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An article posted on an Islamist Web site sparked off wide-spread speculation over the fate of Al Qaida Leader Osama bin Laden on Friday.
According to Reuters reports, an article on www.islam-minbar.net Web site started with a stunning declaration - bin Laden had died.
A posting on an Islamist Web site stirred speculation over the fate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and prompted a flurry of denials yesterday that the world's most wanted man is dead.
An audiotape purportedly by America's most-wanted insurgent in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, posted Friday on the Internet threatens more attacks against U.S. forces and urges followers to be wary of any American attempts at dialogue.
Insurgents set off at least 17 bombs in Iraq yesterday, killing at least 50 persons, including three US soldiers, in a series of attacks aimed at shaking Iraq's newly formed government.
Two years have passed since President Bush stood atop an aircraft carrier (May 1, 2003) and announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Since that ''mission accomplished'' photo-op, more than 1,400 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. And just recently, the Pentagon acknowledged that insurgent attacks have again increased to last year's levels of some 400 attacks per week.
A skull with pink and white dentures belongs to an old woman, investigators said. A skeleton nearby was that of a teenage girl, still clutching a brightly colored bag of possessions.
By Al Pessin. The US Defense Department says a statement Thursday by its intelligence chief was not a new assessment indicating an increased nuclear weapons capability by North Korea. The spokesman was attempting to clarify comments made Thursday by the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The United States and Italy acknowledged Friday they could not bridge sharp disagreements over who was at fault in a friendly-fire shooting in Iraq that killed an Italian intelligence agent.
Pfc. Lynndie England will plead guilty to abusing Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, her lawyer said late Friday, about a year after photos of her sexually humiliating inmates made her the face of a scandal that damaged the credibility of the U.S. military.
Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the 22-year-old woman who became a vivid symbol of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, will plead guilty on Monday to reduced charges, her lawyers said yesterday.
Attorneys for a U.S. Marine accused of murdering two Iraqi detainees argued yesterday to cross-examine a key prosecution witness, saying denying them that chance in a pretrial hearing 'makes this proceeding a sham.'
WND: Scott, Drudge reports that at last night's presidential news conference, "CBS, NBC and Fox cut off President Bush in mid-sentence as NBC rushed to Donald Trump, Fox to Paris Hilton and CBS to 'Survivor.'" And my first question, why does the president recognize for questions those reporters whose networks treat the White House with such despicable contempt?
Former Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, the Democrat who gave a convention keynote speech for President Bush, said Friday he doesn't see another Republican like Bush coming along and there's a chance the Democrats could win the White House in 2008.
A college has been stripped of its status as a Catholic institution because it invited pro-abortion Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., to give its commencement address and receive an honorary degree.
An Australian man accused of trying to strangle his wife has lost a round in his legal battle to keep her on life support. If she dies, he could be charged with murder.
In the latest evidence Iran is seriously planning an unconventional pre-emptive nuclear strike against the U.S., an Iranian military journal has publicly considered the idea of launching an electromagnetic pulse attack as the key to defeating the world's lone superpower.
President Vladimir Putin, on a historic visit to Israel, defended Russia's planned sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Syria, insisting that they would pose no danger to the Jewish state.
North Korea is able to mount a nuclear warhead on missiles that could hit the United States, a senior US defense official said in a startling assessment of the hardline communist state's military capability.
President George W. Bush used a rare prime-time news conference to promote two embattled domestic priorities and defend his multilateral approach to the North Korean nuclear crisis.
President Bush offered a rosy assessment Thursday of developments in Iraq, but the reality is that Iraqi politicians spent most of the nearly three months since their widely hailed national election settling old scores and maneuvering for sectarian gains. They dithered as insurgents regained their momentum. This week's declaration by Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that insurgents are as able to wreak havoc now as a year ago calls into question the credibility of his other assertion that the United States and the Iraqi people are "winning" this fight. More than 100,000 American troops patrol the nation and more than 100,000 Iraqi security forces have supposedly been trained, yet guerrillas show increasing coordination in their attacks. We'd hate to imagine what "losing" this fight would be like.
The White House learned a painful media lesson Thursday: Do not launch a press conference on the first night of May Sweeps! CBS, NBC and FOX cut off President Bush, mid-sentence, in several time zones, after sacrificing one hour of prime.
Here is a list of the 37-member Cabinet approved in Iraq on Thursday. Seven posts remain undecided.
Iraq's new prime minister said yesterday he submitted a slate of 36 cabinet members, including seven women, a critical step before the National Assembly votes on a new government drawing in main ethnic and religious groups and ending a three-month stalemate.
From the redoubt of his retirement, former secretary of state Colin Powell is beginning to exact revenge. His sterling reputation was soiled, having lost most of the important battles within the administration during the first term. While he lamented that he had been "deceived" into presenting false information before the United Nations to justify the Iraq war, he acted as the good soldier to the end, giving every sign of desiring to fade away.
One day after Iraq's National Assembly approved the country's first democratically elected government, insurgents launched a series of attacks in Iraq on Friday, killing at least 14 Iraqis and wounding 50, officials said.
...But if the U.S. military is getting better intelligence these days in Iraq, it appears that the militants are too. A recent surge in attacks against Iraqi officials and security forces, Shiite civilians and U.S. troops indicates rebels are successfully using informants to plan such assaults.
An Iraqi militant group said in an Internet posting Thursday it shot dead six Sudanese truck drivers it had kidnapped. A video of the shooting was placed on a website purportedly by the group Ansar al-Sunnah Army but it was not possible to confirm the six men, kneeling on the ground with their heads toward the camera, were killed.
Afghan government troops have captured a key Taliban commander after a brief shoot-out during a raid in southeastern Afghanistan, an official said yesterday.
A military jury sentenced a soldier to death Thursday for a deadly grenade and rifle attack on his own comrades during the opening days of the Iraq invasion, a barrage that prosecutors said was triggered by religious extremism.
Marines testifying on behalf of a comrade accused of murdering two Iraqi detainees praised him Thursday as a model leader who showed compassion for Iraqi citizens.
Some called Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano the "preppy marine," a charismatic Gulf War veteran-turned-Wall Street broker who cut his long locks and reenlisted in the Marines after several close friends perished in the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks.
An Army squad leader accused of premeditated murder in the shooting death of an Iraqi civilian requested a military jury trial Tuesday after withdrawing from a pending plea agreement.
The United States military said it was investigating the shooting and wounding of three civilians by coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan. The three were in a civilian minivan traveling behind a military convoy when it ran into an ambush on Tuesday. According to the military, American troops returned fire on insurgents and hit the civilians, caught in the middle. The government news agency Bakhtar said the troops fired on the civilian car, suspecting them of being behind the ambush.
Belgian doctors sent an Iraqi girl home on Thursday after treating her for leg wounds caused by a bomb during the U.S. invasion -- and sent the 51,570 euro ($66,650) bill to the U.S. embassy.
A blood component recently approved by the FDA to help hemophiliacs control bleeding is now helping soldiers survive traumatic injuries that would have been fatal in past wars, according to Army doctors who studied medical techniques and technology used in Iraq.
U.S. colonel wages perception war by fielding complaints, questions on weekly call-in show. One caller wants to know why she can't attend the trials of her family members. The next claims his house was robbed of 3 million dinars after a raid, and he wants it back. A third asks about Western medical attention for a critically ill child.
The red-hot rhetoric over Social Security on liberal talkradio network AIR AMERICA has caught the attention of the Secret Service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
A liberal radio talk-show host who aired a comedy skit featuring an apparent gunshot warning to President Bush has apologized, and says she's not afraid of being prosecuted over the matter.
The fight against international terrorism remains "formidable" for the United States and its allies, with 651 significant attacks taking 1,900 lives worldwide last year, according to two US government reports released Wednesday.
President Bush will hold a prime-time news conference on Thursday night and will open it by setting out more specifically than he has so far his proposals for shoring up Social Security, the White House announced on Wednesday night.
Iraq's new prime minister said Wednesday he submitted a complete list of 36 Cabinet members, including seven women, a critical step before the National Assembly votes on a new government drawing in the main ethnic and religious groups and ending a three-month stalemate.
An Iraqi legislator was shot and killed by militants who stormed into her house in a middle class neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, underscoring fears that the political impasse has emboldened insurgents to step up deadly attacks in recent weeks, after a lull following the Jan. 30 elections.
The Iraqi platoon slips in darkness down a path from an abandoned rail yard to a cemetery in Haifa, a Baghdad district long notorious for insurgent ambushes
The American who led the hunt for Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has revealed that the investigation was cut short after he was targeted by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant leader in an attack that left two people dead. The head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, has reported that his investigation into the possible transfer of WMD to Syria had been wound up because of the "declining security situation".
Saddam Hussein asked his weapons specialists about a timeline to restart production of deadly chemical weapons and the potential to have a fleet of bomb-laden boats to attack American ships in the Persian Gulf, a CIA report says.
The United States opposed the reappointment of the U.N.'s top nuclear inspector Wednesday because of his views on Iran and prewar Iraq, prompting the atomic watchdog agency to delay its decision to avoid a confrontation with Washington and other members.
Washington still believes six-nation talks are the best way to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis, the top U.S. diplomat on the matter said on Thursday, steering clear of speculation that a deadline was looming for Pyongyang to return to the table.
...The Army has also enacted a number of changes designed to prevent future abuses, including identifying unacceptable interrogation methods, adding layers of oversight and requiring that all reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross be forwarded immediately up the chain of command to senior military officers and civilians at the Pentagon.
The Army is preparing to issue a new interrogations manual that expressly bars the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, and incorporates safeguards devised to prevent such misconduct at military prison camps in the future, Army officials said Wednesday.
When soldiers in war are not properly trained and supervised, atrocities are all but inevitable. This is one reason why the military command structure is so important. There was a time, not so long ago, when commanders were expected to be accountable for the behavior of their subordinates.
The pretrial hearing of 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano opened yesterday with testimony from two government witnesses and a continued dispute over the investigating officer chosen by the Marine Corps to recommend whether the charges of premediated murder of two Iraqis should proceed to a court-martial.
A key witness in the case against a Marine officer accused of murdering two Iraqi civilians was abruptly taken off the stand Wednesday on suspicion of violating orders on giving interviews about the case.
Dissatisfied with the results of a joint investigation with the United States, Italy on Wednesday began its own probe into the March 4 killing of one of its intelligence agents by U.S. troops in Baghdad.
A Polish priest at the Vatican was accused Wednesday of collaborating with his country's communist secret police during the 1980s, a time when Pope John Paul II was inspiring his countrymen to resist the Soviet-backed government.
It is possible to read someone?s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves.
The Dawn Patrol, a daily feature of the Mudville Gazette, is a roundup of news stories that we think might be of interest to readers and of use to fellow bloggers. Appearances of stories or editorials in this collection are not to be considered as endorsement of their content by the Greyhawks.
Comments caught on tape encouraging battle in Iraq
The question is raised with the disclosure of secretly recorded comments from the kingdom's chief justice encouraging young Saudis to travel to Iraq to wage war against Americans.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday that U.S. and allied forces in Iraq are winning the war against former Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign terrorists and criminals.
The recovery of a laptop computer in Iraq by American forces in February has helped in the capture of several associates of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
Texas Army National Guardsmen play a deadly game of Russian Roulette every time they go to work because the sandy ground that they patrol is strewn with unexploded ammunition.
Iraq's prime minister-designate Ibrahim Jaafari reportedly handed President Jalal Talabani his proposed cabinet list, after nearly three months of protracted consultations which tested Washington's patience.
Iraq's new Kurdish and Shiite Arab political leaders agreed to a cabinet split Tuesday, giving six posts to the holdout Sunni Arab minority, top politicians involved in the negotiations said.
The CIA's chief weapons inspector said he cannot rule out the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were secretly shipped to Syria before the March 2003 invasion, citing "sufficiently credible" evidence that WMDs may have been moved there.
The new leader of Iraq has sent a letter to Tony Blair thanking him and the British people for freeing his country from Saddam Hussein.
An explosive study released today on New York Times coverage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict reveals that the Times reported Israeli deaths at rates up to seven to ten times greater than Palestinian deaths.
The U.S. count of major world terrorist attacks more than tripled in 2004, a rise that may revive debate on whether the Bush administration is winning the war on terrorism, congressional aides said on Tuesday.
The millions of brave Iraqis who risked their lives to vote in January didn't expect that nearly three months later, their squabbling politicians would still be struggling to form a government. As a result, precious momentum has been lost, and a briefly improving security situation has again started deteriorating. The Sunni-based insurgency seems to have drawn fresh encouragement from the inability of the victorious Shiite and Kurdish parties to put the future of their country ahead of their narrow political agendas.
Tensions between the United States and Italy surged Tuesday, as Italian politicians and citizens reacted furiously to leaked reports in the Italian news media that a joint investigation into the shooting death of an Italian agent in Baghdad would absolve American soldiers of guilt in the incident.
Military prosecutors ended months of silence on Tuesday as they presented their first witnesses in the case of a marine accused of murder during his platoon's search of a suspected insurgent hideout near Baghdad last year.
Fellow Marines testified Tuesday that an officer who is accused of murder shot two Iraqis in the back and put a sign near the bodies bearing a Marine slogan: "No better friend, no worse enemy."
Going once, going twice, SOLD to the highest bidder: Military-issue items including body armor, combat helmets and gas masks.
President Bush is offering to make closed military bases available for new oil refineries and will ask Congress to provide a "risk insurance" to the nuclear industry against regulatory delays to spur construction of new nuclear power plants, senior administration officials said Tuesday.
Afghanistan's ousted Taliban have denied that an Afghan arrested in the United States and accused of being a top heroin trafficker ever supported them, as a U.S. prosecutor has said.
Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker says his investigation into the scandal-plagued oil-for-food program has not cleared U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan of wrongdoing, despite Mr. Annan's claims to the contrary.
President Vladimir V. Putin made the first official visit to Egypt by a Russian leader in 40 years on Tuesday, focusing on efforts to revive the internationally backed plan for Middle East peace in a meeting with Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak.
A state Senate committee approved a proposal Tuesday to put a serial number on every handgun bullet made or sold in California.
By Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Researchers called an early halt to two large, federally sponsored clinical studies of the drug Herceptin when it proved to be unusually effective at preventing cancer.
US investigators have found that American troops who shot an Italian agent to death at a Baghdad checkpoint March 4 followed proper procedures, an Army official said yesterday. But Italy was disputing two factual issues in the report: the speed of the car and the nature of communications between the Italians and US forces before the shooting. Intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was killed while escorting freed Italian hostage Giuliana Sgrena.
A front-page article yesterday about Bush administration pressure on Iraqi political leaders to reach a compromise on a government included an erroneous identification provided inadvertently by a State Department official for an Iraqi who had been telephoned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He was Massoud Barzani, leader of a main Kurdish political party, not Jalal Talabani, an Iraqi Kurd who is the new president.
Following training, Iraqi soldiers will be capable of protecting the Green Zone
and its surrounding areas without assistance from the U.S. military.
U.S. soldiers assigned to the 6th Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division took the first steps toward the success of their new mission in Iraq April 18 -- training the ?Defenders of the Green Zone.?
More reports on training:
Staff Sergeant Lloyd Pegues (1-30th Infantry, Fort Benning, GA), an instructer at the Iraqi Army Academy, talks about the progress of the Iraqui forces.
Captain Michael Whitney (1-30th Infantry, Fort Benning, GA) went along for the ride as the Iraqi Army to house to house searches.
Coalition forces captured 18 suspected terrorists during a search-and-seizure operation conducted April 22-24 in Babil province, Iraq. Elsewhere, a security detainee died at a U.S. military hospital.
Jordanian rebel Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ? Iraq's most wanted fugitive ? recently eluded capture by American troops, but left behind a treasure trove of information, a senior military official told ABC News
Wrapping up his investigation into Saddam Hussein's purported arsenal, the CIA's top weapons hunter in Iraq said his search for weapons of mass destruction "has been exhausted" without finding any.
Report Finds No Evidence Syria Hid Iraqi Arms
U.S. investigators hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have found no evidence that such material was moved to Syria for safekeeping before the war, according to a final report of the investigation released yesterday.
Insurgents fighting against US forces and the new government in Iraq are making a concerted effort to gain chemical weapons capability and have already used old Iraqi chemical munitions in their attacks, the top US weapons investigator has warned.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told the nation Monday that the collapse of the Soviet empire "was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" and had fostered separatist movements inside Russia.
President Bush on Monday pressed Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah to help curb skyrocketing oil prices that are hurting the budgets of American families and businesses.
Crude oil futures slipped Monday as President Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah met, in part, to discuss possible ways to bring down high oil prices.
The United States' top diplomat in Venezuela on Monday denied claims by President Hugo Chavez that a woman linked to the U.S. military had been arrested while photographing a military installation.
Zacarias Moussaoui?s guilty plea last week in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and his admission that he was training for a separate, post-9/11 attack on the White House, reveal a chilling truth about al Qaeda, the new secretary of homeland security said today.
An Afghan man regarded by the US as one of the world's most wanted heroin traffickers has been arrested, American officials have announced.
..."You are Muslim, aren't you?" he said to the Turkish manager of one fully stocked bar. "You aren't allowed to serve this liquor."
"We are Muslim," manager Cenk Acar said. "But this is business."
An Afghan woman was stoned to death in the northeastern Badakhshan province on the basis of a Fatwa (decree) issued by religious scholars after reportedly finding her guilty of adultery.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is downplaying suggestions the United States might seek United Nations approval for a blockade of North Korea to prevent it from exporting nuclear technology or material. Ms. Rice says the Bush administration remains committed to the Chinese-sponsored six-party talks to persuade Pyongyang to end its nuclear program.
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of four U.S. servicemen, missing in action from the Vietnam War, have been identified and are being returned to their families for burial with full military honors.
Only one in two Germans below the age of 24 know that the term 'Holocaust' is used to describe the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime, the daily newspaper Die Welt reported on Saturday.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has overcome fierce opposition attacks over his support for the Iraq war to hold a strong lead in the run-up to a May 5 general election, two opinion polls showed on Tuesday.
The government is bracing itself for the possibility that the 13 pages of legal advice drawn up by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, in the build-up to the Iraq war will be leaked, as many expect, in the next few days.
Comic books and soldiers have been allies since the earliest days of World War II, when Superman and Captain America sold war bonds, promoted paper drives and battled Nazis at home and abroad.
Now superheroes are going back to the front.
The Bush administration, facing a series of recent provocations from North Korea, is debating a plan to seek a United Nations resolution empowering all nations to intercept shipments in or out of the country that may contain nuclear materials or components, say senior administration officials and diplomats who have been briefed on the proposal.
As politicians tried once again Monday to end a deadlock regarding the formation of Iraq's (search) new transitional government, the death toll from two well-coordinated militant attacks against Iraqi police and civilians rose to 29.
After nearly three months of negotiations, Iraq's major Shiite bloc has decided to form a Cabinet without members of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi List party, lawmakers said Sunday.
Worried about a political deadlock in Iraq and a spike in mayhem from an emboldened insurgency, the Bush administration has pressed Iraqi leaders in recent days to end their stalemate over forming a new government, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney personally exhorting top Kurdish and Shiite politicians to come together.
Iraqi insurgents keep finding new ways to conceal and detonate deadly improvised explosive devices, making the Pentagon's countermeasures that much more difficult to develop, confidential military documents say.
A. Aaron Weisburd slogged up to his attic at 5 a.m. to begin another day combing through tips he had received about possible pro-terrorist activity on the Internet.
Venezuela is ending military operations and exchanges with the United States, President Hugo Chᶥz said Sunday, and he ordered out American instructors who he said had been trying to foment unrest in the barracks against him.
...In returning home, the leaders and Marine infantrymen have chosen to break an institutional code of silence and tell their story, one they say was punctuated not only by a lack of armor, but also by a shortage of men and planning that further hampered their efforts in battle, destroyed morale and ruined the careers of some of their fiercest warriors.
Two years ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked Gen. Peter Schoomaker, into coming out of retirement and leading the Army as its Chief of Staff. Since then, Schoomaker, a former Delta Force commando who's fought all over the world, has been busy creating what both men want: a completely reorganized ground force with smaller more versatile fighting units.
...U.S. forces on Sunday continued to sweep through a rural area north of Baghdad, hunting insurgents suspected of shooting down the helicopter. The attack killed all 11 people on board.
U.S. and Afghan soldiers backed by planes and artillery clashed with suspected insurgents near the border with Pakistan, and four fighters and one Afghan soldier were killed, the U.S. military said yesterday.
Tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders took part in a moving dawn service on Turkey's historic Gallipoli Peninsula, where 9O years ago scores of their compatriots died in some of the bitterest fighting of World War I.
The Pentagon Channel, now one year old, supplies info to troops - and, critics say, propaganda.
The anchors and reporters wear uniforms instead of neckties and suits, and the commercials promote the military, not laundry soap and cutlery sets. But otherwise, the Pentagon Channel - which is on the cusp of its first anniversary - looks and sounds a lot like CNN and C-SPAN.
Former President Clinton endorsed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's campaign to be elected for a third straight term during a satellite linkup to a Labour Party rally in London Sunday
A Russian space capsule carrying an American, a Russian and an Italian hurtled safely home to Earth from the international space station on Monday, landing softly on the marshy Central Asian steppes in the early morning darkness.
A meteor shower Sunday night sparked a flurry of frantic phone calls to police departments across New England from people who saw bright lights moving in the sky, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said.
A mother who gave birth to a twin girl after an abortion failed is suing the hospital for ?250,000 to help bring up her daughter.
His Grand Ole Opry debut? Charley Pride remembers it well. "It was 1967, January 1," Pride snaps. "Ernest Tubb brought me on, and I was more nervous than a cat on a hot tin roof." That's how most performers feel about the Opry, the folksy live radio show that's helped define country music for four decades.
As members of the U.S. military watched on television via satellite from Iraq, Dolly Parton invited their boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, onstage at the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday.
Assisted by tips from Iraqi civilians, U.S. soldiers on Saturday arrested six men suspected of shooting down a civilian helicopter carrying 11 people, including six American security contractors, U.S. military officials said.
The U.S. military said on Saturday it had detained six Iraqi men in connection with the shooting down of a commercial helicopter this week in which 11 people were killed, including six Americans.
A television cameraman working for The Associated Press was killed Saturday when gunfire broke out after an explosion in the northern city of Mosul. An AP photographer was wounded in the same incident.
Iraqi Shias have admitted taking part in brutal attacks on members of their own religious community after being recruited as paid hitmen for the Sunni terrorist leader, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.
Some leading Kurdish political figures are trying to stall the formation of a new Iraqi government in an effort to force out Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite chosen two weeks ago as prime minister, Iraqi and Western officials said.
Insurgents gave Romania four days to withdraw its troops from Iraq in order to save the lives of three Romanian journalists kidnapped last month, Al Jazeera television reported on Friday.
Human rights groups expressed dismay yesterday over the Army's findings exonerating U.S. generals of prisoner abuse in Iraq, and renewed requests for an independent probe to examine the culpability of senior military and civilian defense officials.
U.S. troops have detained 24 suspectedTaliban militants in Afghanistan's southeastern province ofKhost, bordering Pakistan, the provincial governor said Monday.
Sally Goodrich, whose son died in the Sept. 11 attacks, kept a grip on her grief as she surveyed the foundations of the Afghan school being built with money she raised in the United States.
A growing number of Afghan women are going into business, capitalizing on new opportunities in a thriving, yet still male-dominated economy three years after the fall of the Islamist government.
Indiana County and its surrounding communities were lucky enough to welcome home a number of their service men and women in the past few months as they returned from service in Iraq.
Marine Corporal Marcus Nucci, a former Claverack resident, no doubt counted himself as lucky as he headed home from Iraq March 1.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas named three new heads for the security forces and forced hundreds of their men into retirement on Saturday, pushing aside top commanders in Yasser Arafat's old guard.
Saudi Arabia's limited 10-week experiment with electoral democracy ended here Saturday in a sweeping victory for slates of Islamic activists marketed as the "Golden List," who used grass-roots organizing, digital technology and endorsements from popular religious leaders to defeat their liberal and tribal rivals, even here in Jiddah, for decades Saudi Arabia's most diverse and business-driven city.
Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee has been studying the electorate, and the party's problem with voters of faith is both worse and better than he feared.
A Bronx hospital has been ordered not to remove a brain-dead boy's respirator following an emergency 10:30 p.m. hearing where the 13-year-old's family alleged hospital personnel had threatened to disconnect him from life support against their wishes.
President Bush yesterday nominated Marine Gen. Peter Pace to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which would make him the first Marine to hold the post.
Two dozen suspected members of a Spanish al-Qaeda cell who are accused of aiding preparations for the 9/11 attacks appeared in court today in Europe's biggest anti-terror trial.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, faulted by some for leadership failures in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, has been cleared by the Army of all allegations of wrongdoing and will not be punished, officials said.
There are more than 155,000 ?trained and equipped? members of the Iraqi security forces, and trends are clearly positive, a senior defense official said during a Pentagon background briefing today.
Children at the Palestine Primary School now play and study on school grounds cleared of rubble and broken glass and have access to a renovated restroom due to the work of local Iraqi contractors and the aid of a U.S. military civil affairs team.
Halliburton Co. is reconsidering whether its contract to rebuild southern Iraq's oil industry is worth all the risks involved.
House and Senate negotiators are expected to act quickly to sort out differences -- from a new U.S. embassy in Iraq to an overhaul of immigration laws -- between their versions of an $81 billion spending bill for combat and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A United Nations human rights monitor has accused American military forces and contractors in Afghanistan of acting above the law "by engaging in arbitrary arrests and detentions and committing abusive practices, including torture." In a report released Thursday, the Afghan police and security forces were also criticized for similar actions.
Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban castaway whose international custody battle ended in his dramatic seizure from a Miami home five years ago, addressed a crowd of thousands Friday, thanking Cubans and Americans alike for fighting for his return to the island.
Sen. Richard Lugar, the influential Indiana Republican who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has introduced a bill that seeks to change the way the United States, Mexico and Central America cooperate to stem the flow of illegal immigration on the southern border.
President Hugo Chavez's government has unexpectedly ended a military exchange program with the United States, the U.S. Embassy in Caracas announced yesterday.
Saying the Haitian people need food, not bullets, the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste on Friday demanded the resignation of two top U.S. State Department officials he accused of helping to arm Haiti's interim government.
Sponsors of an "academic freedom" bill requiring a fair forum for all political ideas at state universities admitted Thursday that their plan is dead but said it has sparked a long-overdue debate about liberal bias in the classroom.
Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.
American women are anxious these days and no wonder: They've been vilified as inadequate mothers, desperate housewives, lackluster academic scientists and -- most rudely -- too fat to be French.
The Dawn Patrol, a daily feature of the Mudville Gazette, is a roundup of news stories that we think might be of interest to readers and of use to fellow bloggers. Appearances of stories or editorials in this collection are not to be considered as endorsement of their content by the Greyhawks.
An Iraqi insurgent group took credit Thursday for shooting down a commercial helicopter north of Baghdad -- killing 11 people, including six US civilians working as guards.
In an Internet video, a man purported to be the sole survivor of a helicopter shot down in Iraq on Thursday was helped to his feet by gunmen who found him lying in the grass. Moments later they killed him in a spray of bullets, shouting "Allahu akbar," or "God is great."
Villagers in an area south of Baghdad where more than 50 bodies were pulled from the Tigris River said yesterday that scores more people kidnapped by insurgents were still missing.
The Iraqi Defense Ministry on Thursday identified 19 bullet-riddled bodies found in a stadium northwest of the capital as fishermen, not soldiers as initially rumored.
Abu Mohammed was chatting with a friend in an auto repair shop in Salman Pak two months ago when masked gunmen surrounded him and stuffed his 260-pound frame in their trunk and sped away. He spent the next 10 days locked in a bathroom with a hood over his head, marking the passage of time by listening to his captors' prayers.
It's difficult to know whether the uptick in attacks on Iraqi and coalition targets in Iraq is a trend or an aberration, said Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita today.
?Every commander we talked to in Iraq ? believes that ? the development of the Iraqi security forces is proceeding in an effective and appropriate fashion,? Di Rita said.
Demonstrating Iraqis? growing desire to be part of the security of local neighborhoods and streets, more than 2,000 citizens showed up for an Iraqi Police recruiting drive April 16 near Camp Taji.
Citing videotaped testimonials from soldiers in Iraq, the Army on Thursday returned fire in a battle with critics of its Stryker troop-carrying vehicle, which some say inadequately protects soldiers.
A military jury Thursday convicted an Army sergeant of premeditated murder and attempted murder in a grenade and rifle attack that killed two of his comrades and wounded 14 others in Kuwait during the opening days of the Iraq war.
Five Muslim-Americans have sued the US Homeland Security Department alleging racial profiling. They say it happened when they were detained and fingerprinted by border agents after returning from a religious conference in Canada.
It was in the summer of 2001 when a top secret message was delivered to Farid Solemani.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knows what Belarus is, and this is positive news, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko told journalists upon his arrival in Moscow on Friday.
A leftist presidential favorite embroiled in a tooth-and-nail fight with the government accused President Vicente Fox on Thursday of betraying the democracy he brought to Mexico.
The flight instructor who raised questions about a British national who was flying planes at Gwinnett County's Briscoe field ?- questions that eventually resulted in an international terrorist alert -- has been fired.
Republicans are moving the Senate toward a final confrontation with Democrats over the blocking of President Bush's judicial nominations, even as internal polling shows that most Americans don't support their plan to ban judicial filibusters.
President Bush issued a strong new defense today of John R. Bolton, his nominee as ambassador to the United Nations, even as associates of Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, said that Mr. Powell had expressed reservations about Mr. Bolton in conversations with at least two wavering Republican senators.
House Republicans yesterday called on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to provide documentation to prove that a Washington lobbyist firm did not pay for a trip she and other Democrats took to Puerto Rico in 2001.
Internet sites that market racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazism to a young audience are spreading like wildfire in cyberspace, according to a new study.
The Dawn Patrol, a daily feature of the Mudville Gazette, is a roundup of news stories that we think might be of interest to readers and of use to fellow bloggers. Appearances of stories or editorials in this collection are not to be considered as endorsement of their content by the Greyhawks.
Sgt. Charles Watkins? wife already knew his gunshot wound wasn?t fatal. So, in the moments he had to use the Internet last week while awaiting transport from the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, he logged onto the Ford Motor Co.?s Web site.
Sgt. Joshua Haycox steered our Humvee forward at a slow march, carefully keeping his distance from the vehicle ahead and scanning the road for bombs as the Army convoy pushed deeper into the chaotic region known to soldiers as the Triangle of Death.
The new Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said Wednesday that more than 50 bodies had been discovered in the Tigris River and suggested that they were victims of a mass kidnapping south of Baghdad that other Iraqi officials had insisted was a hoax just three days before.
Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi escapes an assassination attempt when a car bomb explodes, hours after authorities report the deaths of 70 people in two mass killings.
The bodies of 19 Iraqi soldiers were found piled in a soccer stadium in western Iraq on Wednesday, a day after they were captured by insurgents, authorities said. It was not clear when or where they had been killed. At the same time, police announced the discovery of 58 corpses, all suspected victims of insurgents, floating in the Tigris River near a village where Shiite Muslim leaders had reported the abduction of civilians by Sunni Muslim extremists.
U.S. and Iraqi security forces say they are gaining ground on insurgents and criminals because more Iraqis are phoning tips to a hotline set up in October.
More than 400 young men and women have volunteered to carry out suicide bombing attacks against Americans in Iraq and targets in Israel, a militant group said yesterday
Zawra Park, the city's original "green zone," was a popular place for family outings and disco dance parties. But the 80-acre downtown expanse adjoining the military parade grounds was neglected under Saddam Hussein. After a stint as a battle-scarred base for Iraqi troops during the U.S. invasion, it became a looted and shuttered memory of calmer days. Now, the park is slowly coming back to life. A woman in a long black abaya watched a little boy scamper one morning by the lake, where rusted paddleboats plied clear waters once thick with algae.
U.S. forces blasted rebel positions with bombs, rockets and artillery, killing at least 12 insurgents, after rockets were fired at a U.S. base in southeastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said on Thursday.
The Associated Press sued the Defense Department on Tuesday to force the government to release transcripts and other documents related to military hearings for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Sgt. Hasan Akbar's father urged the military Wednesday to investigate the religious and racial harassment his son faced from his platoon before he unleashed a 2003 grenade attack that killed two fellow soldiers.
When a high-level meeting between governments has not gone especially well, the participants sometimes speak afterward of their "frank exchange of views."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday warned Russia against selling arms to Venezuela, and Moscow immediately rebuffed her criticism, saying a $120 million deal it has signed with Caracas violates no laws or treaties.
Yesterday in Moscow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with President of Russian Federation (RF) Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rice made several unprecedented statements. She, in fact, admitted that the US will start to inspect Russian nuclear facilities. The Secretary of State demanded Putin resignation in 2008. She also hinted that Byelorussia is to expect ?Orange Revolution? and Russia ?a bright future.? Her Russian counterparts pretended stubbornly that they didn?t hear anything.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried out her rusty Russian in a Moscow radio interview Wednesday, only to get caught out by a question on whether she might run for president. "Da (Yes)," Rice answered in Russian, before realizing her misunderstanding and hastily adding "Nyet" (No) -- seven times.
Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, said Wednesday the United States was hypocritical over nuclear armaments and not prepared to disarm its own weapons.
In a case that could raise new questions about the conditions of Russian soldiers, four conscripts were found hanged in a forest near Saratov, in the south. Official statements compounded the mystery, including one suggesting a group suicide. Later, the authorities said the soldiers might have been witnesses to a crime committed by others. But Anatoly Gorshkov, a regional prosecutor, said on national television that investigators had found no signs of self-defense or a fight. Russia's largely conscripted military has been sullied by allegations of extensive hazing, abuse, brutality and professional incompetence. The men were due to be discharged in a month, which would have put them past the typical period for hazing. C. J. Chivers (NYT)
Lawmakers voted to oust President Lucio Gutierrez Wednesday morning after a week of protests and appointed the vice president to replace him. But enraged mobs continued to take to the streets, burning government buildings and beating employees and politicians who tried to flee.
"I am very concerned. I would have thought his advanced age and his health which is not very stable would have been reason enough for the cardinals to pick someone else," said a visibly moved in an interview on German television after the election of his 78-year-old brother.
When he was a cardinal in 1991, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, suffered a brain hemorrhage "which laid him down for a while, but he recovered from it," said CNN Vatican analyst John Allen on Wednesday.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday got a stern warning from Bay Area immigrant advocates over his comments that he wanted the California border closed.
A man spit tobacco juice into the face of Jane Fonda after waiting in line to have her sign her new memoir. Capt. Rich Lockhart of the Kansas City Police Department said Michael A. Smith, 54, was arrested Tuesday night on a municipal charge of disorderly conduct.
Eat your way to the bottom of almost any bag of popcorn and there they are: the rock-hard, jaw-rattling unpopped kernels known as old maids. The nuisance kernels have kept many a dentist busy, but their days could be numbered: Scientists say they now know why some popcorn kernels resist popping into puffy white globes.
Recurrent intelligence reports say al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi has obtained a nuclear device or is preparing a radiological explosive -- or dirty bomb -- for an attack, according to U.S. officials, who also say analysts are unable to gauge the reliability of the information's sources.
Locals in Bangor, Maine, are on a mission to greet every military plane, at any time, in any weather. Their tally so far: 200,000 troops.
Former ABC News reporter/anchor Sam Donaldson is ready to say the last rites for network news because it will soon lose its dominant position as Americans' primary source of news. "I think it's dead. Sorry," he said during a breakfast panel Tuesday at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas. "The monster anchors are through."
The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects.
The Senate broke through a logjam of conflicting immigration proposals that had bogged down passage of an $80 billion emergency supplemental military spending bill, clearing the way on Tuesday for a vote on the measure within the next two weeks.
In the second week of December 2003, U.S. Special Forces captured an Iraqi man named Fawzi Rashid, a top insurgent leader in Baghdad. Rashid was carrying a letter from Saddam Hussein, U.S. News has learned, that was less than a week old. It would prove to be the key break in the 10-month manhunt for the Iraqi dictator.
The United States opposed an idea floated by Iraq's new president that could end up extending a proposed amnesty to insurgents who killed US troops.
The United States issued its strongest attack to date on Monday on a U.N. plea that rich countries likeAmerica meet a fixed global target every year for the development aid they give poor countries.
Coalition forces in Iraq are welcoming the deployment of 450 more Australian military personnel. ?These are great soldiers,? said a U.S. official in Baghdad, Iraq. The new Australian contingent will bring the number of ?Aussies? in country up to 1,370, officials at the Australian embassy here said.
Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday pledged to work to unify all Christians, reach out to other religions and continue implementing reforms from the Second Vatican Council as he outlined his goals and made clear his pontificate would closely follow the trajectory of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.
A prophecy by a 12th-century Catholic saint that predicted characteristics of the last 112 popes appears to have been strengthened by the election of the new pontiff today.
A homosexual advocacy group expressed "concern" that Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, "does not present a hopeful vision of the future or inspire optimism for affirming language, policies or outreach."
Ora Mae Magouirk, the 81-year-old Georgia widow at the center of an intense family dispute over her medical treatment and right to live, is growing stronger every day, despite having been denied food and water for nearly two weeks before being airlifted to the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical Center in Birmingham for treatment of an aortic dissection.
Local historian Bill Stanley believes Samuel Huntington was the first president of the United States and he is seeking money to create a presidential library in Norwich.
...This is the first war in which American GIs and military families can communicate freely and in real time via e-mail and cellphone, while gathering endless amounts of information about the situation in Iraq via the Internet - some of it trustworthy, much of it unreliable.
There is no longer any doubt that women can serve in combat.
On the outskirts of Salman Pak a little southeast of Baghdad on March 20, a convoy of 30 tractor-trailers driven by third-country nationals was attacked by a force of 40 to 50
The largest political bloc in Iraq's new government called for the execution of Saddam Hussein if the ousted president is convicted of war crimes and said Monday that President Jalal Talabani should resign if he's not prepared to sign the death warrant.
As the sun peeked over the mountains early on the morning of April 15, three CH-47 Chinook helicopters packed with U.S. and Afghan soldiers sped toward their target in Wardak province.
Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime has started a pirate radio station that pumps out broadsides against the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, officials and reports said yesterday.
...The attack on this remote Marine outpost abutting the Syrian border caused only minor injuries, but it signaled a dramatic change in the methods of the insurgents, who have staged mostly guerrilla-style hit-and-run attacks against the U.S. military for two years.
Iraqi forces regained control of a lawless town near Baghdad, but failed to find any hostages, putting paid to reports that Sunni gunmen had seized scores of Shiite residents and were threatening to kill them.
A high-ranking adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry was assassinated late Monday night by gunmen at his house in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. The official, Maj. Gen. Adnan Qaragholi, was killed just after 11 p.m. when 10 gunmen forced their way into his house in the Doura neighborhood in southern Baghdad and shot him to death, Interior Ministry officials said.
Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said a senior official was assassinated in his home on Monday, adding they had misidentified the official earlier.
Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the United States charged in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has told the government he plans to plead guilty, The Washington Post reported in its Tuesday editions.
The U.S. military has assembled the world's most formidable hacker posse: a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets.
...Now, thanks to the ingenuity and cooperation of a small group of military officers and civilian equipment specialists, the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab at Quantico has developed a novel form of body armor ? Kevlar shorts ? to save troops from death or maiming injuries.
Despite the tremendous advances in military hardware and technology on display in the global war on terror, there are still some capabilities only humans can provide. That was the thinking behind a new initiative to improve foreign language and cultural expertise at the Defense Department.
Members of the presidential commission that examined U.S. intelligence failures told White House officials that they would resign en masse if President Bush did not ensure the nation's spy agencies cooperated with their inquiry -- and had to repeat the threat more than once.
The liberal Air America Radio, just past its first birthday, has probably enjoyed more free publicity than any enterprise in recent history. But don't believe the hype: Air America's left-wing answer to conservative talk radio is failing, just as previous efforts to find liberal Rush Limbaughs have failed.
In an attempt to lessen the impact of so-called conservative talk radio, a New York congresswoman is leading an effort to re-establish the "Fairness Doctrine" for radio and television broadcasters in the United States.
The Dawn Patrol, a daily feature of the Mudville Gazette, is a roundup of news stories that we think might be of interest to readers and of use to fellow bloggers. Appearances of stories or editorials in this collection are not to be considered as endorsement of their content by the Greyhawks.
Marla Ruzicka, of Lakeport, Calif., died Saturday in a car bombing in Iraq, where she had been on and off since the March 2003 invasion began, conducting door-to-door surveys to determine the number of civilian casualties, friends and family said.
The Army chief of staff has raised the stakes in the debate over women in combat with an assertion that women are only barred from serving in support units assigned to infantry when such units are actually in combat.
Iraq's top two leaders called for jump-starting the nation's court system and revamping security forces to end the bloody insurgency and open the way for U.S. troops to come home.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff encouraged newspaper editors today to tell America the full story of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. ?It?s particularly important today ? because the American people need to know the full story,? said Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers
