Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told an Iranian envoy Sunday that the persistent attacks in Iraq are also a threat abroad, a pointed warning amid U.S. accusations that the government in Tehran is stoking the violence by supporting Shiite militias. Al-Maliki met with top Iranian envoy Ali Larijani in Baghdad as Iran agreed to attend a major U.S.-backed regional conference on Iraq set for this week in Egypt.
A section of freeway that funnels traffic onto the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and caught fire, authorities said. The heat from the fire was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns.
A wildfire in southeast Georgia has consumed nearly 100 square miles of forest and swampland since it ignited April 16. Several rural homes were evacuated after spot fires ignited across a highway, and firefighters fought the smaller blazes before they could spread to the tinder-dry forest beyond, authorities said. Firefighters have managed to contain about 70 percent of the wildfire, which is the largest in Georgia history.
The Army’s new chief of staff says he wants to accelerate by two years a plan to increase the nation’s active-duty soldiers by 65,000. The Army has set 2012 as its target date for a force expansion to 547,000 troops, but Gen. George Casey said Saturday that he has told his staff to have the soldiers ready earlier.
Hundreds of Afghans protested in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday after six people were reportedly killed when U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces raided a suspected car-bomb cell. The U.S. said four militants were among the dead, but it was the civilian deaths that infuriated the protesters, who carried five bodies to a main highway and blocked traffic with felled trees during the demonstration.
Gunmen seriously wounded one of Iraq’s best known radio and television journalists near her home on Sunday in Baghdad, police said. The attackers were waiting in parked cars and opened fire just as Amal al-Moudares left her house at 7:45 a.m. in the western neighborhood of Khadra, police said.
At least two people were killed Sunday afternoon after a shooting at a Kansas City, Mo., shopping center, fire officials said. The shooting occurred shortly before 4 p.m. at the Ward Parkway shopping center, police said.
