World News 22-12-2004 Blair Flies To Baghdad who: Tony Blair what: Flies to Iraq in secret where: Baghdad, Iraq when: Yesterday snippet: "Tony Blair yesterday became the first serving British prime minister to visit Baghdad since Stanley Baldwin in 1924," says The Guardian, "but his predecessor`s arrival can scarcely have been as dramatic." "Even by his own audacious globetrotting standards, it was some entrance by Tony Blair as his fleet of helicopters whisked him low over the suburban slums of Baghdad," says The Scotsman`s Jon Smith. "They hurtled past battered mosques and crumbling monuments to the dictator he had played a major part in helping to topple from power." "Only when he appeared with Dr Allawi at a press conference at the Iraqi Prime Minister`s office, broadcast live by satellite television, did the visit become public," says Philip Webster, political editor of The Times. "Mr Blair had suddenly materialised in the middle of one of the world`s most perilous cities." Meanwhile, the BBC reports that a bomb in the dining hall of a US military base in Mosul, north Iraq, killed 20 Americans and two Iraqi soldiers "in the deadliest single attack against the US since the start of the war in Iraq." "A fireball enveloped the top of the tent, and shrapnel sprayed into the diners," says The Independent. "Amid the screaming and thick smoke, soldiers turned their lunch tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot... Outside, scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters. Others wobbled around the tent and collapsed, dazed by the blast." But there was good news from Iraq yesterday with the release of two French journalists held hostage by Islamic extremists since August 20th. Christian Chesnot, 37, and Georges Malbrunot, 41, have been handed over to the French authorities in Baghdad and, says The Times, "will receive a heroes` welcome when they land in Paris today, with [President Jacques Chirac] expected to interrupt a holiday in Morocco to greet them." [... more]

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