Portal:Current events/2003 December 21

December 21, 2003 (Sunday)

"The American Soldier" is named as TIME magazine's "Person of the Year". The periodical's editors chose the anonymous soldier to represent the 1.4 million men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces. [1] Archived 2006-02-13 at the Wayback Machine [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Archived 2007-09-30 at the Wayback Machine
Citing increased "chatter" regarding potential terrorist attacks over the holiday period, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raises its terrorism alert level from "elevated" (yellow) to "high" (orange). [8] Archived 2005-04-08 at the Wayback Machine
A senior French police source claims Diana, Princess of Wales was pregnant when she was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997. A Clarence House spokesperson for The Prince of Wales refuses to comment on the issue. Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of Diana's partner Dodi Al-Fayed had long insisted that Diana was pregnant with Dodi's baby and that she was murdered to stop her from giving birth. [9] [10]
Quoting an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer, a report in the Sunday Express (Britain) claims that before Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops, he had already been discovered by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Kurdish forces had been alerted to his location by a member of the al-Jabour tribe whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday Hussein. [11]
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark presented 4,000 petition signatures to qualify for South Carolina's Democratic presidential primary ballot today. He's the second of the nine candidates for the Democratic nomination to file for the February 3 ballot. Campaign workers for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts gave the state Democratic Party a check for $2,500 last week to qualify.