House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held talks with Syria’s leader Wednesday despite White House objections. She said she pressed President Bashar Assad over his country’s support for militant groups and passed him a peace message from Israel. The meeting was an attempt to push the Bush administration to open a direct dialogue with Syria, a step that the White House has rejected. Congressional Democrats insist the U.S. attempts to isolate Syria have failed to force the Assad government to change its policies.
Violent thunderstorms battered a three-state region with hail as big as softballs and wind that damaged several homes and caused power outages. The storms that hit Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee marked the leading edge of a mass of cold air that dropped temperatures Wednesday morning into the 20s in the central Plains and upper Midwest.
Gunmen opened fire on a minibus carrying power plant workers Wednesday in a predominantly Sunni area west of Kirkuk, killing six men, officials said. West of Baghdad, 22 shepherds were abducted. A suicide car bomber and a mortar attack also hit a police station being manned by U.S. and Iraqi forces in the Shiite Sadr City enclave in Baghdad, wounding two policemen and two civilians, police said.
The strains of fighting in Iraq have forced the Marine Corps to forego training in jungle warfare and other skills that are the traditional backbone of the Corps, the Marines’ top general said Wednesday. “We’re not training for the other kinds” of combat that could arise at short notice, Gen. James T. Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, told a group of Marines at the U.S. naval headquarters for the Persian Gulf. “We are the nation’s shock troops,” he said, stressing that Marines have to be prepared to make amphibious landings and conduct operations that require training they are not getting now because Marine infantry and air units returning from Iraq have time only to get ready for their next tour of duty there.
