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KABUL (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed up to 10 people outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan in an attack aimed at visiting Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday, but Cheney was not hurt in the blast.

An American soldier and a South Korean who was part of the U.S.-led coalition were killed, as was a U.S. government contractor whose nationality was unknown, officials said. NATO put the toll at four, including the bomber, and 27 wounded.

Local police said 10 people died.

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WASHINGTON -- A mistrial has been avoided in the CIA leak case as the judge has sent the eleven remaining jurors back to deliberate the fate of former White House aide Lewis Libby.

Earlier today, the judge dismissed a juror because he said the juror had seen or read something over the weekend about Libby's trial that "obviously disqualifies her."

The judge had originally feared that several jurors were tainted, raising the possibility of a mistrial. But after questioning jurors behind closed doors, the judge determined that the remaining seven women and four men were not affected.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Underscoring growing alarm in the West at how militants have regained ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday sought Pakistani aid to help counter al-Qaida's efforts to regroup, officials said.

However, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insisted his forces have already "done the maximum" possible against extremists in their territory — and insisted that other allies also shoulder responsibility in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Cheney, accompanied by CIA deputy director Steve Kappes, made an unannounced stop in Pakistan en route to Afghanistan, where snow prevented him from reaching Kabul for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

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TOKYO (AP) An AP headline on Saturday, Feb. 24, on a story slugged AP-Japan-Spies-and-War-Crimes, incorrectly stated that the CIA and not the the G-2 intelligence service had recruited Japanese war criminals to spy for the U.S.

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WASHINGTON -- Deliberations in the Lewis Libby trial will continue with 11 jurors, now that the 12th has been dismissed.

The judge today announced that the juror was being dismissed because she had been exposed to information about the case over the weekend.

Judge Reggie Walton said the information "obviously disqualifies her." But he wouldn't say what information the juror had seen or heard.

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WASHINGTON - The jury considering whether Lewis "Scooter" Libby is guilty of perjury lost one of its members Monday morning but will continue working to reach a decision, a judge decided.

The presiding judge dismissed one female juror in her 70s, an art curator, after she disclosed to her peers that she had come into contact over the weekend with information about the case of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff.

The foreperson reported it this morning to U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who interviewed the jurors and decided the female juror had not intentionally sought to ignore his orders that all 12 jurors avoid contact with media coverage and any other information about the Libby case.

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TOKYO (AP) Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March. And then he became a U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, released by the U.S. National Archives and examined by The Associated Press, document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence in the early days of the Cold War. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view.

The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files, fill in many of the blanks in the previously spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.

In addition to Tsuji, who escaped Allied prosecution and was elected to parliament in the 1950s, conspicuous figures in U.S.-funded operations included mob boss and war profiteer Yoshio Kodama, and Takushiro Hattori, former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.

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WASHINGTON — Even as jurors pondered whether Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff should be convicted for lying about what the Bush administration did to smear one of its critics, there was Cheney accusing another adversary of doing the work of the terrorists.

The fabricate-and-smear cycle illustrated so dramatically during the case of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby explains why President Bush is failing to rally support for the latest iteration of his Iraq policy. The administration's willingness at the outset to say anything, no matter how questionable, to justify the war has destroyed its credibility. Its habit of attacking those who expressed misgivings has destroyed any good will it might have enjoyed. Bush and Cheney have lost the benefit of the doubt.

Yet, Cheney has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. His latest demon is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he accuses of validating al-Qaida's objectives.

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U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said the juror had seen or read something over the weekend about Libby's trial.

"What she had exposure to obviously disqualifies her," the judge said.

He did not say what the juror had seen but characterized it as a misunderstanding. He has ordered jurors to avoid media coverage of the case.

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WASHINGTON - While held incommunicado for more than two years by the U.S. and Pakistan, accused jihadist Marwan Jabour claims he was beaten, burned with an iron, held naked for a month and chained to the wall of his cell so tightly that he could not stand up.

His rare account of the secret world of terror detentions - provided in a new report from Human Rights Watch - ended last summer when the United States flew him to Jordan from a secret detention facility that he believed to be in Afghanistan. By September, the Jordanians turned him over to the Israelis. Six weeks later, he was let go in the Gaza Strip, where the 30-year-old Palestinian had family.

U.S. counterterrorism officials would not confirm Jabour's account, but they say they still view Jabour as one of al-Qaida's most dangerous. One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the information's sensitivity, said Jabour was in direct contact with al-Qaida's operational leaders, had ties to al-Qaida's chemical and biological programs and plotted to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

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WASHINGTON - The nation's newly installed spy chief, Mike McConnell, told CIA personnel at a town-hall style meeting last week that he intends to establish personal relationships with Congress.

He has his first chance Tuesday as he appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee to lay out threats facing the United States around the globe. Among them are Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Muslim extremists operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Both Republicans and Democrats alike have grown uneasy about the situation in Iraq and the growing tension with Iran over its nuclear program and U.S. claims that the government in Tehran is meddling in Iraq.

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WASHINGTON - After the judge dismissed one of its members, the jury finished a fourth day of deliberations Monday without a verdict in the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Most of the morning was consumed by deciding what to do about an art historian on the jury who saw or read something over the weekend about the trial. After interviewing her in private along with lawyers in the case, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled that "what she had exposure to obviously disqualifies her."

The judge let the jurors continue deliberating with just 11 members after the defense endorsed that option. He overruled prosecutors who asked him to seat one of two alternate jurors who heard the trial and remain on standby.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Underscoring growing alarm in the West at how militants have regained ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday sought Pakistani aid to help counter al-Qaida's efforts to regroup, officials said.

However, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insisted his forces have already "done the maximum" possible against extremists in their territory - and insisted that other allies also shoulder responsibility in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Cheney, accompanied by CIA deputy director Steve Kappes, made an unannounced stop in Pakistan en route to Afghanistan, where snow prevented him from reaching Kabul for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

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WASHINGTON — A juror was dismissed Monday from hearing the perjury and obstruction case against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, but the judge allowed the panel to continue deliberations with 11 members.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton discharged the juror, a former art museum curator, after the woman acknowledged being exposed to information about the case during the weekend, when court was not in session.

Walton did not detail the nature or extent of the contacts, which he said were brought to his attention by the jury foreperson. He expressed concern to the lawyers that other jurors might have been tainted, but after interviewing each, the judge concluded the remaining seven women and four men could continue to serve.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Vice President Dick Cheney made a surprise visit to Pakistan on Monday to bluntly tell President Pervez Musharraf that his forces must markedly heighten their efforts to track down al-Qaida militants crossing the border into Afghanistan.

But Pakistan was defiant in its response to Cheney's message, blaming the increased violence in the region on lapses in security on the Afghan side of the border.

"Our reading is that there are security failures inside Afghanistan ...," said Nadeem Kiani, a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. "It doesn't have much to do with Pakistan."

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MIAMI (AP) - Mario Chanes de Armas, who was at Fidel Castro's side in the Cuban revolution and later spent three decades as a political prisoner in the leader's jails, died Saturday. He was 80.

Chanes de Armas had been in a nursing home but fell ill Saturday and died at Hialeah Hospital, said his friend and fellow prisoner, Eleno Oviedo.

Chanes de Armas joined Castro during the 1953 attack that began the Cuban revolution. He was sentenced with Castro and others to 15 years by the Batista dictatorship, though they were granted amnesty and released 20 months later.

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A jury is moving into its second week of debate on whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq war critic.

The eight women and four men began deliberations late Wednesday morning and have issued only two brief written notes, which suggested they are methodically reviewing the evidence against the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

They requested a large flip chart, masking tape, Post-it notes and a document with pictures of the witnesses.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Jurors considering the five felony charges against former White House aide Lewis 'Scooter' Libby are entering a fourth day of deliberations today.

The former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney is charged with lying and obstructing the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative.

The jury of eight women and four men hasn't been heard from since requesting pictures of the witnesses and some office supplies.

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WASHINGTON -- Jurors considering the five felony charges against former White House aide Lewis 'Scooter' Libby enter the fourth day of deliberations on Monday.

The former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney is charged with lying and obstructing the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative.

The jury of eight women and four men hasn't been heard from since requesting pictures of the witnesses and some office supplies.

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DETROIT - Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was greeted by cheers, tears and chants from tens of thousands as he returned to the public eye just long enough to say he would be leaving it soon.

Farrakhan, who ceded leadership duties last year because of illness, spoke for nearly two hours Sunday. Looking healthy and fit, he credited the prayers of millions from all walks of life for allowing him to take the stage at Detroit's Ford Field.

His vitality seemed at odds with his message, that his time left in the spotlight was short.

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DETROIT -- Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said Sunday the world is at war because Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths are divided.

The 73-year-old Farrakhan stressed religious unity during what was being billed as his final major speech.

He told the tens of thousands gathered at Detroit's Ford Field that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad would embrace each other with love if they were on the stage behind him.

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WASHINGTON -- Attorneys and a federal judge began questioning each juror in the CIA leak trial Monday after one juror apparently saw or read something about the case over the weekend.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has ordered jurors to avoid contact with media coverage of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's monthlong trial. He said Monday that one juror was exposed to information about the trial over the weekend.

Jurors occasionally saw some news coverage during the monthlong trial. Unlike those incidents, Walton said Monday that he worried that the information may have been passed to several jurors. He said each juror would be questioned behind closed doors.

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DETROIT - Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan stressed religious unity Sunday during his final major speech, saying the world is at war because Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths are divided.

The 73-year-old Farrakhan told the tens of thousands at Detroit's Ford Field that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad would embrace each other with love if they were on the stage behind him.

"Our lips are full of praise, but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim," he said. "That's why the world is in the shape that it's in."

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DETROIT -- Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan stressed religious unity Sunday during his final major speech, saying the world is at war because Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths are divided.

The 73-year-old Farrakhan told the tens of thousands at Detroit's Ford Field that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad would embrace each other with love if they were on the stage behind him.

"Our lips are full of praise, but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim," he said. "That's why the world is in the shape that it's in."

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FRESNO — Trudging down the wilted rows of his leased 10 acres last week, Fong Tchang stooped and broke off a brown stalk of dead sugar cane. "Doesn't smell sweet, does it?" he asked in his native Hmong. "Smells more like wine."

The sugar cane was blasted in last month's historic deep freeze, along with rows of eggplant, tong ho soup greens, cabbages, strawberries, artichokes, a cornucopia of Asian squashes and lemongrass, a Hmong staple. Withered Chinese yams lay in brown piles outside the tattered plastic tenting that was supposed to have protected them from the plunging temperatures. Tchang snapped off a stalk of broccoli covered with raw patches of what looked like freezer burn. "Tastes horrible," he said.

Like hundreds of other small farmers whose fields dot sprawling Fresno, Tchang lost well more than half his crop to the freeze. But unlike larger, more established growers, farmers such as Tchang have no cushion — no crop insurance and no savings for the seed and equipment they need to keep going.

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DETROIT ? Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan stressed religious unity Sunday in what was expected to be his last major speech, saying the world is at war because Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths are divided.

The 73-year-old Farrakhan told the tens of thousands at Detroit's Ford Field that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad would embrace each other with love if they were on the stage behind him.

"Our lips are full of praise, but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim," he said. "That's why the world is in the shape that it's in."

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WASHINGTON -- Each of the jurors in the Lewis Libby trial is being questioned today, after one juror apparently saw or read something about the case over the weekend.

The jurors had been ordered to avoid contact with media coverage of the trial of the former White House aide. He's accused of lying about the leak of the identity of a CIA operative who was married to a critic of the Iraq war.

The judge says one juror was exposed to information about the trial over the weekend. During the trial, jurors occasionally saw some news coverage. But this time, the judge says he's worried that the information may have been passed to several jurors.

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WASHINGTON - A jury is moving into its second week of debate on whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq war critic.

The eight women and four men began deliberations late Wednesday morning and have issued only two brief written notes, which suggested they are methodically reviewing the evidence against the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

They requested a large flip chart, masking tape, Post-it notes and a document with pictures of the witnesses.

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DETROIT - Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was greeted by cheers, tears and chants from tens of thousands as he returned to the public eye just long enough to say he would be leaving it soon.

Farrakhan, who ceded leadership duties last year because of illness, spoke for nearly two hours Sunday. Looking healthy and fit, he credited the prayers of millions from all walks of life for allowing him to take the stage at Detroit's Ford Field.

His vitality seemed at odds with his message, that his time left in the spotlight was short.

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Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan stressed religious unity Sunday in what was expected to be his last major speech, saying the world is at war because Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths are divided.

The 73-year-old Farrakhan told the tens of thousands at Detroit's Ford Field that Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad would embrace each other with love if they were on the stage behind him.

"Our lips are full of praise, but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim," he said. "That's why the world is in the shape that it's in."

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Facing the past, celebrating the future of Liberia

By SARAH BINGAMAN SCHWARTZ - Sun Newspapers

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DETROIT -- Tens of thousands who listened to what likely will be Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's final major speech heard a call Sunday for religious unity _ with a heavy warning of what lies ahead for the world.

The fiery orator, whose pulpit was on the main floor of Detroit's Ford Field, said the world is at war because Christians, Muslims and people of other faiths are divided. The 73-year-old leader said Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad would embrace each other with love if they were on the silver-framed stage behind him, but their followers don't do the same.

"Our lips are full of praise, but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim," he said. "That's why the world is in the shape that it's in."

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After my boys recently requested new targets for paintball in the backyard, I found myself online, ordering a 25-pack of Osama bin Laden likenesses for $19.97. They arrived last week, on the same day as reports of an al-Qaeda resurgence in Pakistani training camps. Seems bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still alive, and apparently not the irrelevancy we had hoped, six years removed from 9/11.

As I stood opening the cylinder containing the terrorist's image, one of my sons asked what had become of the mastermind of the plot that killed 3,000. I found myself parroting the usual lines about the difficulty of finding one man amid rugged terrain. But the more my son prodded, the angrier I became.

Because I no longer believe we are hunting bin Laden. Worse, no one seems to care. What happened to the days when a Bryn Mawr soccer mom would have yearned to strangle bin Laden or Zawahiri with her bare hands?

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WASHINGTON — A band of religious warriors that Iran's clerical rulers created to spread their country's Islamic Revolution has joined Iran's nuclear program at the center of the rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.

The Quds Force, a secretive overseas arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan; runs Shiite extremist networks in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe; trains and arms Hezbollah and other Shiite radicals in Iran and Lebanon; and funds the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. Now it's arming Iraqi Shiite Muslims with armor-piercing bombs, according to U.S. officials.

Many experts now warn that if the U.S.-Iranian frictions over Iraq and Iran's nuclear program escalate into conflict, Tehran would use the Quds Force to launch terrorist attacks against U.S. and allied targets around the world.

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A sell-out crowd of some 600 retailers and restaurateurs spent more than $2 million Saturday for close to 200 lots of wine handcrafted solely for the trade attending Premiere Napa Valley.

Sponsored by Napa Valley Vintners, the auction was held at CIA Greystone, an event that supports the trade association?s worldwide marketing programs and helps fund the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies.

In a little over three hours, auctioneers Ursula Hermacinski and Fritz Hatton sold off 192 lots of wine especially made for this event ? a mix of distinct vineyard blends and hand-selected barrels from some of the best vineyards in the valley.

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The confrontation between the United States and Iran seems to grow more bitter every day. Last week, Iran defied a United Nations deadline to stop enriching uranium, which the U.S. claims is part of an Iranian program to build nuclear weapons. The U.S. also accuses Iran of supplying sophisticated bombs to kill American soldiers in Iraq. A second U.S. carrier battle group arrived in the region last week, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates insists that "we have no intention of attacking Iran." Uni...

1. Iran is a major exporter of crude oil, but it has to import gasoline because of its limited refinery capability. This shortcoming would make Iran particularly vulnerable to any blockade.

2. The CIA helped overthrow Iran's democratically elected government and installed a dictator in 1953. The joint U.S.-British covert action known as Operation Ajax turned Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh into a political prisoner and led to decades of repression, torture and assassination under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

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CAIRO, Egypt - An Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped off the streets of Italy by CIA agents in 2003 claimed Sunday that the Americans who abducted him "savagely" tortured him while deporting him to Egypt for interrogation.

The allegations by Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr, who also is known as Abu Omar, are likely to intensify criticism of the United States' "extraordinary rendition" program. Italy has indicted 26 Americans and five Italian agents accused of seizing the cleric in 2003.

Nasr told the pan-Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera that he "was savagely tortured by the CIA when kidnapped and during my deportation" to Egypt.

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VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Despite growing international concern about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran, diplomats here said.

The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services have provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed.

None of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic is developing illicit weapons.

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PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) -- Ronald Hilton, a noted Latin America scholar who uncovered preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion, has died. He was 95. Hilton died of cancer Tuesday at his longtime home on the Stanford University campus, said his daughter, Mary H. Huyck of Greenwich, Conn. As director of Stanford's Institute of Hispanic American Studies, Hilton reported that it was common knowledge in Guatemala that the CIA had established a base there to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of C...

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It seems to me that our language is getting more and more jumbled up by the all the alphabet soup we encounter every day. This kinda came home recently when we were watching a crime show where one of the characters said that he had "bolo'd" a suspect. I couldn't figure out why he would put a "bolo", a type of Western string tie which uses a sliding clasp, on the culprit. Then again he surely wouldn't use a "bolo", a large knife similar to a machete, or the South American throwing rope device whi...

An acronym, according to the purists on the subject, is a pronounceable word formed from each of the first letters of a series of words that describe an object, process, system, or organization. I don't think this is followed very carefully because additional letters from within a word are sometimes used and some words may be omitted. Radar, for example, is an acronym for "RAdio Detection And Ranging" and sonar comes from SOund Navigation And Ranging. We have gotten so used to some acronyms that...

According to the folks who catalogue them, acronyms can often have more than one meaning. "Laser" comes from Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but can also mean Lots of Applied Scientists Eat Regularly. Then, too, one might well find CRAP (Cheap Redundant Assorted Products) in a CRAP (Central Receiving And Processing) facility. (These are actual acronyms.)

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WASHINGTON — President Bush says he isn't looking for a fight, but the question won't go away: Is the United States headed for war with Iran's Islamic rulers?

Increasing tensions with Iran over its nuclear program and actions in Iraq have fueled speculation that Bush may be paving the way for military action. With U.S. forces tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one expects a ground invasion, but analysts at both ends of the political spectrum put little stock in Bush's insistence that he's focused only on diplomacy.

"I still believe, at the end of the day, that he will bomb the Iranian [nuclear] facilities," said Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. "When he does it — if he does it — it will be wildly unpopular. He certainly at least wants to be able to say convincingly, 'I tried everything else,' " Muravchik said.

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ST. LOUIS - Richard Perle has been among the most influential defense and national security figures in Washington. Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board early in the Bush administration, he was assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Reagan administration and is now with the American Enterprise Institute. He strongly supported the decision to attack Iraq four years ago.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau reporter Philip Dine spoke with him recently about the war.

QUESTION: Some say the administration has made major strategic errors in prosecuting the war in Iraq. Do you agree?

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t should come as little surprise that Social Security numbers are posted on the Internet. But, says Betty Ostergren, a former insurance claims supervisor in suburban Richmond, Va., who has spent years trolling for them, “people are always astounded” to learn that theirs is one of them.Mrs. Ostergren, 57, has made a name for herself as a gadfly as she took on a lonely and sometimes frustrating mission to draw attention to the situation. With addresses, dates of birth and maiden name...

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TOKYO - Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March. And then he became a U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, released by the U.S. National Archives and examined by The Associated Press, document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence in the early days of the Cold War. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view.

The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files, fill in many of the blanks in the previously spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.

In addition to Tsuji, who escaped Allied prosecution and was elected to parliament in the 1950s, conspicuous figures in U.S.-funded operations included mob boss and war profiteer Yoshio Kodama, and Takushiro Hattori, former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.

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WASHINGTON - Jurors deliberated a third day Friday without reaching a verdict on whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq war critic.

After 2 1/2 days of deliberations over the fate of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, the eight women and four men went home until Monday.

In addition to obstruction of the leak investigation, Libby is charged with lying to the FBI and a grand jury about how he learned about and whom he told about CIA operative Valerie Plame.

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WASHINGTON It's going to be a weekend of wondering for Lewis Libby.A Washington federal jury has not reached a verdict in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former top aide. Libby is accused of lying to investigators probing who leaked the name of a C-I-A operative married to a critic of the administration's rationale for invading Iraq.Nobody was ever charged with the actual leak.The jurors got the case Wednesday, and after two and a-half days of deliberations, have gone home until Mon...

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WASHINGTON - Jurors resumed deliberating Friday over whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq war critic.

The eight women and four men began deliberations late Wednesday morning and have issued only two brief written notes, which suggested they are methodically reviewing the evidence against the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

They requested a large flip chart, masking tape, Post-it notes and a document with pictures of the witnesses.

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A jury began its third day of deliberations on Friday in the perjury trial of former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is accused of obstructing an investigation tied to the Iraq war.Friday, February 23, 2007

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A jury began its third day of deliberations on Friday in the perjury trial of former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is accused of obstructing an investigation tied to the Iraq war.

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WASHINGTON - A band of religious warriors that Iran's clerical rulers created to spread their country's Islamic Revolution has joined Iran's nuclear program at the center of the rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.

The Quds Force, a secretive overseas arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan; runs Shiite extremist networks in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe; trains and arms Hezbollah and other Shiite radicals in Iran and Lebanon; and funds the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. Now it's arming Iraqi Shiite Muslims with armor-piercing bombs to use against American troops, according to U.S. officials.

Many experts now warn that if the U.S.-Iranian frictions over Iraq and Iran's nuclear program escalate into conflict, Tehran would use the Quds Force to launch terrorist attacks against U.S. and allied targets around the world.

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WASHINGTON - President Bush says he isn't looking for a fight, but the question won't go away: Is the United States headed for war with Iran's Islamic rulers?

Increasing tensions with Iran over its nuclear program and actions in Iraq have fueled speculation that Bush may be paving the way for military action. With U.S. forces tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one expects a ground invasion, but analysts at both ends of the political spectrum put little stock in Bush's insistence that he's focused only on diplomacy.

"I still believe, at the end of the day, that he will bomb the Iranian (nuclear) facilities," said Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Bush administration. Muravchik, who favors military action, sees Bush's current focus on diplomacy as a prelude to attack.

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 ? The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to American officials.

The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants? positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and ventured into Somalia, the officials said.

The counterterrorism effort was described by American officials as a qualified success that disrupted terrorist networks in Somalia, led to the death or capture of several Islamic militants and involved a collaborative relationship with Ethiopia that had been developing for years.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - It's day three for the jury deliberating Lewis Libby's fate.

The panel of a dozen jurors is back in a Washington courthouse, debating whether the former White House aide obstructed the probe into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

The jury has issued two brief notes since getting the case Wednesday -- asking for a large flip chart, masking tape, Post-it notes and document with pictures of the witnesses.

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Richard Lehman, a CIA official credited with creating the president's daily intelligence briefing and who became chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which oversees government intelligence analysis, died Saturday at a hospice in Concord, N.H., after a stroke. He was 83.

Lehman worked at the CIA from 1949 to 1982. He received a CIA Trailblazer Award for creating the President's Intelligence Checklist for President Kennedy in 1961. The checklist, initially known by the acronym PICL and pronounced "pickle," was later renamed the President's Daily Brief.

The written briefing, which has become standard practice, informs the president and other senior policymakers about intelligence developments worldwide. Lehman had a prominent role in keeping Kennedy informed of developments during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and became a CIA transition liaison for new presidents.

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