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Officials: Teens trained for suicide bombings in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraqi soldiers rounded up six teenagers in northern Iraq who were being trained, against their will, to carry out suicide bombings for al Qaeda in Iraq, the Interior Ministry said Monday.

Troops conducting house-to-house searches in Mosul found six teens, ages 15 to 18, who were being trained to perpetrate attacks against Iraqi security forces, said ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

Insurgents had threatened to kill the boys or their families if they refused to comply with the training, Deputy Interior Minister Kamal Ali Hussein told reporters.

The Saudi insurgent threatened to rape our mothers and sisters, destroy our houses and kill our fathers if we did not cooperate with him, one of the youths told The Associated Press in Mosul.

The boys were rounded up as part of the Mother of Two Springs operation targeting al Qaeda in Iraq in Mosul and Nineveh province. The offensive has netted the detentions of more than 1,300 suspects.

The teens had been trained in recent weeks, Khalaf said.

A Saudi national — a suspected al Qaeda in Iraq operative — had been one of their trainers, but he was believed to have died in a military operation, Khalaf said. It is not known where or when he was killed.

The group of teens included the son of a female physician, the son of a college professor and four youths who belonged to families of poor vendors.

All six boys were taught how to carry out suicide attacks with explosive belts and a date was fixed for each one of them, Hussein said, adding that Iraqi soldiers had questioned the boys.

Iraqi troops rounded up the teens on the same day a suicide bomber drove a motorcycle into a checkpoint manned by police and a U.S.-backed Iraqi security group in northern Iraq, killing six people and wounding 22 others, local police said.

The suicide blast occurred Monday in the Salaheddin provincial city of Tarmiya.

The bomber, carrying a Saudi Arabian identification card, attacked a checkpoint guarded by police and members of the Sons of Iraq, the American-backed citizens’ group that opposes al Qaeda in Iraq, police in Tikrit said.

Police said the Saudi ID card contained the name of Sultan bin-Mohammed al-Ghamedih, 35.

The checkpoint is near the house of a local leader of the citizens’ group. The dead and wounded included police, civilians and Sons of Iraq members, police said.

Sons of Iraq, or Awakening Council, groups have been targeted by al Qaeda in Iraq.

Also in Salaheddin province Monday, a U.S. soldier was killed and two others wounded when a roadside bomb exploded, according to the U.S. military. Watch how a military unit is honoring its fallen

The U.S. military said Monday that another soldier was killed in a bombing Sunday near Ash Shamiya in southern Iraq’s Qadisiya province.

An American soldier also died Saturday from a noncombat-related cause. The number of U.S. service members killed in the Iraq war stands at 4,083.

Other developments

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Why ‘Indiana Jones’ went digital

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — In these hallowed halls, Indiana Jones almost seems out of place.

A banner with a two-dimensional cutout of the swashbuckling archaeologist swings through the lobby of Industrial Light and Magic, where life-size replicas of Darth Vader and Bobba Fett from Star Wars stand guard.

The home of George Lucas’ visual effects company is a high-tech temple to everything from the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to the talking robots in Transformers. But Indy can’t take credit for the digital wizardry for which ILM has become famous over the last couple of decades.

Not yet, anyway. That’s because he hasn’t been around for 19 years, a time in which special effects has mostly migrated from soundstage to server.

The first three Indy films were gritty, sweaty and tactile affairs, largely because everything onscreen physically existed somewhere. Not so with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — though that was almost the case.

When first approaching the latest Indy, director Steven Spielberg considered dusting off his old-school approach.

He thought maybe we should just go back to the way we did things before, like matte paintings on glass and things like that, said visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman. We entertained that idea for a little bit, but we realized we could serve the story better by using our digital tools.

That decision ultimately led to a filmmaking innovation that brings the random reactions of a virtual world to the big screen, giving more control to ILM’s computers than ever before.

To the children romping outside at ILM’s in-house daycare located just past the lobby, the notion of a digital environment being responsible for much of what’s onscreen will probably seem quaint someday. But to the adult audiences who’ve glimpsed the latest Indy escapade, it’s a big part of the reason this one looks so different from Jones’ last crusade.

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Joseph kittinger

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first manservant in space - skydiving from the edge of the world (extended version) // on august 16, 1960, joseph kittinger jumped his model … all » excelsior jump, doing so from an expose-thin height of 102,800 feet (31,334 meters). from that closely 20 miles altitude, his tumble toward terra firma took some 4 minutes and 36 seconds. exceeding the speed of sound during the be, kittinger Euphemistic pre-owned a small stabilizing chute beforehand a larger, gas main parachute opened in the denser ambience. he safely touched down in infertile new mexico strand, 13 minutes 45 seconds after he vaulted into the void.the jump set records that still stand today, entirety them, the highest parachute jump, the longest freefall, and the fastest speed ever attained by a human through the atmosphere. somewhat in contention is kittinger’s squander of the unimaginative parachute to save stabilization during his record-setting fall. roger eugene andreyev, a russian, is touted as holding the world’s free fall record of 80,325 feet (24,483 meters), made on november 1, 1962.

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China races to dynamite ‘quake lake’

CHENGDU, China (CNN) — Chinese military engineers Monday prepared to dynamite a potentially dangerous quake lake created when landslides dammed a river after this month’s earthquake in which more than 65,000 people were killed, state-run media reported.

Authorities are concerned the swelling lake will burst as water from the Jianhe river in Beichuan county in China’s southwestern Sichuan province rises behind the earthquake-created dam, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The lake … may cause a devastating flooding if the barrier bursts, Xinhua said. Authorities want to control the flow of water — rather than have the dam give way all at once — by creating a spillway.

Helicopters transported military experts armed with dynamite and heavy equipment to the site Monday morning. About 1,800 Chinese soliders and police are already at the site. Watch soldiers dig out landslides as blasts ring out .

More than 30 of the so-called quake lakes were created by the 7.9-magnitude quake that devastated the region on May 12. Watch a report on dangerous quake-made lakes and dams

A strong aftershock on Sunday killed at least eight people, injured about 1,000 others and destroyed more than 70,000 homes in China’s Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces.

The official toll from the original quake has now risen to 65,080, China’s Civil Affairs Ministry said Monday. Another 360,058 people were injured and 23,150 are missing, according to the ministry.

In another development Monday, officials said China’s strict one-child policy would be relaxed for some families affected by the quake, The Associated Press reported.

The Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee in the capital of hard Sichuan province announced families whose child was killed, severely injured or disabled in the quake could get permission to have another child.

The worst damage occurred in Sichuan, which has experienced thousands of aftershocks over the past two weeks, but Sunday’s — which the U.S. Geological Survey measured at a 6.0 magnitude — was the strongest since a 5.8-magnitude tremor shook the region a day after the initial quake.

Shaanxi experienced the highest death toll as a result of the aftershock, with four people losing their lives. One each died in Sichuan and Gansu.

The aftershock damaged more than 200,000 other homes, according to state media. It also damaged another dam, cutting off several more roads in the region.

Sunday’s aftershock was felt in Chengdu, one of the largest cities in the Sichuan province and about 150 miles (240 km) from the aftershock’s epicenter. A CNN employee, on the 24th floor of a high-rise hotel, reported that the building swayed.

At a news conference Sunday, a Civil Affairs Ministry official said rescue workers have pulled alive 6,537 people from the rubble of the earthquake.

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Hundreds in Seoul protest U.S. beef

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Riot police beat and arrested several protesters early Monday during an illegal rally by hundreds of opponents of a beef import agreement with the United States that has raised fears of mad cow disease in South Korea.

Several protesters were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment. A policeman shoved me and slammed his shield into my right side, and the pain is killing me, Cho Ik-bi, a 36-year-old businessman, told The Associated Press as he was taken to an ambulance.

Police detained 31 people for questioning, a police officer at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters and declined to comment on the police violence.

Thousands of South Koreans have held candlelight vigils and other protests against the April 18 deal to resume U.S. beef imports. They say the government of President Lee Myung-bak made too many concessions in the accord and that it does not include strict enough quarantine restrictions to protect against mad cow disease.

The protest movement is among the biggest domestic challenges faced by Lee in his first months in office.

On Sunday, police detained 37 other protesters at a separate rally urging the government to scrap the import deal.

Lee last week sought to reassure the country on the safety of U.S. beef but failed to ease public anger, fanned in part by media reports questioning the safety of the meat.

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