Washington, D.C.

Polls shows drop in Bush approval

The American people are increasingly disenchanted with President Bush’s effort in turning around the economy and solving the nation’s health care woes, as well as with efforts in Iraq, says a poll released Tuesday.

Bush’s approval ratings stood at 60 percent in the survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a significant drop from his 74 percent rating on April 9, the day the 40-foot statue of Saddam Hussein fell in Baghdad and U.S. commanders said the Iraqi ruler’s reign had ended.

The daily violence in Iraq since Bush announced an end to major combat weighs heavily on the public, with the number of Americans saying the military effort in Iraq is going very well down to 23 percent from 61 percent in mid-April.

The poll of 1,201 had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Washington, D.C.

American forces arrest Iraqi diplomat

U.S. forces have arrested the Iraqi diplomat alleged by some Czech officials to have met with the lead Sept. 11 hijacker five months before the attacks.

U.S. government officials said Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was arrested on July 2 in Iraq.

U.S. investigators have dismissed Czech accounts of an April 2001 meeting in Prague between suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta and al-Ani, who is widely believed to be an intelligence agent.

Some Czech officials stand by their claims, the only known link between Saddam Hussein’s government and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Other Czech officials retracted the account after U.S. investigators said that Atta was in the United States during the time he was supposed to have been meeting with al-Ani.

London

Ten percent of stolen Iraqi artifacts recovered

About 10 percent of the artifacts known to have been stolen from Iraqi museums after the war have been recovered, archaeologists said Tuesday.

Looters smashed many artifacts, making it difficult for the 44 staffers at the Baghdad museum to reassemble them and determine what has been stolen and what is damaged, said Nawal al-Mutawalli, director of Iraq’s museums.

She said the list of items missing from storage rooms of Baghdad’s museum alone now stood at 13,000. In addition, 47,000 pieces are missing from the museum’s exhibition hall.