U.S. authorities have given cash compensation to the families of Afghans killed in a shooting rampage allegedly carried out by an American soldier in Kandahar province, a family member and a tribal elder said on Sunday.
The families received around $50,000 for each person killed and about $10,000 for each wounded in the shootings in two villages in Panjwai district earlier this month. Afghan officials say 16 people, including nine children and women, were killed in the attacks.
“We were invited by the foreign and Afghan officials in Panjwai yesterday and they said this money is an assistance from Obama,” Haji Jan Agha, who said he lost his cousins, told Reuters, referring to U.S. President Barack Obama.
The United States said on Wednesday it appears to be on track to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan charting their future relations during or before a late May NATO summit.
U.S. and Afghan officials have been trying to negotiate an accord for a long-term U.S. presence in Afghanistan beyond a 2014 deadline for most NATO combat forces to withdraw, allowing advisers and possibly some special forces to stay on.
The two countries earlier signed a deal on the transfer of a major U.S.-run prison to Afghan authority, leaving military raids on Afghan homes conducted at night as the final sticking point for reaching a deal.
Read more: Clinton - U.S. on track for Afghan deal by NATO summit
The moment Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat chose to depict President Bashar al-Assad and his “inner circle” in his drawings, he knew he was courting trouble.
One of his first cartoons portraying Assad — long a taboo in Syria — showed the president reluctantly ripping a page off a calendar on Thursday, knowing that Friday would bring another wave of popular protests to the streets of Syria.
In another, Assad tries to hitch a lift with outgoing Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and a third shows Assad beside a large armchair, unable to sit down because the springs have broken.
“Even the chair won’t accept him any more,” Farzat explained with a smile.
When the revolt against Assad kicked off, Farzat received threatening phone calls and messages, but not even that prepared him for the ferocity of the attack which came in the early hours of August 25 as he left his Damascus studio.
Three masked men he described as “thugs of Assad” dragged him from his car and beat him with batons before putting him in their own vehicle and continuing the assault.
“I could hear them saying ‘break his hands so they never dare challenge his masters again’,” he told Reuters, speaking through an interpreter.
Read more: Syrian cartoonist paid the price for getting personal
Zohra Bensemra is a news photographer for Reuters. Based in Algiers, she traveled on assignment to Syria in February. This is her account of that journey:
The contact from Syria called: “Be ready in 30 minutes,” he said. “If you want to go, we have to go now.”
From the moment we left our Turkish hotel near the border, my colleague and I traveled on dirt roads used by smugglers and farmers around Syria’s northern frontier. The highways were busy with soldiers and shabbiha, irregular pro-Assad fighters.
Unlike in Libya, where clear frontlines divided rebels from Muammar Gaddafi’s army, in Syria, frontlines cut through villages and criss-cross farmlands in a treacherous maze. One village might be pro-Assad, the president’s picture hanging in every window, the next a solidly rebel-held town, another a mixture of communities where you could not trust your neighbor.
In Libya, miles divided the warring parties. In Syria, enemies are yards apart. The war is being fought from house to house. Not knowing the local terrain, we were completely dependent on our rebel guides to keep us alive.
Read more: ‘My journey into Syria’s nightmare’
Female war correspondents are no longer a novelty. The legendary 20th century author and journalist Martha Gellhorn broke that mold around 80 years ago, and in recent times many of our most accomplished journalists and chroniclers of war zones — among them CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the BBC’s formidable Kate Adie, Alex Crawford from Sky News and others — just happened to be women.
Male news executives like to think we have become more enlightened over the years as we made decisions about who should cover wars and who was not suited and should stay at home.
As I made judgments, as head of Newsgathering at the BBC and then president and managing director of CNN International, about whom to assign to the hellholes around the globe, the gender of a war correspondent was always under the surface. Was the story suitable for a woman? Would she prove a distraction? Was her hair too long or too blonde? Did her flak jacket fit? Crucially: Was she at greater risk of harassment, sexual assault and rape than her male colleagues?
Read more: On the front line with female war reporters
The United States should lead an international effort to protect key population centers in Syria through air strikes on President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, U.S. Senator John McCain said on Monday.
“The ultimate goal of air strikes should be to establish and defend safe havens in Syria, especially in the north, in which opposition forces can organize and plan their political and military activities against Assad,” McCain, an influential Republican, said in remarks on the Senate floor.
McCain has previously called for efforts to arm the Syrian opposition. But he said on Monday the help Syrian rebels needed most urgently was “relief from Assad’s tank and artillery sieges in the many cities that are still contested” in Syria.
The battered city of Homs is “lost for now,” but other cities are not, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee said.
Read more: Senator McCain urges air strikes on Syria
The White House announced plans on Monday to help “Arab Spring” countries swept by revolutions with more than $800 million in economic aid, while maintaining U.S. military aid to Egypt.
In his annual budget message to Congress, President Barack Obama asked that military aid to Egypt be kept at the level of recent years — $1.3 billion — despite a crisis triggered by an Egyptian probe targeting American democracy activists.
Obama proposed $51.6 billion in funding for the U.S. State Department and foreign aid overall, when $8.2 billion in assistance to war zones is included. The “core budget” for the category would increase by 1.6 percent, officials said.
Most of the economic aid for the Arab Spring countries — $770 million — would go to establish a new “Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund,” the president said in his budget plan.
Read more: Obama proposes $800 million in aid for ‘Arab Spring’
![A white rose is placed on barbed wire at the museum of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau marking the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz Birkenau January 27, 2012. [REUTERS/Kacper Pempel]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lygrl17NKA1qmaoalo1_1280.jpg)
A white rose is placed on barbed wire at the museum of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau marking the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust, in Auschwitz Birkenau January 27, 2012. [REUTERS/Kacper Pempel]
The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.
David Rohde, in the Reuters Magazine article “The Drone Wars.”
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Reuters Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa interviews Dan Rather
