Suspected U.S. strikes kill 27 in Pakistan

Suspected U.S. strikes kill 27 in Pakistan

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — Suspected U.S. missiles slammed into two villages close to the Afghan border Friday, killing 27 people including an Arab al-Qaida operative and other foreign militants, intelligence officials said.

The new strikes raised the number of such attacks to at least 17 since August. The surge has angered many Pakistanis and put strains on a seven-year U.S. alliance with Pakistan, where rising violence is exacerbating economic problems gnawing at the nuclear-armed country’s stability.

The apparent attacks by American unmanned planes come amid Washington’s frustration at what U.S. officials say is Pakistan’s failure to curb Islamic extremists blamed for attacks in both Afghanistan and Pakistan — and suspected of planning Sept. 11-style terror strikes in the West.

Dozens of foreign al-Qaida members, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be hiding in northwestern Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas along the Afghan frontier.

Strip assumes Obama win

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It’s not exactly “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” but some newspaper editors are pondering how to deal with a “Doonesbury” comic strip to be published the day after the election that assumes Barack Obama will win the presidency.

Comic creator Garry Trudeau delivered a series of strips for next week’s papers showing his characters reacting to an Obama victory. But he offered no such option in the event of a comeback by John McCain, who’s trailing Obama in the polls.

Trudeau’s syndicator is offering papers a series of rerun strips from August. But the Obama story line is forcing some editors to question whether “Doonesbury” could put them in a spot — albeit in the funny pages — similar to 1948, when the Chicago Daily Tribune infamously declared in huge, front-page type that Republican Thomas Dewey had beaten Democrat Harry Truman for the presidency.

Residency denied for doctor in Australia

SYDNEY, Australia — Thirteen-year-old Lukas Moeller has Down syndrome. His father is a doctor who came to Australia from Germany to help fill a shortage of physicians in rural communities.

But now Australia has rejected Dr. Bernhard Moeller’s application for residency, saying Lukas does not meet the “health requirement” and would pose a burden on taxpayers for his medical care, education and other services.

The case has provoked an outcry in the rural region of southeastern Victoria state, where Moeller is the only internal medicine specialist for a community of 54,000 people.

Author Studs Terkel dies

CHICAGO — Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the “noncelebrated,” died Friday. He was 96.

Dan Terkel said his father died at home, and described his death as “peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted.”

“My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life,” Terkel said in a statement issued through his father’s colleague and close friend Thom Clark.

He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its “carbuncles and warts,” as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, “Touch and Go.”

He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and “never met a picket line or petition I didn’t like.”

Cheetahs on a plane: One escapes from cage

ATLANTA — A Delta baggage worker got a bit of a fright before Halloween when she opened a jetliner’s cargo door and found a cheetah running loose amid the luggage.

Two cheetahs were being flown in the cargo area of a Boeing 757 passenger flight from Portland, Ore., to Atlanta on Thursday when one escaped from its cage, Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton said Friday.

“They told us a large animal had gotten out of a container in the cargo hold and they were having to send someone to tranquilize it,” said one passenger, Lee Sentell of Montgomery, Ala.

He said luggage was delayed, but baggage handlers promised to send his bags to him in Alabama.

The good news for passengers: The escaped cheetah didn’t damage any of their luggage.

Associated Press