The agency quoted a source criticising the teams for doing inspections on Friday, which was a Muslim holiday.Access to presidential palaces and other sensitive sites has been the main sticking point since the weapons inspections resumed last week.The weapons inspectors have to give Iraq a clean bill of health before UN sanctions imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait can be lifted.- Reuters, Baghdad. The invitations were extended to UN Security Council member states.Al-Thawra urged them “to react positively”. But the paper said it expected the US would try to “prevent the Special Commission and the Security Council from agreeing to the Iraq initiative.Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, on Thursday ruled out allowing the current Unscom weapons inspectors in Baghdad to visit the palaces. “No one will be permitted to go there,” he said.Eight teams of UN arms monitors headed for Iraqi sites yesterday for the seventh consecutive day after Baghdad’s decision to allow UN inspection teams, including Americans, to resume their work. The official Iraqi news agency INA said that among them was a team of nuclear weapons specialists. Washington insists that UN inspectors charged with ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction must enjoy unfettered access to sites, while Baghdad says some areas are off limits to the UN Special Commission (Unscom), though other foreign experts will be allowed to visit them.
“Iraq wants to avert an explosion of the situation in the region as a result of America’s aggressive escalation,” Iraq’s ruling Baath party newspaper al-Thawra said.Iraqi media said Tareq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, had sent the UN an invitation for some 117 foreign experts to visit the palaces and presidential buildings to see if they contain any prohibited weapons. One of Lenin’s nieces is now claiming the loot, including interest..

Iraqi newspapers yesterday said Baghdad hoped a decision to allow foreign experts to check Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces for banned weapons would defuse its stand-off with Washington. It was from this account that he was to pay his membership dues to the local branch of the Bolshevik party.In his hasty departure, he took the party with him, but not the account, whose contents have been underpinning Swiss capitalism ever since. Among those not claimed since the Second World War lies an account in the name of Vladimir Ulyanov, containing the princely sum of 12.90 Swiss Francs. According to yesterday’s Neue Zuricher Zeitung, this Mr Ulyanov is the very same man who was later to rise to world fame as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

The revolutionary leader lived in Zurich until April 1917, when German agents worried about the course of the war on the eastern front bundled him onto a train heading for Petrograd. The rest, as they say, is history.
Lenin had opened his savings account with the Zuricher Kantonalbank shortly before that fateful journey. Swiss bank officials sifting through dormant accounts have made an unexpected discovery. Should the victim turn out to be Jewish with no descendants, the letter said, the painting, A dune landscape with two figures by a fence (left), by Jacob van Ruisdael, would be donated to “an appropriate museum or gallery in Israel.” If no evidence of Nazi looting exists and no victim can be found, the family would meet again “to settle the disposition of the picture.” The Globe said Sotheby’s listed the painting with a notation showing it had been acquired for a museum Hitler planned to build in the Austrian city of Linz.Guenther Henle, an industrialist and political architect of the post- war Christian Democratic government in Germany, bought the painting in 1961 from the Amsterdam dealer Pietre de Boer, who helped the Nazis obtain 300 paintings during the war.Ori Soltes, director of Washington’s National Jewish Museum, said the Henles’ effort “is as correct as one could hope for, and reflects a sensitivity for rapprochement.”AP – Boston. The letter was released to The Boston Globe, which first reported the painting’s dubious ownership background.

Peter Henle, son of the German collector Guenther Henle, said in a letter to the London branch of Sotheby’s that his family would look for the victim and return the painting if it was stolen.
It was to have been auctioned at next week. It has been suggested that some assets remain in British banks which could and should have been returned to victims of Nazism. And one official warned yesterday that the conference should not be seen as a “quick fix”. “At least 10 years’ minimum work is needed on an international scale before these questions are resolved.”. If the Nazis stole a valuable 17th-century painting during the Second World War, it will be returned or donated to a museum, the owners said after it was withdrawn from auction.