Iraq

Well, Australia has lost her first soldier in Iraq. And it couldn't have been a more futile death -- he shot himself while cleaning his gun! Of course this hardly compares to the 2386 soldiers the US has lost since the start of the war.

But then I started wondering -- "How many civilians have died?" The answer is somewhere between 34 000 and 39 000! Why such a vague number? As Rumsfeld said, "We don't do body counts on other people." Hence the new chotchkie in the side bar (which I hope will keep updating itself automatically) gives totals of the upper and lower estimates reported by any two news sources. Sounds pretty reliable to me.