Dawn Patrol

• Agents Check Report of Grenade Near Bush

  The Secret Service was investigating a report Tuesday that a hand grenade was thrown at the stage during President Bush's speech in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

  • Grenade Found Near Bush Was Dud: Georgian Officials

    A hand grenade was found at a square in Georgia where President Bush made a public speech on Tuesday, but it was incapable of exploding, a top Georgian security official said on Wednesday.

• North Korea hurls taunts at Bush

  North Korea intensified its nuclear confrontation with the United States on Tuesday, calling President George W. Bush "Hitler, Junior," while South Korea warned the Communist state against taking "extreme measures," in an apparent reference to a nuclear test.
  
  

  • China Rules Out Using Sanctions on North Korea

    The announcement appeared to undercut the Bush administration's strategy to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

• Suicide Attack Kills 30, Wounds 35
  
  A man with explosives hidden under his clothes set them off while standing in a line of people waiting outside a police and army recruitment center in northern Iraq on Wednesday, killing 30 people and wounding 35, police said. In Tikrit, meanwhile, a suicide car bomb exploded

• Car bomb kills 26 in Tikrit

  Car bombs reportedly struck three Iraqi cities Wednesday, killing at least 26 people, as U.S. troops battling insurgents near Iraq's border with Syria encountered uniformed fighters.

  • Gunmen Kidnap A Governor In Iraq

    Gunmen kidnapped the newly elected governor of Anbar province yesterday, demanding that U.S. forces stop their offensive against foreign insurgents in western Iraq in return for his release. U.S. officials said they had no plans to end their offensive in the area around the town of Qaim, near the Syrian border.

  • U.S. Forces Push Toward Syrian Border

    Capitalizing on a lull in fighting Tuesday, hundreds of U.S. Marines pushed through a lawless region on the Syrian frontier after intense battles along the Euphrates River with well-armed militants fighting from basements, rooftops and sandbag bunkers.

  • Iraqi insurgents take U.S. troops by surprise

    U.S. forces on an offensive across a remote desert region in western Iraq have encountered surprisingly stiff resistance from insurgents who have established a base of operations near the Syrian border.

  • 'They Came Here to Die'

    Screaming "Allahu Akbar'' to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade

  • Clashes Near Syria Begin To Wane

    Intense fighting in a string of towns along the Syrian border in northwestern Iraq showed signs of subsiding Tuesday, as U.S. forces wound down an assault on foreign insurgents

  • U.S. Says Battle Reveals Foreign Insurgency Link

    U.S. Marines rolling though towns on the upper Euphrates River said yesterday that they found dead insurgents wearing bulletproof armor and foreign clothes. In the towns, they reported finding caches of weapons and suicide-bomb vests, as well as car bombs rigged to explode.

• Benefit For Wounded Soldiers Passes

  ...A plan to aid severely injured soldiers who face long recoveries and unplanned expenses won its final congressional approval Tuesday and a presidential signature is expected shortly afterward.

  • New York Man's Website Labels Military Personnel 'Leeches' and 'Scumbags' (News Video- 5/11/05 at link )

    ...Crook says the idea behind his site was "to call attention to what I feel is excessive pay and benefits given to our military."

    • Congratz to all who complained.

      Forsake The Troops is no longer a customer of SMIS Hosting. Their website is no longer hosted by our company. We intitally gave them the courtesy of more than 24 hours' notice to terminate their account, but due to their threats and vile behavior, which violated our TOS, they were removed as of 5pm on Thursday, February 24th, despite a grass-roots campaign to attempt to flood our e-mail boxes and telephone lines with cries of "Save our Ship!"
      

    • HE'S BACK... More here

• Ethnic Rifts Tearing at al-Qaida

  American and Pakistani intelligence agents are exploiting a growing rift between Arab members of al-Qaida and their Central Asian allies, a fissure that's tearing at the network of Islamic extremists as militants compete for scarce hideouts, weapons and financial resources, counterterrorism officials say.

• Air Force Elite Troops Find Ways to Adapt

  In the shadow of their better-known Army and Navy counterparts, Air Force commandos have been sent into Iraq and Afghanistan so frequently that strains are showing in many corners of their secretive world.

• Marines Insist Vests Offer Designed Protection

  The Marine Corps flatly rejects charges that the protective vests issued to thousands of deployed Marines don't offer the ballistic protection they were designed to provide, but is recalling 5,277 of them to remove doubts about their effectiveness.

• Military deployment unchanged despite kidnapping: Japan

  Japan says the kidnapping of a Japanese national in Iraq will not affect its military deployment there. The Islamic militant group, Army of Ansar al-Sunna announced Monday through its website

• Taliban Leader Rejects Afghan Amnesty Offer

  Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has rejected an offer of amnesty and ordered his men to continue fighting U.S. and Afghan government forces, a Taliban spokesman said yesterday.

• Iran Making First Locally Built Submarine

  Iran on Tuesday officially launched production of its first locally built submarine, a craft that can fire missiles and torpedoes at the same time, state-run television reported.

• BAM RECONSTRUCTION AT A TURNING POINT, SAYS DEPUTY CULTURE MINISTER

  Sixteen months after the earthquake that devastated the historical Iranian city of Bam, reconstruction work is now at a "turning point", said Seyed Mohammad Beheshti, head of the country's Cultural Heritage Organisation (ICHTO) in an interview with Adnkronos International (AKI). Attending a meeting of international experts in Rome on the rehabilitation of Bam and, in particular, its famed 2000-year-old citadel, Beheshti said that it was important for countries with the right expertise to help Iranians preserve their cultural heritage.

• Pakistan likely to take legal actions: Desecration, cartoon

  The government on Tuesday hinted at the possibility of initiating legal actions against reported desecration of the Holy Quran by the US military interrogators and publication of an allegedly derogatory cartoon about Pakistan by an American newspaper.

• Afghans protest over reported U.S. Koran abuse

  Several thousand Afghans chanting "Death to America" protested for a second day on Wednesday over a report that U.S. interrogators in Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran.

• U.S. Denounces Desecration Reports

  The State Department described Tuesday as "reprehensible" reports that U.S. troops at the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have desecrated copies of the Quran.

• Congress Approves Additional $82B for Wars

  Congress approved an additional $82 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan and combating terrorism worldwide on Tuesday, boosting the cost of the global effort since 2001 to more than $300 billion. The Senate approved the measure by a 100-0 vote Tuesday. The House easily approved the measure last week. It now goes to President Bush for his signature, which is certain.

• Supreme Court urged to protect reporters from jail time

  The Supreme Court has been asked to throw out contempt orders against two journalists who refused to reveal sources in the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity

• Schwarzenegger not mad at moon

  California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does not want to destroy the moon. A U.S. political commentator has admitted he failed to check his facts when he erroneously reported on the MSNBC cable news network last month that Schwarzenegger had jokingly advocated doing away with the moon.

• Schiavo findings won't be rushed

  People around the world have talked about the life and death of Terri Schiavo, but Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon hogmartin will get the last word.