A US federal jury will determine whether former soldier Steven Dale Green should be executed for raping an Iraqi teenager and executing the girl and her family, court officials said.
It took the jurors less than two days of deliberations to find Green guilty on all 17 criminal counts, which included rape, premeditated murder and obstruction of justice.
Three other soldiers were given life sentences in the March 2006 atrocity that was devised over whiskey and a game of cards at a traffic check point in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.

Turkish authorities arrested a man who allegedly plotted to pose as an Arab news network journalist to kill U.S. President Obama, a Saudi newspaper said Monday.
The man, said to be of Syrian descent, was arrested Friday and allegedly confessed he intended to stab Obama with a knife during the president’s visit to Turkey, the Saudi daily Al Watan reported. The man, who was carrying a press card identifying him as an employee of al-Jazeera, allegedly said he had three accomplices.
The Jerusalem Post, which reported about the al Watan article, said …

John Solecki, the head of the UN refugee agency’s office in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, was found on Saturday night by the side of a road near Quetta, the provincial capital, with his hands and feet bound, pleading: “Help me, help me!”
Ethnic Baluch separatists had earlier claimed responsibility for the abduction and at one point threatened to kill Mr Solecki — the highest-profile Westerner to be kidnapped in Pakistan since Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded in 2002. News of Mr Solecki’s release came …

The United States has lodged a protest with China over an incident Sunday in which the Pentagon says five Chinese vessels harassed an unarmed U.S. Navy research ship in international waters in the South China Sea, and engaged in potentially dangerous maneuvering. Pentagon officials say this is the latest in a series of such incidents in recent days.
A U.S. Navy photo shows that one of the Chinese ships is fairly large and has “China Marine Surveillance” written on its side. The other ships are smaller and also do not …

An Internet security company claims that Iran has taken advantage of a computer security breach to obtain engineering and communications information about Marine One, President Barack Obama’s helicopter, according to a report by WPXI, NBC’s affiliate in Pittsburgh.
Tiversa, headquartered in Cranberry Township, Pa., reportedly discovered a security breach that led to the transfer of military information to an Iranian IP address, according to WPXI. The information is said to include planned engineering upgrades, avionic schematics, and computer network information.
Incoming search terms:obamas helicopterobama\s helicopterobama helicopter iraqsaudi choperhelicoptere marine onemarine one …

The nation’s top military officer said Sunday that Iran has enough nuclear material to make a bomb, but Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Tehran was not close to building a weapon.
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that he believed Iran had enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
“We think they do, quite frankly,” Mullen said.
A recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency found that Iran had built up its supplies of enriched uranium to slightly more …

President Obama announced today his plans for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. He did it from North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, where thousands of Marines are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. (You can read his speech here.)
This is as much a message to Americans as it is Europeans: We have a new priority.
“America can no longer afford to see Iraq in isolation from other priorities: we face the challenge of refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan; of relieving the burden on our military; and of rebuilding our struggling economy and these are …

The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.
The image — that is no longer on the site but which was obtained by The News, Pakistan’s English language daily newspaper — shows what appear to be three Predator drones outside a hangar at the end of the runway. The Times also obtained a copy of the image, whose co-ordinates confirm that it is the Shamsi airfield, also …

Ecuador’s left-wing president has ordered the expulsion of a senior US diplomat, accusing him of suspending aid to Ecuador’s anti-drugs programme.
During his weekly TV address, Rafael Correa said US customs attache Armando Astorga was “insolent and foolish” and had treated Ecuador like a colony.

US officials are looking for alternative ways of transporting soldiers and goods to Afghanistan after a decision by the Kyrgyz government to close a US base on its soil.
The Manas airbase near the capital Bishkek serves as an important supply route for US and Nato operations in Afghanistan.
It was set up by the United States in 2001 to support Operation Enduring Freedom – the US-led fight against al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan.