North Korea has told the United States it would begin dismantling its nuclear weapons program in return for normalising ties between the two countries and a security guarantee.

The offer was the "new bold proposal" North Korea said it put to the US at talks in Beijing last week - where the communist state admitted to already having nuclear weapons and said it was prepared to make a "physical demonstration" of them.

But the US maintained its position that it would not begin negotiations with North Korea until the nuclear program was dismantled in a verifiable way.

Nevertheless, South Korean Government officials appear encouraged by the proposal, seeing a glimmer of hope in the crisis.

The attitude was exemplified by Seoul's National Security Adviser, Ra Jong-yil, who said the US and its allies should look at the "bright aspects" of the Beijing meeting.

Details of Pyongyang's proposal emerged yesterday in South Korea, with several daily newspapers quoting South Korean Government sources. The Munhwa Ilbo newspaper reported that, apart from a security guarantee, the North also wanted Washington to recognise its political system, and not hinder its economic development.

North Korea's official news agency carried a report from the ruling Worker's Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, indicating that the Government wants "rewards" for ending its nuclear program.

The paper said the nuclear issue would "not be settled easily" if the US kept urging North Korea "to accept its demand while insisting on its viewpoint that it never makes a concession because it is a big power."

"The US statement that there will be no provision of rewards even after the settlement of the 'nuclear issue' is, in essence, little short of opposing the conclusion of a non-aggression treaty between the two countries," it said.

South Korean officials were again frustrated yesterday in their attempts to confront North Korea over its nuclear arms, with negotiators from Pyongyang refusing to answer direct questions.

Seoul had hoped to use cabinet-level talks in Pyongyang to question North Korea about the nuclear issue. But the North has been adamant that it will only deal with the US on the nuclear crisis.

In a government building resembling an oversize mausoleum in Baghdad, Major Charlotte Herring, a US Army lawyer, faced a nervous Iraqi lawyer, Fatima Suaad Ibrahim. A translator sat between them. Ms Ibrahim, 36, told Major Herring she lived with her parents, three brothers and their families in a house in Baghdad.

Major Herring, a single mother who has served in the army for 13 years, told her the Americans were urgently seeking Iraqi lawyers and jurists. They want to rebuild the legal system and to understand the structure of a court and prison system that remained an enigma.

Major Herring, with the staff judge advocate's office of the 3rd Infantry Division, questioned Ms Ibrahim who described an Iraqi system in which bribery was common.

She said judges had insulted her because she was a woman. She also said she had adored her job as a lawyer because it gave her a sense of freedom. She also described the system as a shadowy world where loyalty to Saddam Hussein was often a question of survival.

Ms Ibrahim said that lawyers attended two-year institutes to become judges in criminal and civil courts. Serious crimes like murder were handled by three-judge panels called the Court of Sessions.
Asked how many judges were women, Ms Ibrahim replied: "Only five or six. "That will change," Major Herring said.

ALI Ismail Abbas, the Iraqi boy who lost both arms and both parents to an American rocket, was finally being evacuated last night from the Baghdad hospital where he faced almost certain death from his injuries.

Twelve-year-old Ali was being taken by the US military to Kuwait City, where the Kuwaiti Government has agreed to treat the burns covering more than a third of his body.

His rescue was organised by The Australian when a Perth reader, Tony Trevisan, telephoned to ask if he could help after reading in Monday's edition that Ali's nurse and doctors believed he could die any day from blood infections.

The Australian returned to the Saddam City hospital, where Ali was being treated, to discover that previous offers of assistance and attempts by foreign aid and media groups to get him to a safer environment had come to nothing.

The US military had offered to take Ali to a hospital ship to stabilise his condition, but was reluctant to take on responsibility for the child because he needed long-term care, including plastic surgery and prosthetics, and US officers felt a distant military hospital was not the best place for him.

Hospital director Mowafak Gorea had also rejected some offers of assistance, saying he had heard plenty of promises but seen no action, and did not want Ali taken far from the uncle and aunt who were now his guardians.

That left Ali in an unsterile ward of a hospital struggling to cope with scores of war-related casualties and attacks by armed looters.

With no telephone lines working in Baghdad, The Australian shuttled between US Navy medical officer Ed Martin and the hospital administrator before proposing neighbouring Kuwait as a solution.

Stewart Innes, a Kuwaiti-based Briton who has been working as The Australian's translator during the war, then used his contacts in Kuwait City to approach health and charity officials there.

Within hours, an assistant director of the Kuwaiti Health Ministry, Abdul Rida Abbas, had agreed to provide immediate help to save Ali's life and the longer-term care he desperately needed.

After the hospital and Ali's family had agreed, the US military offered to provide a helicopter flight to Kuwait, US medical officers using The Australian's satellite phone and hotel room yesterday to speak to Kuwaiti officials to organise the details of Ali's transfer.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was responding to wide coverage in the British media of Ali's plight by telling the House of Commons that every effort should be made to save the boy.

Mr Blair did not know that a haven in Kuwait and an evacuation flight for Ali had already been organised.

His minders in London apparently later suggested to reporters that Mr Blair had been involved, although the US military doctors insisted there had been no such role.

British television networks rushed to the hospital after Mr Blair's comments, creating a media crush as medical staff awaited the US ambulance.

Ali's parents and brother were killed in the night-time rocket attack that destroyed their home two weeks ago. Most of his six sisters were injured in the blast.

Ali's uncle was to travel to Kuwait City with him to care for him there. The Australian will assist him in Kuwait, and Mr Trevisan yesterday offered $US5000 ($8275) to help the uncle stay in Kuwait City for some time so Ali did not feel alone.

"I wanted to do anything I could after reading that story and seeing (John Feder's) photograph," Mr Trevisan said.

"It was a cruel photo to see, with those injuries and his beautiful brown eyes, but it was one of the most compelling photos I have ever seen."

As the war began, members of the House of Representatives gave speech after speech praising our soldiers, and passed a resolution declaring their support for the troops. Then they voted to slash veterans' benefits.

Some of us have long predicted that the drive to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy would lead to a fiscal dance of the seven veils. One at a time, the pretenses would be dropped — the pretense that big tax cuts wouldn't preclude new programs like prescription-drug insurance, the pretense that the budget would remain in surplus, the pretense that spending could be cut painlessly by eliminating waste and fraud, the pretense that spending cuts wouldn't hurt the middle class.

There are still several veils to remove before the true face of "compassionate conservatism" is revealed, but we're getting there.

I've always assumed that at some point the American people would realize what was happening and demand an end to the process. Now, though, I'm not so sure, and that wartime vote illustrates why.

A digression: we have entered a new stage in the tax-cut debate. Until now, the Bush administration and its allies haven't made any effort to explain how they plan to replace the revenues lost because of tax cuts. Now, however, party discipline is starting to crack: a few Republicans in the House and Senate, and many erstwhile supporters on Wall Street are beginning to notice how much we're looking like a banana republic.

That House budget was a halfhearted attempt to assuage those concerns; for the first time, the Republican leadership went beyond generalities about cutting spending to a list of specific cuts.

But the result wasn't very convincing: it still contained several dollars in tax cuts for every dollar of spending cuts. Furthermore, the list of cuts — in child nutrition, medical care for children, child-care assistance and support for foster care and adoption (leave no child behind!) — was clearly designed to suggest that the budget can be balanced on the backs of the poor, without any significant cuts in programs that benefit the middle class.

Aside from its mean-spiritedness, this suggestion is simply false: our deficits are too large, and our current spending on the poor too small, for even the most Scrooge-like of governments to offer additional tax cuts for the rich without raising taxes or cutting benefits for the middle class.

So it's not too surprising that the House budget failed to win over the doubters, though it's unclear what will happen next. In a bizarre piece of parliamentary maneuvering, wavering senators agreed to vote for a budget resolution that would allow $550 billion in tax cuts, in return for a gentlemen's agreement from Bill Frist and Charles Grassley that the actual sum won't exceed $350 billion.

I'm no expert on this, but given the underhanded tactics that were used to push tax cuts through in 2001 — the Senate's cap on the 10-year tax cut was evaded by making the whole thing expire after 9 years — I suspect that the spirit, if not the letter, of this agreement will somehow be violated.

But back to the amazing spectacle of the war's opening, when the House voted to cut the benefits of the men and women it praised a few minutes earlier. What that scene demonstrated was the belief of the Republican leadership that if it wraps itself in the flag, and denounces critics as unpatriotic, it can get away with just about anything. And the scary thing is that this belief may be justified.

For the overwhelming political lesson of the last year is that war works — that is, it's an excellent cover for the Republican Party's domestic political agenda. In fact, war works in two ways. The public rallies around the flag, which means the President and his party; and the public's attention is diverted from other issues.

As long as the nation is at war, then, it will be hard to get the public to notice what the flagwavers are doing behind our backs. And it just so happens that the "Bush doctrine," which calls for preventive war against countries that may someday pose a threat, offers the possibility of a series of wars against nasty regimes with weak armies.

Someday the public will figure all this out. But it may be a very long wait.

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, US scholars repeatedly urged the Defence Department to protect Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country.

Late in January, a mix of scholars, museum directors, art collectors and antiquities dealers asked for and were granted a meeting at the Pentagon to discuss their misgivings.

McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said on Sunday that he went back twice more, and he and colleagues peppered Defence Department officials with email reminders in the weeks before the war began.

"I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected," Dr Gibson said. Instead, even with US forces firmly in control of Baghdad last week, looters breached the museum, trashed its galleries, burnt its records, invaded its vaults and smashed or carried off thousands of artefacts dating from the founding of ancient Sumer around 3500 BC to the end of Islam's Abbasid Caliphate in 1258AD.

Asked on Sunday about the looting of the museum, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld blamed the chaos that ensues "when you go from a dictatorship" to a new order.

Iraq also has 13 regional museums at risk, including another world-renowned facility in the northern city of Mosul, as well as thousands of archaeological sites, ranging from the fabled ancient cities of Ur, Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon to medieval Muslim villages abandoned in the country's vast western reaches.

"To the extent possible, and as soon as though it were yesterday, someone needs to post border guards to intercept antiquities as they try to leave the country," said archaeologist and art historian John Russell, of the Massachusetts College of Art.

In January, a statement from the Archaeological Institute of America called on "all governments" to protect cultural sites during an expected conflict and in its aftermath. Dr Gibson and others said they were especially concerned because of the example of the 1991 Gulf War.

Allied forces scrupulously avoided targeting Iraqi cultural sites during the bombing of Baghdad 12 years ago.

But the end of that war kicked off a looting rampage, and eventually allowed systematic smuggling to develop. Artefacts from inadequately guarded sites were dug up and hauled away during the 12 years between the wars. "We wanted to make sure this didn't happen again," Dr Gibson said.

"They said they would be very aware and would try to protect the artefacts," Dr Gibson said, recalling January meetings with Pentagon officials charged with target selection and the protection of cultural sites.

Pentagon officials knowledgeable about those meetings referred questions to the public affairs office, which said the military had tried to protect the sites.

Since the 1920s, Iraq has required that anyone digging within its borders file a report with the museum. More recently, expeditions had to submit excavated material to the museum for cataloguing after each year's digging season.

Looters apparently burnt or otherwise destroyed most of those records last week, but Dr Gibson suggested scholars worldwide could duplicate the archive by copying their files and reports and resubmitting them to Iraqi authorities.

The museum's artefacts are another matter. Although the damage done is almost certainly catastrophic, Dr Russell said: "It's going to be a matter of weeks or months before we're going to be able to identify any particular thing". The cultural heritage of Iraq, the home of ancient Mesopotamia, encompasses the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids and Muslims, to name only the best-known civilisations.