World News joined 6

[OMEN]

GAZA (Reuters) - The Israeli army killed at least four Palestinian gunmen and five civilians in air and ground strikes in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Thursday, witnesses and hospital officials said.

Hamas said one of its militants was killed and three were wounded by an Israeli missile in the central Gaza Strip after they had tried to fire mortar bombs into Israel.

Another militant with Hamas, an Islamist group, was killed and three were wounded by a missile attack on a militant training camp near the southern town of Rafah, Palestinian hospital staff and a Hamas official said.

An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed there had been a missile attack on a gunman in the central Gaza Strip and said she was checking the report of the Rafah strike.

An earlier incursion by Israeli troops near the town of Khan Younis was a hunt for militants who fire short-range rockets into Israel, the Israeli army said.

One rocket fired on Thursday landed north of the Israeli city Ashkelon, 17 km (11 miles) from Gaza -- the furthest a Palestinian rocket has ever penetrated into Israel, the army said. A second landed in the garden of a house in Sderot, a police spokesman said.

After the Ashkelon attack, which caused no casualties or damage, Israeli warplanes bombed three buildings in the Gaza Strip, causing extensive damage.

Two of the buildings were linked to the militant group Islamic Jihad and the third to Hamas, an Israeli military spokeswoman said. Palestinian witnesses and medical officials said an Israeli tank fired at a house near Khan Younis, killing an Islamic Jihad militant outside. The shell also killed his mother, a sister and two brothers, who were in the house at the time.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops had come under attack by local gunmen. A tank fired at a building after gunmen were spotted taking shelter in it, she said.

Another shell wounded at least seven schoolchildren between the ages of eight and 10, hospital officials said. Medics said an Israeli tank fired the shell into a crowd. The Israeli army said it was checking the report.

The army killed two Hamas gunmen in separate incidents, both sides said, and wounded 22 Palestinians, most of them gunmen.

U.S. President George W. Bush visits the region next week to build on the November peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, at which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to pursue talks.

ROCKET WORRIES

The rocket attack on Ashkelon stirred concern in Israel, which says Palestinian factions are smuggling in military grade munitions from neighboring Egypt.

Islamic Jihad and another Palestinian militant group, the Popular Resistance Committees, claimed responsibility for the rocket. A rival claim, with a videotape claiming to show the rocket launch, was made by the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- General Command.

"Until now it was only the population immediately adjacent to the Gaza Strip that was in the immediate firing line, (but) because of the extended range we could have as many as 250,000 Israelis in the firing line," said Olmert spokesman Mark Regev. Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in June after routing Abbas's Fatah forces but Fatah runs the occupied West Bank.

Reuters

[OMEN]

An image of Saturn taken by the Cassini-Hudgens mission. Saturn's chilly north pole boasts a hot spot of compressed air, a surprising discovery that could shed light on other planets within our own solar system and beyond, researchers said on Thursday.
LONDON (Reuters) - Saturn's chilly north pole boasts a hot spot of compressed air, a surprising discovery that could shed light on other planets within our own solar system and beyond, researchers said on Thursday.

Scientists already knew about a hot spot at Saturn's sunny south pole but data from the Cassini spacecraft now shows that the winter pole drenched in darkness also has a hot spot, said Nick Teanby, a planetary scientist, who worked on the study.

"With this Cassini mission we can also see the winter pole, which we are not able to see from Earth because of the tilt of the planet," said Teanby of the University of Oxford. "We didn't expect it to have a hot spot at the north."

The hot spot is essentially a small, narrow region hotter than the gas surrounding it, the international team reported in the journal Science.

Researchers said the southern hot spot was probably formed by the warm rays of the sun but added compressed air descending from the atmosphere best explained the newly-found hot spot on the north pole.

"We think it is due to air descending from higher in the atmosphere to lower in the atmosphere," Teanby said in a telephone interview. "The mass of air heats up as it's compressed -- like air in a bicycle pump."

The researchers were able to gauge different temperatures using the Cassini spacecraft's infrared spectrometer that measures the intensity of radiation emitted from Saturn's atmosphere. Cassini was launched in 1997 to examine Saturn.

Reconstructed images pinpointed the hot spot smack dab in the centre of the planet's north pole vortex, a swirling motion of high speed air traveling around the pole.
"We've managed to probe the top portion of the atmosphere," Teanby said.

The findings may also help scientists better understand other gas planets in the Earth's solar system such as Jupiter, Teanby said.

They also help shed light on the growing number of newly-discovered planets orbiting stars other than our own. So far, there are more than 230 of these known exoplanets.

"If we can gain an understanding of what goes on in the atmosphere, we can apply them to other planets and extra solar planets now being discovered," Teanby said.

Reuters

[JohnCenaFan28]

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[OMEN]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi soldier opened fire on U.S. troops during a joint patrol on December 26, killing two and wounding three others along with a civilian interpreter, Iraqi and U.S. officials said on Saturday.

The U.S. military said it was not clear why the Iraqi soldier had opened fire in the northern city of Mosul, but two Iraqi generals told Reuters the attacker had links to Sunni Arab insurgent groups.

The U.S. military said in a statement the two soldiers killed were Captain Rowdy Inman and Sergeant Benjamin Portell, both assigned to 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, III Corps, based in Fort Hood, Texas.

"The Iraqi soldier who allegedly opened fire fled the scene but was identified by other Iraqi army personnel and was then apprehended. Two Iraqi army soldiers are now being held in connection with the incident," the military said.

In response to the shooting, the Iraqi army has tightened screening of new recruits in its 2nd Division, which controls the Mosul region, and is carrying out more thorough background checks on serving soldiers, the Iraqi generals said.

U.S. and Iraqi troops have been conducting joint patrols as part of a new U.S. counter-insurgency strategy to curb sectarian violence and improve the capabilities of Iraq's military, which will take over more security responsibilities to allow U.S. forces to begin withdrawing from Iraq.

The U.S. military said the December 26 attack occurred during an operation to set up a combat outpost, similar to dozens across Iraq where Iraqi and U.S. soldiers live side by side.

The commander of the Iraqi army's 2nd Division, Brigadier-General Mutaa al-Khazraji, told Reuters the U.S. soldiers were killed during a joint patrol in Hermat in western Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad. The patrol "was attacked by gunmen and the soldier abused the situation and killed the two soldiers. The soldier was an insurgent infiltrator," Khazraji said.

"SHOOTING DELIBERATE"

Brigadier-General Noor al-Din Hussein, commander of the Iraqi Army's 4th Brigade, 2nd Division, told Reuters: "The shooting was deliberate. It was not an accident."

Hussein said the Iraqi soldier had been in the army for only one year and was an Arab from the Jubouri tribe. Most soldiers serving in the Mosul area are from Iraq's Kurdish minority.

"There is some penetration (by insurgents) and we want to purify the Iraqi army. Our soldiers are good and doing well. This is the first time something like this has happened," Hussein said.

The Muslim Scholars Association, a hardline group of Sunni clerics, said in a statement that the Iraqi soldier had shot the U.S. soldiers after he witnessed them beat a pregnant woman.

"His blood rose and he asked the occupying (U.S.) soldiers to stop beating the woman. Their answer through the translator was: 'We will do what we want.' So he opened fire on them."

U.S. military spokesman Colonel James Hutton said: "There is no indication that that is true and the matter remains under investigation."

U.S. commanders have been praising the improving abilities of the Iraqi military, which was rebuilt from scratch after the U.S. invasion and has been beset by a high desertion rate and some units refusing to deploy outside their home provinces. American generals say Iraqi units have performed well in a series of counter-insurgency operations that have contributed to a 60 percent drop in violence in Iraq since June 2007.

In June 2004 two U.S. soldiers were killed by Iraqi civil defence officers patrolling with them. The Iraqi Civil Defence Corps was created after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and was the forerunner of today's post-Saddam Iraqi army.

Reuters

[JohnCenaFan28]

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[Black Widow]

HARTFORD, Connecticut, January 04, 2008 (NBC) -- A Connecticut woman and her newborn twins are doing fine despite their unusual birth.

On Wednesday, Larryette Thomas, unexpectedly gave birth with one of the tiny boys born inside her pants.

Thomas wasn’t due until February but she says she started to feel contractions around 3 o’clock Wednesday morning.

That’s when her concerned mother called 911 for help. But just as medics arrived one of the children landed in his mother’s pants.

Thomas said, "One pant leg was on and the other wasn’t and he just came right down and firefighters had to cut my pants to take the baby out."

Rescue crews delivered the second child a few minutes later using flashlights since there were no lights in the house.

Mom and newborns Kurt and Kurtis are reportedly doing fine.

ksn.com

[whoblehwah]

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[JohnCenaFan28]

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[OMEN]

An American-born member of al-Qaeda has called on Islamist militants to set off bombs to mark U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to the Middle East this week.

"Welcome him not with flowers and applause but with bombs and traps," Adam Gadahn said in a 50-minute video posted on the internet on Sunday.

In the video, he is seen holding up his U.S. passport for the camera and tearing the document into pieces to protest the treatment of Muslim detainees.

"The jihad against you will remain our duty as long as there remains even one Muslim in American captivity," Gadahn said.

Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, is a convert to Islam who is wanted in the U.S. for treason. He was indicted in 2006. A $1-million US reward is being offered for information leading to his capture.

In the video, titled An Invitation to Reflection and Repentance, he wears a white and red headscarf. The message was released by al-Qaeda's media arm As-Sahab and posted on a website usually used by Islamists.

Gadahn has appeared in several other al-Qaeda videos. In the most recent one released last August, he urged militants to attack foreign embassies.

On Tuesday, Bush heads to Israel, and then the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier will be visiting the Middle East and India beginning Wednesday.

He will meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah and with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Tel Aviv.

CBC

[OMEN]

Rescuers search a neighborhood in Fernley on Saturday after a canal levee ruptured from heavy rainfall.
As people in California and other West Coast states were coping with huge amounts of snow and rain, forecasters predicted new storms would arrive in the next few days.

Snow has been piling up in higher elevations in northern California, among the regions most affected by a powerful storm that began on Thursday.High winds, snow and rain also hit Oregon, Nevada, Washington and British Columbia.

While more of the same was expected on Sunday and Monday, forecasters said the volume of snow and rain will be lighter. However, they predicted a stronger storm system would move into the West Coast on Tuesday.

Snow continued Sunday in the Sierre Nevada mountains in northern California, east of San Francisco, a region that has seen up to two metres of snow in places. As much as a metre more could hit the area by Tuesday evening, the U.S. Weather Service said.

At least three deaths have been blamed on the storm. One woman died Saturday when her pickup truck was swept into a flood channel east of Los Angeles, police said. Rescuers found her boyfriend clinging to a tree.

On Friday, a falling tree killed a woman in Oregon and a falling branch killed a transportation worker in northern California.

In rain-drenched Nevada, a broken levee sent a frigid wall of water from a canal into a desert town 50 kilometres east of Reno on Saturday. A large part of the town of Fernley resembled a lake as the water flooded hundreds of homes.

Some of the 3,000 people who had to leave their homes had to be rescued from rooftops by helicopters.

On Saturday, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared emergencies in three counties hit hard by the storms, and Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski declared a state of emergency for one county that had severe wind damage.

CBC