A U.S. Marine pleaded guilty on Thursday to shooting a defenseless Iraqi grandfather dragged from his house in the middle of the night in what his squad informally called "Operation Vigilante."Cpl. Trent Thomas was charged with murder, kidnapping and other offenses in the April 2006 death of Hashim Ibrahim Awad in Hamdania, Iraq. According to earlier testimony in the case, Thomas shot the man up to 10 times. Awad was a neighbor of a man Marines had sought to kidnap and kill as a suspected terrorist. The case is one of a series from the Iraq war in which U.S. military personnel are accused of crimes against Iraqi civilians. Seven Marines and a Navy medic have been charged in the incident. Thomas said unit leader Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins devised a plan to kidnap and murder a suspected terrorist released from prison, but the unit ended up grabbing a neighbor, Awad, instead. ...
http://abcnews.go.com
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Editor - 18:54:00 01-18-07
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 Journalism Advocacy Group Calls for Concerted Action After 6 Media Employees Killed in Week |
The Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday urged Iraqi authorities to step up efforts to protect journalists here after, it said, six journalists and media workers were killed in less than a week. The group issued a statement calling on the Iraqi government to bring the killers to justice, and noted that the recent string of slayings came less than a month after the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution on the protection of journalists. "Although many others fall victim to the daily violence ravaging Iraq, journalists are for the most part deliberately targeted because of what they do," Reporters Without Borders said in their statement. "Those responsible must be found and punished, or else these killings will continue." The U.N. Security Council on Dec. 23 condemned attacks on journalists during armed conflicts and urged combatants to stop singling out members of the media....
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2806326
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Editor - 18:52:00 01-18-07
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| Fierce storm blasts northern Europe, killing at least 27 people |
Hurricane-force winds and heavy downpours hammered northern Europe on Thursday, killing 27 people and disrupting travel for tens of thousands — including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose plane circled for 15 minutes before landing amid winds gusting to 77 mph.The storms were among the fiercest in years, ripping off part of the roof at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, toppling a crane in the Netherlands and upending trucks on Europe's busiest highway. By evening, weather-related accidents had killed 27 people, including a 2-year-old boy hit by falling brick from a toppled wall in London. Rice cut short her visit to Berlin in order to leave for London before winds worsened, landing at Heathrow Airport in winds gusting up to 77 mph. "It's not often you get winds of that sort of strength that far inland," said John Hammond of Britain's weather office. "(Rice) did well to land there, I wouldn't have fancied doing that."...
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/2007-01-18-europe-storm_x.htm?csp=34
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Editor - 18:39:00 01-18-07
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| UN weighs peacekeepers across border from Darfur |
The United Nations, blocked by Sudan from sending U.N. peacekeepers to Darfur, is weighing how to send a smaller force into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic, U.N. officials said on Thursday.An assessment team of about 30 U.N. staff is leaving for the unstable region on Friday and will spend two weeks studying how many troops would be needed to protect and aid civilians caught up in the fighting there, how to get them into the remote area, and how to supply them once they were in place. One possible approach is to send battalions of about 700 to 800 soldiers to each of Chad's three eastern provinces — Salamat, Ouaddai and Biltine — and a fourth battalion to the Central African Republic's northern Vakaga province, officials said. ...
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2806164
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Editor - 18:04:00 01-18-07
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| Mahdi Army fighters say they're under siege |
Two Shiite militia commanders said Thursday that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Madhi Army under pressure from Washington, while the fighters described themselves as under seige in their Sadr City stronghold.Their account of an organization now fighting for its very existence could represent a tactical and propaganda feint, but there was mounting evidence the militia is increasingly off balance and has ordered its gunmen to melt back into the population. To avoid capture, commanders report no longer using cellphones and fighters are removing their black uniforms and hiding their weapons during the day.During much of his nearly eight months in office, al-Maliki, who relies on al-Sadr's political backing, has blocked or ordered an end to many U.S.-led operations against the Mahdi Army....
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-01-18-mahdi-army_x.htm?csp=34
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Editor - 17:58:00 01-18-07
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| China Successfully Tests Anti-Satellite Missile |
The United States is criticizing China's anti-satellite weapons test in which an old Chinese weather satellite was destroyed by a missile. The Bush administration has kept a lid on the test for more than a week as it weighed its significance. Analysts said China's weather satellites would travel at about the same altitude as U.S. spy satellites, so the test represented an indirect threat to U.S. defense systems. "The United States believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Thursday. "We and other countries have expressed our concern to the Chinese." In his annual threat address to Congress, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, said last week that China and Russia are the "primary states of concern" regarding military space programs....
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,244761,00.html
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Editor - 17:50:00 01-18-07
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