The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Baghdad - The man known as "Chemical Ali" will be the first of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's lieutenants to go on trial for war crimes, Iraq's defence minister said Wednesday. Ali Hassan al-Majid is a cousin of Saddam who served as one of his top advisers leading up to the dictator's ouster at the hands of a U.S.-led military campaign in 2003. Al-Majid's opponents gave him the nickname "Chemical Ali" for his role in chemical weapons attacks on Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988. He was Iraq's defence minister from 1991 to 1995. St. Paul, Minn. - A retiree is being treated as a hero after getting into a tussle with a 40-year-old man who was loudly using four-letter words on his cellphone at a bagel shop in Minnesota. Bill Stevenson, 79, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in St. Paul, Minn., Tuesday, receiving three months of probation for trying to take the phone away from Jesse Tabor. "I've had more than 30 calls and letters and e-mails, and I've not had one negative call. They're all on my side." Washington - The first full test in nearly two years of a multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile shield failed Wednesday when one missile launched but a second shut down before leaving the ground, the Pentagon says. The Pentagon, which spends about $10 billion US a year on the U.S. ballistic missile defence system, blamed an "anomaly" of unknown origin.
