A United States Army sergeant was convicted by a military jury today of premeditated murder and attempted murder in a grenade and rifle attack that killed two of his comrades and wounded 14 others in Kuwait during the opening days of the Iraq war. Hasan Akbar, 33, now faces a possible death penalty, which the 15-member jury will consider at a hearing that begins Monday. Prosecutors at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, said Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned US troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq.

A commercial helicopter contracted by the U.S. Defense Department was shot down by missile fire north of the Iraqi capital Thursday, and all nine people on board were killed, U.S. and Bulgarian officials said.

The oldest inhabitants of southern Africa, the Gana and Gwi Bushmen of Botswana, are set to lose historic rights to ancestral lands after a controversial change to the country's constitution.
The Bushmen have lived in the Kalahari desert for 20,000 years, but the Botswanan government claims that the tribesmen are endangering wildlife in parts of the Kalahari. Ministers also claim that the cost of providing water to the tribes is too great and the authorities have forced at least 243 Bushmen to move to "relocation camps" outside the desert.
In response, the Bushmen challenged the government's right to evict them in court, basing their argument on a key clause in the Botswana constitution, which protects Gana and Gwi Bushmen's ancestral land within the central Kalahari game reserve. The scrapping of the clause, halfway through the case, appears designed to ensure that the Bushmen cannot win in court.

VATICAN CITY (AP) - With unusual speed and little surprise, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany became Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, a 78-year-old transitional leader who promises to enforce strictly conservative policies for the world's Roman Catholics.

Appearing on St. Peter's Basilica balcony as dusk fell, a red cape over his new white robes, the white-haired Ratzinger called himself ``a simple, humble worker.'' The crowd responded to the 265th pope by waving flags and chanting ``Benedict! Benedict!''

A suicide car bomb outside an Iraqi army recruitment center and other attacks Tuesday killed a dozen Iraqis and wounded more than 50, police said. Elsewhere in the capital, parliament briefly adjourned after a legislator belonging to a radical Shiite group claimed he had been roughed up at a U.S. checkpoint. The blast occurred in the Azamiyah section of the capital about 18 yards from the front gate of the recruitment center, killing at least six Iraqis, including two soldiers, and wounding 44, said police Col. Hussein Mutlaq.

MADAIN, Iraq - Hundreds of Iraqi security forces, backed by U.S. military, swept into a town south of Baghdad at dawn Monday but found no hostages, despite reports that Sunni militants had kidnapped as many as 100 Shiites there. Residents and Sunni clerics said the reports had been grossly exaggerated by government officials bent on re-establishing control in the lawless region the U.S. military has called the "Triangle of Death" because it has become a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency.

Shia politicians in Iraq have called for Saddam Hussein to be executed if he is convicted of war crimes and say the president should resign if he will not approve the death penalty. Jalal Talabani, the incoming president of Iraq, said in an interview with the BBC that he would not sign the order of execution for Saddam.