Two generations of Kennedys – the Democratic Party’s best-known political family – endorsed Barack Obama for president on Monday, with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy calling him a “man with extraordinary gifts of leadership and character,” and a worthy heir to his assassinated brother. “I feel change in the air,” Kennedy said in remarks salted with scarcely veiled criticism of Obama’s chief rival for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as her husband, the former president. Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, also pledged her support for Obama.
A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is behind a group of foreign and Iraqi fighters responsible for this week’s devastating explosion in northern Iraq, a security chief for Sunni tribesmen who rose up against al-Qaida said Saturday. At least 38 people were killed and 225 wounded last Wednesday when a huge blast destroyed about 50 buildings in a Mosul slum. The next day, a suicide bomber killed the provincial police chief and two other officers as they surveyed the blast site.
A smattering of Hamas-affiliated security forces, many of them bearded and dressed in blue camouflage uniforms, fanned out on both sides of the breached Gaza-Egypt border Sunday to jointly police the crossing with Egyptian guards. Though only about a dozen Hamas forces took up positions, it was their first significant action on the Egyptian side of the border in the five days since Palestinian militants blasted through the partition. Since then, tens of thousands of Gazans have flooded into Egypt to buy food, fuel and other goods made scarce by an Israeli closure of the territory.
Canada will extend its military mission in Afghanistan only if another NATO country puts more soldiers in the dangerous south, the prime minister said Monday, echoing the recommendation of an independent panel to withdraw without additional forces. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is under pressure to withdraw its 2,500 troops from Kandahar province, the former Taliban stronghold, after the deaths of 78 soldiers and a diplomat. The mission is set to expire in 2009 without an extension by Canadian lawmakers.
