U.S. Confirms Some Afghan Civilian Deaths
KABUL, Afghanistan - A U.S. airstrike last week killed 17 Afghan villagers, including women and children, a provincial governor said Monday. The U.S. military confirmed some civilians were killed in the attack on what it called a known terrorist compound.
The bombing occurred in Kunar province last Friday, three days after an elite U.S. military team disappeared in the mountainous area.
"Seventeen civilians were killed during the bombing, including women and children," Kunar Gov. Asadullah Wafa told The Associated Press after leaving a mosque in the capital, Kabul. He did not say whether any militants also were believed to be in the compound.
The U.S. military confirmed civilians were killed but didn't say how many.
The attack was "with precision-guided munitions that resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of enemy terrorists and noncombatants," the military said in a statement.
"The targeted compound was a known operating base for terrorist attacks in Kunar province as well as a base for a medium-level terrorist leader," it said. "Battle damage assessment is currently ongoing."
The statement added that U.S. forces "regret the loss of innocent lives and follow stringent rules of engagement specifically to ensure that noncombatants are safeguarded. However, when enemy forces move their families into the locations where they conduct terrorist operations, they put these innocent civilians at risk."
Hundreds of Afghan and U.S. forces are in Kunar, searching for members of the missing military team and hunting militants in the area. One member of the team has been rescued and was being evaluated on Monday, a U.S. Defense Department official said.
He declined to say when the rescue occurred or provide other details, including a reaction to reports that the team consisted of several U.S. Navy Seals.
U.S. officials at the time said the target was an "enemy compound" that "we deemed we had to hit immediately."
Suspected Insurgent Houses Raided in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi forces raided suspected insurgent safe houses near Baghdad International Airport on Monday, arresting at least 100 suspected militants, including foreign fighters, the U.S. military said.
In Cairo, the family of Egypt's top envoy to Iraq, who was abducted over the weekend in Baghdad, pleaded for the diplomat's speedy release and said it had heard nothing of about his whereabouts. Ihab al-Sherif's abduction was an apparent bid to dissuade Arab governments from strengthening ties to the U.S.-backed government.
A car bomb detonated by remote control in western Baghdad on Monday killed two civilians, including one woman, and wounded four more, police said. Elsewhere, four gunmen killed a senior member of the Kurdish Democratic Party's Mosul branch, a party spokesman said. Jirjis Mohammed Amin was shot inside his sister's home in the northern city.
A second attack by gunmen in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, killed a bodyguard of the provincial Nineveh governor, police said. He was killed in front of his home in the eastern part of the city, which is the capital of Nineveh province.
In the Iraqi capital, about 600 Iraqi army soldiers and 250 U.S. soldiers took part in Operation Muthana Strike, which started early Monday and targeted alleged insurgents safe houses in neighborhoods near the west side of the Baghdad International Airport, the military said in a statement.
At least 100 suspected insurgents, including alleged foreign fighters, were arrested, the military said. Those captured included Egyptian suspects, it said.
The raid, which the military said was based on tips from local residents, was designed to detain suspects, seize illegal weapons and gain intelligence to disrupt future attacks.
"The success of the Iraqi army demonstrates their level of training and high commitment to rid Iraq of terrorists," said U.S. Col. Kenneth Roberts in the statement. "I am proud of our Iraqi counterparts. They are well-led and well-trained. I congratulate them on their successful operation."
The operation concluded at about 9:30 a.m.
A joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol came under fire Sunday south of Baghdad, killing five Iraqi soldiers and wounding three more, the U.S. military said Monday. There were no reports of American casualties. Up to 40 suspected insurgents were captured after the attack in Youssifiyah, 12 miles south of Baghdad.
Elsewhere, gunmen in Baghdad killed an Iraqi painting contractor who worked with a U.S. military base, doctors said. Omar Othman and a friend were driving on Baghdad's dangerous airport road Monday morning when the assailants opened fire. Othman's friend was wounded.
Separately, the Iraqi army found the beheaded corpse of an unidentified man with his hands tied behind his back Monday in Bani Zaid village, north of Baghdad, police said.
On Sunday, officials and witnesses said al-Sherif, 51, chief of Egypt's diplomatic mission in Baghdad, was seized Saturday night by about eight gunmen after he stopped to buy a newspaper in western Baghdad.
Al-Sherif, who had been in the country since June 1, was pistol-whipped and forced into the trunk of a car as the assailants shouted that he was an "American spy," the witnesses said, speaking on condition of anonymity Sunday because they feared reprisals.
Al-Sherif's brother-in-law and family spokesman, Yahia Hussein, said Monday he has received no demands from the kidnappers nor the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, which has been in contact with Iraqi authorities. There has been no claim of responsibility.
"We know nothing at all. We don't know what the kidnappers want but I am sure the Foreign Ministry is exerting all the effort to let him free," Hussein said.
In Cairo, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry confirmed the diplomat was missing and said contacts were underway with the Iraqi government "and all other sides" to win his release.
One of Iraq's most prominent Sunni Arab political organizations, the Iraqi Islamic Party, quickly condemned the kidnapping and demanded al-Sherif's "immediate release."
"This kidnapping is an attempt to block Arab countries from opening stronger diplomatic channels in Iraq," said Iraqi legislator Abbas al-Bayati, a member of the foreign relations committee. "We condemn this cowardly and terrorist. It seeks to isolate Iraq from the rest of the world."
More than 1,400 people have been killed in insurgent attacks since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new government, dominated by Shiites and Kurds, on April 28. Sunni Arabs make up the core of a violent insurgency.
Washington has been urging Arab nations to resume full diplomatic relations with the sovereign, elected Iraqi government, and al-Sherif's abduction appeared to serve as a warning against responding favorably to such overtures.
Last month, the Egyptian government said it would upgrade its mission in Iraq to full embassy status headed by an ambassador, which would have made al-Sherif the first Arab ambassador to Iraq's new government although the timing of the move was uncertain.
The abduction occurred hours before U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales paid a surprise one-day visit to Iraq on Sunday, where he praised the country's commitment to democracy despite sustained and deadly attacks by insurgents.
He told U.S. troops and diplomats at the American Embassy that their mission in Iraq "is so very important to the security of our country and the promotion of freedom around the world. There is so much at stake here."
Homeowners Deal With Rising Property Taxes
MIAMI - As home prices skyrocket, property taxes are also going up, especially in hot markets like Florida, California and the Northeast.
"Young families simply can't afford to live here. It's very difficult for police officers, firefighters, teachers and nurses," said Lori Parrish, the property appraiser in nearby Broward County, who has pushed for more property tax breaks.
Teri Vasarhelyi and her husband thought they would be able to afford a bigger house with more land two years ago when they left San Francisco, the most expensive home market in the country.
They figured they found a good deal in a two-bedroom house in the peaceful, leafy Coconut Grove area for $440,000 in March 2004. But the shock came when their first property tax bill came a few months later — more than $9,200 a year, nearly double what they paid in their old home.
"That's an awful lot of money, on top of your mortgage, to find that cash," said Vasarhelyi, 35, who's taking time off from her advertising career to raise their baby.
Many people are running into similar problems, a side effect of the real estate boom.
First-time home buyers are especially running into trouble as wages adjusted for inflation haven't kept pace with real estate prices, and elderly residents on fixed incomes who have lived in their homes for decades are also struggling to pay ever-increasing taxes.
The national average annual property tax collection was $971 per person in 2002-2003, up 18 percent from $822 five years earlier, according to the latest figures available from the Tax Foundation, a research organization in Washington. The median home price nationwide rose to $170,000 in 2003 from $128,400 in 1998, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The most expensive states for property taxes were in the Northeast, with New Jersey topping out at $1,872 per person in 2002-2003. The cheapest state was Alabama at $329 per person.
While rising property taxes in theory should slow down the real estate market, that hasn't happened for two key reasons: "The popular belief that real estate is the best investment and the American willingness to spend a remarkably high fraction of their disposable income on housing," said foundation spokesman Bill Ahern.
Governments are still sensitive to complaints from homeowners. At least 48 states have tried to give homeowners relief from rising property taxes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The methods include tax freezes, restricting property taxes to a percentage of the home's market value and caps on how much a home's assessed value can increase. Many states are considering expanding property tax relief.
But local governments are also wary of cutting back on what they collect — they get more than 95 percent of all property taxes. Altogether, American businesses and home-owners paid $296.7 billion in property taxes in 2002-2003, up from $279.1 billion in 2001-2002, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Those numbers likely climbed even faster recently along with record-high home prices.
Property taxes pay for everything from schools and roads to police and fire departments. While they usually are collected by local governments, states generally write the laws that govern them.
"States are interested in keeping property taxes manageable at the same time they're balancing the delivery of public services demanded by citizens," said Bert Waisanen, fiscal analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Property tax relief varies widely from state to state, and even within them. A 2002 report by the legislative conference said that states are walking a tightrope to ensure that tax burdens are fair.
"(T)he relief provided to some may come at the expense of others," the report said.
California was a pioneer in easing the burden of property taxes. In 1978, voters there passed Proposition 13, which capped the increase in a home's taxable value at 2 percent a year until it is sold. It also limits a homeowners property tax to 1 percent of market value. Many other states followed with similar breaks, even though California's recurring budget crisis has been partly blamed on the initiative.
Forty-eight states also give home-owners a homestead exemption or credit, which allows them to deduct a certain amount from their home's taxable value.
But those rules aren't enough to keep taxes level.
It is also becoming more difficult for people to move because they usually lose out on property tax breaks when they do. For example, the previous owner of Vasarhelyi's house paid less because the increases in assessed values are capped in Florida at a maximum of 3 percent a year. But once the house is sold, that limit is lifted.
So what options do people have when the taxman comes calling?
"The biggest thing that any individual home-owner can do is to make sure that they aren't overassessed. The errors that take place in assessing properties are rampant," American Homeowners Association president Richard J. Roll said.
Some common errors are improper calculation of square footage and incorrect number of bathrooms or bedrooms, he said.
Only 2 percent of homeowners have challenged their assessment, but many more should because about 70 percent of those who do receive a reduction, Roll said.
"There are often tremendous disparities for no apparent reason," he said.
On Target: NASA Rocket Slams Into Comet
PASADENA, Calif. - It sounded like science fiction — NASA scientists used a space probe to chase down a speeding comet 83 million miles away and slammed it into the frozen ball of dirty ice and debris in a mission to learn how the solar system was formed.
The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse.
The impact at 10:52 p.m. PDT was cause for celebration not only to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but also for the more than 10,000 people camped out at Hawaii's Waikiki Beach to watch it on a giant movie screen.
"It's almost like one of those science fiction movies," said Steve Lin, a Honolulu physician.
The cosmic smash-up did not significantly alter the comet's orbit around the sun and NASA said the experiment does not pose any danger to Earth — unlike the scary comet headed for Earth in the 1998 movie, "Deep Impact."
Scientists at mission control erupted in applause and exchanged hugs as a voice on a speaker proclaimed, "Team, we have a confirmation."
It was a milestone for the U.S. space agency, because no other space mission has flown this close to a comet. In 2004, NASA's Stardust craft flew within 147 miles of Comet Wild 2 en route back to Earth carrying interstellar dust samples.
"A lot of people said we couldn't do this or wouldn't be able to pull it off," said Rick Grammier, the mission's project manager. "It happened like clockwork and I think that's something to be proud of on America's birthday."
Rough images by the mothership that released the probe on its suicide mission 24 hours earlier showed a bright white flash from the comet upon impact, which hurled a cloud of debris into space. When the dust settles, scientists hope to peek inside the comet's frozen core — a composite of ice and rock left over from the early solar system.
In Frankfurt, Germany, David Southwood of the European Space Agency congratulated NASA. "The Deep Impact mission brought the world together in an excellent opportunity to make a new step into the advancement of cometary science," he said.
The European agency was observing and photographing the comet collision with its Rosetta spacecraft, which will attempt to rendezvous with a comet in 2014.
The camera of the Deep Impact probe temporarily blacked out twice, probably from being sandblasted by comet debris, NASA scientists said. Still, the probe — on battery power and tumbling toward the comet, using thrusters to get a perfect aim — took pictures right up to the final moments, revealing crater-like features. The last image was taken three seconds before impact.
The energy produced from the impact was equivalent to exploding five tons of dynamite and it caused the comet to shine six times brighter than normal.
Scientists had compared the barrel-shaped probe's journey to standing in the middle of the road and being hit by a semi-truck roaring at 23,000 mph. They expect the crater left behind to be anywhere from the size of a large house to a football stadium and between two and 14 stories deep.
Soon after the crash on the comet's sunlit side, the mothership prepared to approach Tempel 1 to peer into the crater site and send more data back to Earth. The spacecraft was to fly within 310 miles of the comet before activating its dust shields to protect itself from a blizzard of debris.
Comets are frozen balls of dirty ice, rock and dust that orbit the sun. A giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed to create the sun and planets about 4.5 billion years ago and comets formed from the leftover building blocks of the solar system.
NASA's fleet of space telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope, and dozens of ground observatories recorded the impact.
Deep Impact launched Jan. 12 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on its 268 million-mile voyage. Scientists say the choice of the mission name was a coincidence and not inspired by the movie.
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