Carter: Soldier heroically joined Kurdish-IS firefight, 1st US combat death in anti-IS war
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. soldier fatally wounded in a hostage rescue mission in Iraq heroically inserted himself into a firefight to defend Kurdish soldiers, even though the plan called for the Kurds to do the fighting, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Friday.
“This is someone who saw the team that he was advising and assisting coming under attack, and he rushed to help them and made it possible for them to be effective, and in doing that lost his own life,” Carter told a Pentagon news conference.
Carter applauded Army Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, 39, of Roland, Oklahoma, who died of his wounds Thursday.
The defense chief gave the most extensive public description yet of what transpired during the pre-dawn raid on an Islamic State prison compound near the town of Hawija. About 70 people, including at least 20 members of the Iraqi security forces, were freed. It was the first time U.S. troops had become involved in direct ground combat in Iraq since the war against the Islamic State was launched in August 2014, and Wheeler was the first U.S. combat death.
Carter portrayed Wheeler as a hero and said he would be present when Wheeler’s body is returned to the U.S. on Saturday.
Fiery bus-truck crash in French wine country near Bordeaux kills 43, mostly nearby retirees
PUISSEGUIN, France (AP) — A French investigator says it’s far too early to know the cause of a fiery crash between a truck and a bus full of retirees that killed 43 people Friday morning — France’s deadliest road accident in more than 30 years.
Christophe Auger, the prosecutor for Libourne in southwest France’s wine region, said “it’s impossible at this stage” to say why the tourist bus and the empty truck crashed on a winding road near the village of Puisseguin, 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Bordeaux. The crash killed 41 bus passengers, the truck driver and his 3-year-old son, who was riding in the truck with his father. Four other people were badly injured.
Auger said investigators’ top priority in the coming days is to identify the victims, a task made difficult by the charred state of their remains. Experts expect it will take three weeks before all victims are identified.
In the meantime, experts will begin analyzing the wreckage and collecting testimony from survivors, including the bus driver, to try to understand the cause of the crash, Auger said in a televised news conference.
Images on French television showed the carcass of the bus — a collapsing, charred frame engulfed by smoke near Puisseguin, its seats nothing but empty metal frames. Aerial views showed the mangled remains of both vehicles on a narrow, curving road surrounded by trees.
Disagreements over ground rules at contested Jerusalem shrine at the center of recent violence
JERUSALEM (AP) — Disputes over the ground rules at a major Jerusalem shrine played an important role in triggering the current Israeli-Palestinian violence. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting in Amman this weekend with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, custodian of the site, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after holding talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to clarify those rules. Each side has a different interpretation of what is known in dry legalese as the “status quo,” or unwritten understandings that evolved after Israel captured the hilltop platform in 1967. Here is a look at the positions.
Feds confiscate lethal-injection drugs obtained overseas by Arizona and Texas
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Compounding the nation’s severe shortage of execution drugs, federal authorities have confiscated shipments of a lethal-injection chemical that Arizona and Texas tried to bring in from abroad, saying such imports are illegal.
The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it impounded orders of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that has been used in past executions in combination with drugs that paralyze the muscles and stop the heart. It currently has no legal uses in the U.S.
“Courts have concluded that sodium thiopental for the injection in humans is an unapproved drug and may not be imported into the country,” FDA spokesman Jeff Ventura said in a statement.
Arizona paid nearly $27,000 for the sodium thiopental, but federal agents intercepted it when it arrived via British Airways at the Phoenix airport in July, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Texas and FDA authorities gave fewer details about the seizure there. Texas is the nation’s busiest death penalty state, with about 250 death row inmates and 530 executions carried out over the past four decades. But it has not been using sodium thiopental in recent years.
Now that US stocks are back in positive territory, how do they compare with other investments?
NEW YORK (AP) — Maybe you shouldn’t have put your money under a mattress after all.
The stock market is back in the black for the year after a bruising late-August tumble that had investors worrying about their money in a way they hadn’t in four years.
A three-week surge in stocks has now lifted the Standard & Poor’s 500 index above where it was at the beginning of 2015 for the first time since the summer.
The S&P 500 fell 12 percent from its mid-July high to its depths in late August, as investors worried that slowing growth in China, along with continued economic weakness in Europe and Japan, would crush any hopes of stronger global growth.
It was the first correction in four years, and it looked like investors in the U.S. stock market could be on track for their first annual losses, including dividends, since 2008.
