“We saw the flashes of the bombs but nothing was bombed near us,” she recalled, speaking carefully as if her memory might somehow save her doomed husband. “We were safe.” But Dr Jawad Khadim al-Alia begs to disagree. “We rarely saw these types of tumours before the war,” he said, gently touching Matar’s right ear.
Dr al-Ali smiles a lot, although – from time to time – you notice tears in his eyes and realise that he might also be a spiritually broken man. It is also accused of breaching a 1995 undertaking on competitiveness by imposing restrictive deals on its customers: computer-makers and Internet providers.. MATAR ABBAS is dying. In the corner of the cancer ward at the Basra teaching hospital, the wreckage of his emaciated body seems to mock the broad, pale blue Shatt al-Arab river outside the window.

Its software is installed in 85 per cent of personal computers world-wide and accounts for 95 per cent of the software installed in PCs now sold.In a graphic illustration of the state of the market, Jim Barksdale, president of Netscape Communications, one of Microsoft’s main rivals, asked yesterday’s audience how many used PCs (almost all); and then how many did not use Microsoft’s Windows software (almost none). That, said Mr Barksdale, was a monopoly, and he called for rigorous enforcement of US competition (anti-trust) legislation to deal with it.Otherwise, he said: “Microsoft’s abuse of its monopoly power … will adversely affect the course of American commerce and communications in the information age.”In a lawsuit brought by the US Justice Department, Microsoft is accused of trying to consolidate its hold on the market for “browsers” – the software that controls access to the Internet. The might of the US computer industry – chief executives of Dell, Netscape, Sun Microsystems and others – turned up in person to testify.While the Republican chairman of the Senate panel, Orrin Hatch, denied that the hearing was intended to vilify Microsoft, proceedings developed rapidly into an inquisition into Microsoft’s market dominance. At issue is whether Microsoft’s market dominance is a just reward for its innovativeness (as it claims) or an impediment to free competition that should be curbed (as its rivals claim).

And “if we cannot innovate, then you know we will be replaced” as industry leader.Yesterday’s hearing, much of which was televised, had been keenly awaited as an opportunity for the political and legal arguments currently swirling around Microsoft to be aired in public. The plan is to create a range of French red wines – from pounds 5 to pounds 25 a bottle – “adapted to American tastes”.Whether or not American tastes are inferior to French tastes is a matter for endless argument. This depends on more intensive methods of wine-manufacture and boosts the importance of the type of grape used over the importance of the “terroir”.This appears to be precisely what Robert Mondavi intends to do with its new “Vichon Meditteranean” label: to apply American production methods to French raw materials. A COOLLY insistent Bill Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation and the richest man in America, denied yesterday that his company had, or sought, a monopoly of the computer software market or that it aspired to dominate the global information network, the Internet.