Blast kills 40 at Afghan wedding

Blast kills 40 at Afghan wedding

NADAHAN VILLAGE, Afghanistan

Body parts in trees. Mud walls flattened. Corpses riddled with ball bearings.

NATO and the Afghan government on Thursday blamed a Taliban suicide bomber for the grisly scene at a wedding party where at least 40 people were killed by an intense explosion. But the Taliban claimed they played no role in the blast in the Arghandab district, an insurgent stronghold near the southern city of Kandahar.

Stunned survivors said they suspected a NATO airstrike was responsible, a view that reflects either their deep suspicion of the U.S.-led coalition or fear of Taliban retribution.

Condemned man seeks commutation

DRAPER, Utah

A Utah man set to be executed by firing squad said Thursday he is remorseful and wants a state parole board to spare his life so he can help troubled kids avoid the kind of problems that landed him on death row.

Ronnie Lee Gardner told the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole he and his brother are trying to develop 160 acres in northern Utah for an organic farm and residential program for children.

The hearing continues today, and a decision is expected Monday, five days before Gardner is set to be executed.

Man partially amputates own arm

HARTFORD, Conn.

Jonathan Metz had been trapped for two days in his basement with his left arm stuck in a broken furnace. Smelling rotting flesh, he decided that amputation was his only hope.

So the 31-year-old fashioned a tourniquet near his shoulder and began cutting. He made it almost all the way through but wasn’t able to free himself.

He was rescued Wednesday after three days in his West Hartford basement when worried friends called police, and firefighters cut the furnace apart. As they did so, the arm came off.

Doctors said the attempted self-amputation probably saved his life, preventing the infection in his gangrenous arm from spreading to the rest of his body.

Testimony: ID not necessarily a fake

MUNICH

A former U.S. Secret Service forensics expert testified Thursday that the photo on a Nazi-issued identity card being used by prosecutors against John Demjanjuk, which the defense argues is a fake, appears to have been removed and later reattached.

Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who turned 90 in April, is standing trial on some 28,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he was a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp.

Demjanjuk’s defense team maintains the card is a fake made by the KGB and that the staple holes indicate it was taken from another document to produce a forgery.

But Larry Stewart, who analyzed the identity card and 21 other documents being used in the case, testified that photographs often fell off wartime documents as they aged and were then stapled to separate pieces of paper in postwar archives.

Pope defends celibacy for priests

VATICAN CITY

Pope Benedict XVI strongly defended celibacy for priests as a sign of faith in an increasingly secular world Thursday, insisting on a church tradition that has increasingly come under scrutiny amid the clerical sex-abuse scandal.

Benedict didn’t directly mention the crisis that has rocked the Catholic Church for months in his comments to some 15,000 priests who massed in St. Peter’s Square. But in an apparent reference to the crisis, Benedict spoke about “secondary scandals” that showed “our own insufficiencies and sins.”

Associated Press