest city, the possibility of chemical weapons being used near populated areas also raises the possibility of unprotected civilians being exposed to such weapons, officials say.
- Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, whose contract expired Friday, said he had renewed it until June 30, just after his 75th birthday. "How could I leave tomorrow?" he said at a reception at Germany's U.N. Mission on Friday night.
The Olympian Online
• Graphic: U.S. presents evidence (USA TODAY)
• Preparing for chemical warfare (USA TODAY)
• Soldiers simulate war in Kuwait (USA TODAY)
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