AP - A wall U.S. troops are building around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad came under increasing criticism on Saturday, with residents calling it "collective punishment" and a local leader saying construction began without the neighborhood council's approval.

AP - The Pentagon is laying the groundwork to extend the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq. At the same time, the administration is warning Iraqi leaders that the boost in forces could be reversed if political reconciliation is not evident by summer.

AP - NASA officials who examined their security measures following the deadly shooting at Virginia Tech are trying to figure out how a contract worker sneaked a handgun into the Johnson Space Center and killed another employee before shooting himself.

AP - An American billionaire who paid $25 million for a 13-day trip to outer space returned to Earth on Saturday in a space capsule that also carried a cosmonaut and an American astronaut, making a soft landing on the Kazakh steppe.

AP - It was reportedly scrawled in red ink on the arm of the Virginia Tech gunman after his shooting rampage that left him and 32 others dead. It was written on an overnight postage Seung-Hui Cho sent between the two shootings. And a variation of it appeared on a file contained in the package sent to NBC that included Cho's rambling, hate-filled video, incoherent written messages and photos.

AP - CBS Radio is suing a small radio station for airing reruns of Don Imus' program since his firing for sexist and racist comments about the Rutgers University women's college basketball team.

AP - Rangers at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park are launching a program to stop people from leaving religious offerings at the summit of Mount Kilauea — including food they say attracts rats and cockroaches.

AP - Boston manager Terry Francona was thinking about going out to talk to reliever Hideki Okajima in the ninth inning before Alex Rodriguez's at-bat. Rodriguez had already homered twice to join Mike Schmidt as the fastest to reach a dozen in baseball history. Masai Takahashi, a member of the training staff who serves as translator, started writing out some things to say before Francona realized it was pointless.

Reuters - An armed space engineer killed a co-worker he had taken hostage, then himself, in an attack on Friday at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Reuters - Convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who has not appeared in public for almost nine months, met with a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official for an hour on Friday, Cuban state media said.

Reuters - Space tourist Charles Simonyi returned safely to Earth on Saturday, touching down with a Russian-U.S. crew in the steppe of Central Asia after paying for a two-week round trip into space.

Reuters - A U.S. Army general concluded the Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored "obvious" signs of "serious misconduct" in the slayings of two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

Reuters - The fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has urged his followers to step up suicide attacks on foreign and Afghan troops and remain united, according to a Taliban commander.

Reuters - President George W. Bush is expected to visit Warsaw in June for talks on installing part of a U.S. missile defense system in Poland, Polish daily Rzeczpospolita said on Saturday, quoting a government source.

AFP - Voting began Saturday in Nigeria's landmark presidential elections, hours after a failed attempt to blow up the electoral commission marred hopes of a trouble-free poll in the first post-colonial transfer of power between two civilian presidents.

AFP - A NASA contractor took two co-workers hostage at Johnson Space Center, killing one of them before turning the revolver on himself, officials said, just days after the bloodiest school shooting in US history.

Page created by Feed Builder 1.1
Date created: 2007/04/21 at 17:39.20
© 2006 Star Media
All rights reserved.