Talk of Pardon for Libby Begins, An al-Qaida-Linked Group Claims to Hold Missing GI's & Death Penalty Sought for Saddam in Today's Details

-Officials in US President George W. Bush's administration turned down a 2003 Iranian offer to begin talks with the US, recognize Israel, and end support of Palestinian terror organizations, The Washington Post reported on Sunday. The proposal, which arrived via fax along with a letter of authentication by a Swiss ambassador, was ignored. Reports have circulated in the past that Iran had extended its hand to the US, but the document itself was only recently obtained by the Post - reportedly from Iranian sources - and confirmed as genuine by both American and Iranian officials. DETAILS

-Now that top White House aide Karl Rove is off the hook in the CIA leak probe, President George W. Bush must weigh whether to pardon former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the only one indicted in the three-year investigation. DETAILS

-An al-Qaida-linked group claimed Monday that it had kidnapped two American soldiers reported missing south of Baghdad, where 8,000 Iraqi and U.S. troops were conducting a massive search. DETAILS

-The Bush administration is lobbying to prevent Venezuela from securing an open seat on the U.N. Security Council because of concern that its leading South American rival could confound plans to step up pressure on Iran. Under United Nations rules, Latin American governments are entitled to pick a country from the region to fill the rotating seat that comes open next year. Venezuela has been campaigning for the post. DETAILS

-The U.S. Army has charged three soldiers in connection with the deaths of three Iraqis who were in military custody in southern Iraq last month, the military said Monday. DETAILS

-The prosecutor asked for the death penalty for Saddam Hussein and two of his co-defendants, saying in closing arguments Monday that the former Iraqi leader and his regime committed crimes against humanity in a "revenge" attack on Shiite civilians in the 1980s. DETAILS

-Sen. Dianne Feinsteinn of California said she and other Democrats would introduce a resolution this week calling for a phased withdrawal, noting that Bush signed a defense bill last year calling for that in 2006."Three years and three months into the war, with all of the losses, the insurgency, the burgeoning civil war that's taking place, an open-ended time commitment is no longer sustainable," she said. "We want to see an end to this thing. We want to transition the mission. That isn't cutting and running," Feinstein said on CNN's "Late Edition." DETAILS

-White House legend Helen Thomas, the longtime United Press International reporter who is now a syndicated columnist for Hearst, takes aim at her colleagues in a new book, saying that when it came to questioning President Bush in the weeks before the Iraq war, they were more lapdogs than watchdogs. "I ask myself every day why the media have become so complacent, complicit and gullible," Thomas writes in Watchdogs of Democracy? (Scribner, $25), due in bookstores this week. "It all comes down to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to fear among reporters of being considered 'unpatriotic' or 'un-American.' " DETAILS

-Mayor Ray Nagin asked the governor Monday to send National Guard troops to patrol his city after a violent weekend in which five teenagers were shot to death and a man was fatally stabbed in argument over beer. DETAILS