je crois pas que quelqu'un ait déjà mis en ligne sa press review, ms au k ou il y ades intéressés...

To offer one’s condolences to sb : présenter ses condoléances à qun
To taunt: railler, persifler -)to taunt sb with racial abuse: accabler qun d’injures racists Taunting: railleries, persiflage, sarcasmes
The times:Saddam Hussein is dead
Saddam, who ruled Iraq from 1979 to 2003, was sentenced to death in November and lost his appeal in the last week of September.
He was buried near the graves of his sons Uday and Qusai, which are in Awja's main cemetery. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gunbattle with American forces in Mosul in July 2003.
Saddam Hussein die swiftly, without showing any sign of remorse. Saddam Hussein was buried in his home village of Awja in the early hours of December, 31st, 24 hours after his execution.
While government officials had indicated he might lie in a secret, unmarked grave for fear the site could become a shrine and focal point for rebels, it appears they have taken the view that the cemetery can be kept under surveillance.
2,000 Iraqis - including dozens of relatives and other mourners such as the governor of Salaheddin province, the chief of Saddam's tribe of Albu Nasir, along with many other clansmen, some of them crying and moaning , attended the burial in Tikrit
Elsewhere his death was greeted with joyous scenes, with people thronging the streets of the country's major cities.
The former dictator met his fate calmly, although it emerged today that he had been taunted minutes before his death and had a frosty exchange with one of his guards. A new video showed Saddam exchanging taunts with onlookers before the gallows floor dropped away.






The video was apparently shot with a camera phone and posted on a website. The footage showed Saddam appearing to smile at those taunting him. It also showed a close-up of Saddam's face as he swung from the rope.
The Sunday Times December 31, 2006

'I watched Saddam die'
MARIE COLVIN

THE knock on the door came just before 6am. Saddam Hussein’s executioners were disguised with black balaclavas. He spent his last minutes yesterday in the sordid bowels of Iraqi military intelligence headquarters, once home to his own torturers and killers.



Just as the dawn call to prayer was beginning over the city, he was led, shambling in leg irons, to the scaffold to pay the price for his crimes against the Iraqi people.“We took him to the gallows room and he looked like he wondered what was going on,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government’s national security adviser, who saw him die. “He looked at the gallows not believing what was going to happen.”As the world reacted with mixed jubilation and condemnation to the hanging, Rubaie revealed that the deposed dictator muttered as he was taken to his death: “Do not be afraid; it is where we all go.” Rubaie was among the 15 people in the ill-lit room that was Saddam’s last sight on earth. The former Iraqi dictator showed no remorse, said Rubaie, speaking by telephone from Baghdad. “He was respected throughout before and after the execution. We followed rigorously international and Islamic standards.” After the dramas of Friday night, when Iraqi officials said Saddam’s death was imminent but his lawyers tried to stay his execution with an appeal to a United States court, his fate was set early yesterday. Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, had signed the death warrant before going to celebrate his son’s wedding, and the presidential council had endorsed it.
The American jailers who had custody of Saddam were ordered to surrender him to the Iraqi government. They offered him tranquillisers but Saddam refused. “We received physical custody of Saddam Hussein around 5.30am from the coalition forces, and we took over and he became ours,” said Rubaie.
As US troops stood guard outside, Saddam was first led to a sparse and unheated holding room in the bowels of the headquarters of Iraqi military intelligence. It would not have been lost on him that his own security forces had tortured and killed many people in the same grim building. Saddam was left for about half an hour to contemplate his fate. Iraqi law provides that a condemned man be allowed a final cigarette and a meal before his execution.
“He was handcuffed and we took him and sat him down,” said Rubaie. “There was a judge, a deputy general, deputy minister of justice, deputy minister of interior, a couple of other ministers, myself and a doctor.” After formalities they took him through “a huge file” of documents detailing his trial for crimes against humanity.
“The judge took him through the conviction. He was silent until he saw a video camera, and then began shouting slogans such as ‘God is great’. He started his rhetoric: ‘Long live Islam, down with Persia’, down with this and that. He started shouting his head off.” Rubaie made a last gesture of mercy. “His handcuffs were a little bit tight, and hurt him, and I instructed the guards to loosen them.”
The formalities over, the four masked executioners stepped forward. Short, tubby and dressed in leather jackets, they looked more like Al-Qaeda killers in an amateur terrorist video than those responsible for carrying out the sentence of death on a former head of state. Even though Saddam had shrunk in stature since the days of his pomp, he towered over them.
He had dressed for death in clothes sewn by his personal Turkish tailor: black trousers, shined black shoes, a starched white shirt, black pullover and a black wool overcoat that protected him against the deep chill of his remaining minutes in the execution suite. His hair was dyed his signature black, but he had heavy bags under his eyes.
In sight of a new hemp noose hanging from the ceiling, the executioners removed his handcuffs to tie his hands behind his back. As he stood close to the trapdoor one wrapped a black scarf around his neck to shield it from rope burns.
When they went to put the black hood over his head, he mumbled: “That won’t be necessary.” The noose was slipped over his head.


He stood looking almost bewildered, and an executioner awkwardly tightened the hand-coiled knot of the noose on the left side of his neck.
Even on the brink of death Saddam had not forgotten the video camera. Just before he dropped through a trapdoor on a platform surrounded by red railing, he shouted the Muslim profession of faith, “God is great and Muhammad is his prophet” and “Palestine is Arab”.
“He was standing with the rope round his neck,” said Rubaie. “The executioner started reading verses from the Koran, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger’. He repeated it twice and [Saddam] went down in no time.” The hangman pulled a lever, and Saddam dropped silently about 3ft through a metal trapdoor. It was 6.10am. Rubaie said he died instantly. “It was so, so quick, totally painless and there was no movement after that.”
Sami al-Askari, who represented the prime minister at the hanging, said he “heard his neck snap”.
Saddam hung from the rope for about 10 minutes, watched by the audience of about 15 people who could see him dangling under the platform. A doctor checked that his heart had stopped, then one of the executioners untied him. There was blood on the rope. The executioners put him in a white body bag and took photographs as proof for diehard loyalists that Saddam was dead. Iraqi television broadcast a still photograph of the last image of the dictator, his neck at an unnatural angle, sticking out of the white shroud.
Munir Haddad, an Iraqi appeals court judge, also witnessed the execution. He said afterwards: “One of the guards present asked Saddam Hussein whether he was afraid of dying. Saddam said, ‘Why would I? I spent my whole life fighting the infidels and the intruders.’
“Another guard asked him, ‘Why did you destroy Iraq, and destroy us? You starved us, and you allowed the Americans to occupy us’. His reply was, ‘I destroyed the invaders and . . . I destroyed the enemies of Iraq, and I turned Iraq from poverty into wealth’.
“Saddam was normal and in full control. He said, ‘This is my end. I started my life as a fighter and as a political militant. So death does not frighten me’.
“He said, ‘We’re going to heaven, and our enemies will rot in hell’.
“When he was taken to the gallows, the guards tried to put a hood on his head, but he refused. Then he recited verses from the Koran. Some of the guards started to taunt him.”
The guards chanted the name of the Shi’ite firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. “Who is Moqtada?” — Saddam sneered.
“A cleric who was present asked Saddam to recite some spiritual words,” Haddad said. “Saddam did so, but with sarcasm. These were his last words, and then the cord tightened around his neck and he dropped to his death.”
The daily telegraph
Gordon Brown will preside over an exodus of Tony Blair's allies from No 10 and usher in "humbler and more austere" government.


The Chancellor, the apparently unassailable favourite to succeed Mr Blair as both Labour leader and prime minister, is preparing to bring up to seven Labour rising stars into the Cabinet after he takes over, probably in June.
He will also seek to return power to civil servants, in contrast to Mr Blair who has relied on a clique of advisers, such as the former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, and his chief of staff Jonathan Powell.
Several senior ministers are expected to bow out with Mr Blair, including John Prescott, his deputy, John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, Hilary Armstrong, the social exclusion minister, and Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor. All are key supporters of Mr Blair.
In their places are likely to come three Brown allies — Ed Balls, his wife Yvette Cooper, and Ed Miliband, brother of David Miliband, the Environement Secretary. Others tipped for advancement include young Blairites James Purnell and Liam Byrne. Margaret Beckett may become leader of the House of Lords, paving the way for Jack Straw to return to the Foreign Office.
John Reid, still a possible leadership contender, is likely to retain the Home Office while Alastair Darling, the Trade Secretary, is the "strong favourite" to go to the Treasury.
Mr Brown is said to be planning a "humbler" style of leadership than Mr Blair, currently in the spotlight over his New Year holiday at the Miami home of the Bee Gees popstar, Robin Gibb. "You will not see the new prime minister holidaying at the home of a Bee Gee or Sir Cliff Richard," said a senior MP last night.
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The Guardian: Scientists find way to slash cost of drugs

Indian-backed approach could aid poor nations and cut NHS bills
Sarah Boseley, health editor
Tuesday January 2, 2007

Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them to market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies, enabling millions in poor countries to be cured of infectious diseases and potentially slashing the NHS drugs bill.
Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, based at Hammersmith hospital, calls their revolutionary new model "ethical pharmaceuticals".
Improvements they devise to the molecular structure of an existing, expensive drug turn it technically into a new medicine which is no longer under a 20-year patent to a multinational drug company and can be made and sold cheaply.
The process has the potential to undermine the monopoly of the big drug companies and bring cheaper drugs not only to poor countries but back to the UK.
Professor Shaunak and his colleague from the London School of Pharmacy, Steve Brocchini, have linked up with an Indian biotech company which will manufacture the first drug - for hepatitis C - if clinical trials in India, sponsored by the Indian government, are successful. Hepatitis C affects 170 million people worldwide and at least 200,000 in the UK.
Once the drugs have passed through clinical trials and have been licensed in India, the same data could be used to obtain a European licence so that they could be sold to the NHS as well.
Professor Shaunak says it is time that the monopoly on drug invention and production by multinational corporations - which charge high prices because they need to make big profits for their shareholders - was broken.
"The pharmaceutical industry has convinced us that we have to spend billions(=milliards) of pounds to invent each drug," he said. "We have spent a few millions. Yes, it will be a threat to the monopoly that there is.
"Why should we be completely dependent on them when we do all the creative stuff in the universities? Maybe the time has come to say why can't somebody else do it? What we have been struck by is that once we have started to do it, it is not so difficult."
The team's work on the hepatitis C drug has impeccable establishment credentials, supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and help and advice from the Department for Trade and Industry and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
But the professors' ethical pharmaceutical model is unlikely to find much favour with the multinational pharmaceutical companies, which already employ large teams of lawyers to defend the patents which they describe as the lifeblood of the industry.
One industry insider envisaged legal challenges if the new drugs were not genuinely innovative. It could become "a huge intellectual property issue", he said.