Indianapolis

Gunman kills campus officer; suspect dies

A man fatally shot a Butler University police officer Friday outside the school’s basketball arena, triggering a manhunt that ended with police shooting a suspect who later died.

The suspect, identified as Kahdir Al Khattab, 26, was taken to a hospital in critical condition, police said. He died about six hours later.

The 31-year-old officer, James Davis, was called after police received a report of a suspicious person inside Hinkle Fieldhouse, where the women’s basketball team was practicing, police Sgt. Steve Staletovich said.

The man was outside the building when Davis arrived. Witnesses reported hearing a single gunshot, then seeing the man pick up a gun and run away, Staletovich said. The gun belonged to Davis, he added.

California

Juvenile prison staffers fired after beating video

Six counselors at a high-security juvenile prison have been fired after an investigation found that two of them used excessive force during a fight with two inmates, and the four others falsified reports about the beating.

The fight, videotaped Jan. 20 at the N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility near Stockton, began between the two youths and two counselors.

On the video, broadcast across the nation, the two counselors continued to beat the youths after they were subdued, and other counselors joined in.

The six have appealed their firing.

Houston

Teenager charged with murder in sword attack

Police said a teenager used a 2-foot sword to kill his neighbor during an argument, then struck the man’s elderly mother before her relatives could seize the weapon.

Jose Alberto Martinez, 18, was charged with murder and aggravated assault in the death of Gabriel Flores, 42. He was jailed Friday in lieu of $40,000 bail, investigators said.

Sheriffs Sgt. James Parker said Martinez brought the sword to show it to Flores. The two were drinking when the argument started, and Martinez allegedly stabbed Flores several times before striking Flores’ mother, Parker said.

The woman was in good condition, officials said.

Washington, D.C.

Pentagon releases more Bush Guard records

The Pentagon released 10 pages of records from President Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard Friday, but the files shed no new light on his career.

The records include several that have been released before and others that are administrative files or cover letters to other documents that have been previously released.

The Defense Department released the records in response to a lawsuit by The Associated Press. Friday was the court-ordered deadline for the Pentagon to turn over all records it could find on Bush’s Air National Guard service.

New York

Brothers honored for diabetes perseverance

Day in and day out, for seven decades, brothers Robert and Gerald Cleveland have meticulously managed their blood glucose levels, fending off a disease that typically gives its victims just 20 or 30 years.

On Thursday, the world’s leading diabetes research center paid tribute to the Clevelands for their longevity and everyday perseverance. According to the Boston-based Joslin Diabetes Center, they are the first siblings known to have lived with Type 1 diabetes for 50 years or longer.

Robert, at age 84, has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 79 years and, the center’s Dr. Hillary Keenan says, is the longest known survivor. Gerald, 88, has had diabetes for 72 years.

California

Schwarzenegger OKs online sex offender list

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Friday allowing the home addresses of the state’s 55,000 most serious sex offenders to be posted on the Internet by early next year.

The Republican governor also made it clear he wants an even tougher bill next year, saying this was a “good first step.”

The measure adds California to a majority of states that have posted personal information about high-risk and serious convicted sex offenders who have been released from prison.

Gaza Strip

Israeli missiles kill one

An Israeli missile strike killed one Palestinian and wounded five early today, hours after militants killed an Israeli-American woman in the first deadly shelling of a Jewish settlement in Gaza in four years of fighting.

The settlement attack, which came just before the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, was likely to mobilize further opposition to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip next year. The militant Hamas group claimed responsibility for firing two mortars at the Neve Dekalim settlement in southern Gaza.

Chad

U.N. refugee chief poses autonomy for Darfur

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees proposed autonomy for the troubled Darfur region of Sudan — a solution the government has resisted but said Friday it would be willing to discuss anew in an effort to end the violence that has killed 50,000 people.

Also, the U.S. State Department’s representative for Sudan said it would take up to two years to disarm the Arab militia blamed for the violence and secure the region so 1.4 million displaced people could return home.

UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers went as far as any international official has done previously in proposing solutions to the 19-month conflict.

Afghanistan

U.S. forces kill 5 Taliban after checkpoint attack

U.S. troops and helicopter gunships killed five suspected Taliban rebels Friday, hours after militants attacked Afghan army troops in southern Afghanistan, a provincial governor said.

The Taliban fighters attacked a checkpoint of Afghanistan’s fledging national army at midnight in the area of Thor Nasar in Deh Rawood district, 105 miles north of Kandahar, said Jan Mohammed Khan, governor of Uruzgan province.

Army forces fought back, and the attackers fled after wounding four soldiers, he said.

“On our request, U.S. forces and helicopter gunships went to the area and killed five Taliban after tracing them,” he said.

Belgium

Doctors tout future of ovarian transplants

“It’s a dream,” proclaimed the beaming 32-year-old new mother Friday as she cuddled her day-old baby girl, born following a pioneering ovarian tissue transplant performed after the woman was made infertile by chemotherapy.

Doctors hailed the breakthrough procedure, saying it sent a “big message of hope” to cancer patients who have lost their fertility and could one day allow women to delay motherhood beyond menopause.

Ouarda Touirat presented her healthy, 8-pound 3-ounce baby, Tamara, at a news conference at Brussels’ Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc hospital, where she was born Thursday night.

Dr. Jacques Donnez, who led the procedure, said it gave cancer survivors a second chance at motherhood.

Doctors cut out Touirat’s ovarian tissue before she had chemotherapy, then froze it in liquid nitrogen. Five years after she was cleared of cancer, the tissue was grafted back onto her fallopian tubes, allowing for a natural pregnancy.

Guantanamo Bay

Alleged accountant for al-Qaida rejects hearing

Osama bin Laden’s alleged accountant boycotted a review hearing to evaluate his legal status, and his attorney was barred from attending the proceedings at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi, 44, is one of four prisoners charged with war crimes at the U.S. naval base on Cuba’s eastern tip. The United States says al Qosi, of Sudan, worked as al-Qaida’s chief accountant, paymaster and supply chief.

Defense attorneys have criticized the hearings as a sham, warning their clients not to speak at any hearings unless they have an attorney present.

Moscow

Putin: Media should play role in war on terrorism

President Vladimir Putin urged journalists Friday to use their work to advance the battle against terrorism, saying the media should not just be passive observers in the face of threats by militants.

“It is obvious that the struggle against terrorism cannot be an excuse to infringe upon the freedom and independence of the press,” Putin told an international media conference organized by Russia’s ITAR-Tass news agency.

“But you yourselves, as professionals, should develop a model of work that would allow media to become an effective instrument in the struggle against terror, which would exclude any, even involuntary, form of assistance to terrorists’ goals.”

Virginia

Teen sniper to accept deal, plead guilty to second killing

Teenage sniper Lee Boyd Malvo plans to drop all appeals of his conviction and life sentence for one of 10 killings in October 2002, and will admit guilt in a second slaying, his lawyer said Friday.

A plea hearing is scheduled for Oct. 26 in Spotsylvania County Circuit Court, where Malvo is charged with capital murder in the Oct. 11, 2002, killing of Kenneth Bridges.

Malvo’s lawyer, Michael Arif, said Malvo would plead guilty and accept a sentence of life in prison. The plea bargain would eliminate the possibility of a death sentence in that case.

Malvo, now 19, will also drop all appeals of his conviction last year for the murder of FBI analyst Linda Franklin. The jury in that case sentenced him to life in prison.

Washington, D.C.

Navy charges three more SEALs in Iraq prisoner abuse

The Navy said Friday it had filed assault and other criminal charges against three more of its elite SEAL commandos in connection with prisoner abuse in Iraq.

The three, whose names were not released, are in addition to four SEALs charged Sept. 2 with assault and other offenses in connection with the death of a prisoner last November.

At the time of the reported abuse, all seven were members of a Sea-Air-Land, or SEAL, unit known as SEAL Team-7, a counterterrorist group that sometimes operated in Iraq with CIA officers. It is based at Coronado, Calif., and reports to the Naval Special Warfare Command in San Diego.

Iraq

10 kidnapped in Baghdad; Fallujah airstrikes kill eight

Kidnappers seized six Egyptians and four Iraqis working for the country’s mobile phone company, authorities said Friday, and Muslim leaders in Britain announced plans to send negotiators to Baghdad in hopes of winning the release of hostage Kenneth Bigley.

Gunmen abducted two of the Egyptians on Thursday in a bold raid on the firm’s Baghdad office — the latest in a string of kidnappings targeting engineers working on Iraq’s infrastructure, in a bid to undermine the U.S.-allied interim government.

Insurgents fired a rocket on a busy Baghdad street Friday, killing four people and wounding 14, the military said.

U.S. warplanes, tanks and artillery units bombed the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah today, killing at least eight people and wounding 15, hospital officials and witnesses said.

Washington, D.C.

Paige declares debate is over about ‘No Child Left Behind’

Education Secretary Rod Paige declared Friday that “the debate is over” about whether the law shaking up public education is working, even as he acknowledged schools’ struggles to meet its sweeping demands.

“If we remain resolute and steadfast, year by year, more powerful and positive changes will follow,” Paige said about the No Child Left Behind Act, which greatly expanded the federal role in changing schools.

“But if we backtrack, if we falter, if we renege on our promise to our children, then we will lose the most important and profound opportunity of our lifetime to make education better,” Paige said.