South Korea says it has cancelled plans to send troops to northern Iraq because of security concerns and was considering deploying them to other areas in the war-torn country.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday he could not be sure that a June 30 date would be met for ending the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and handing sovereignty over to Iraq.
A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that "right now we are working toward a June 30 sovereignty transfer and that's our operating assumption."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has emphasized the importance of June 30. After a U.N. team visited Iraq last month, he issued a report saying, "Virtually every Iraqi with whom the mission met stressed that the date of June 30, 2004, is a deadline that must be respected."

Clear Channel stations were also prominent among those that dumped the Dixie Chicks from their playlists after Natalie Maines's dustup with Bush. If anything, the company's political affiliations are somewhat more consistent than its enforcement of good taste; last month the trade publication Broadcasting Cable cited Clear Channel's penchant for "tolerating shock jocks so raw they'd make Howard Stern blush."