Gunman kills 3, wounds 16 at Fort Hood Army base

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — An Iraq War veteran being treated for mental illness opened fire Wednesday on fellow service members at the Fort Hood military base, killing three people and wounding 16 before committing suicide at the same post where more than a dozen people were slain in a 2009 attack, authorities said.

The shooter apparently walked into a building and began firing a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol. He then got into a vehicle and continued firing before entering another building.

He was eventually confronted by military police in a parking lot. As he came within 20 feet of an officer, the gunman put his hands up but then reached under his jacket and pulled out his gun. The officer drew her own weapon, and the suspect put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger a final time, according to Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, senior officer on the base.

The gunman, who served in Iraq for four months in 2011, had sought help for depression, anxiety and other problems. Before the attack, he had been undergoing an assessment to determine whether he had post-traumatic stress disorder, Milley said.

The married suspect had arrived at Fort Hood in February from another base in Texas. He was taking medication, and there were reports that he had complained after returning from Iraq about suffering a traumatic brain injury, Milley said. The commander did not elaborate.

The gunman was never wounded in action, according to military records, Milley said.

Three Dead, 16 Hurt in Ft. Hood ShootingPlay video

There was no indication the attack was related to terrorism, Milley said.

The military declined to identify the gunman until his family members had been notified. Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he was named Ivan Lopez but offered no other details.

The weapon had been purchased recently in the local area and was not registered to be on the base, Milley said.

Late Wednesday, investigators had already started looking into whether Lopez's combat experience caused lingering psychological trauma. Among the possibilities they planned to explore was whether a fight or argument on the base triggered the attack.

"We have to find all those witnesses, the witnesses to every one of those shootings, and find out what his actions were, and what was said to the victims," said a federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case by name.

Obama: 'Get to Bottom of Ft Hood Shooting'Play video

The official said authorities would begin by speaking with Lopez's wife and expected to search his home and any computers he owned.

The injured were taken to the base hospital and other local hospitals. At least three of the nine patients at Scott and White Hospital in Temple were listed in critical condition.

Wednesday's attack immediately revived memories of the shocking 2009 assault on Fort Hood, which was the deadliest attack on a domestic military installation in U.S. history. Thirteen people were killed and more than 30 wounded.

Until an all-clear siren sounded hours after Wednesday's shooting began, relatives of soldiers waited anxiously for news about their loved ones.

"The last two hours have been the most nerve-wracking I've ever felt," said Tayra DeHart, 33, who had earlier heard from her husband that he was safe but was waiting to hear from him again.

1 Dead, 14 Injured in Ft Hood ShootingPlay video

Brooke Conover, whose husband was on base at the time of the shooting, said she found out about it while checking Facebook. She immediately called her husband, Staff Sgt. Sean Conover.

"I just want him to come home," Conover said.

President Barack Obama vowed that investigators would get to the bottom of the shooting.

In a hastily arranged statement in Chicago, Obama reflected on the sacrifices that troops stationed at Fort Hood have made — including enduring multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"They serve with valor. They serve with distinction, and when they're at their home base, they need to feel safe," Obama said. "We don't yet know what happened tonight, but obviously that sense of safety has been broken once again."

View gallery

Lucy Hamlin leans on her husband's foot, Specialist Timothy Hamlin, as they wait to be allowed b …

The president spoke in the same room of a steakhouse where he had just met with about 25 donors at a previously scheduled fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.

The November 2009 attack happened inside a crowded building where soldiers were waiting to get vaccines and routine paperwork after recently returning from deployments or preparing to go to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan was convicted and sentenced to death last year in that mass shooting. He said he acted to protect Islamic insurgents abroad from American aggression.

According to testimony during Hasan's trial last August, Hasan walked inside carrying two weapons and several loaded magazines, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great!" — and opened fire with a handgun.

The rampage ended when Hasan was shot in the back by Fort Hood police officers. He was paralyzed from the waist down and is now on death row at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

View gallery

Lucy Hamlin and her husband, Spc. Timothy Hamlin, wait for permission to re-enter the Fort Hood mili …

After that shooting, the military tightened security at bases nationwide. Those measures included issuing security personnel long-barreled weapons, adding an insider-attack scenario to their training and strengthening ties to local law enforcement. The military also joined an FBI intelligence-sharing program aimed at identifying terror threats.

In September, a former Navy man opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard, leaving 13 people dead, including the gunman. After that shooting, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the Pentagon to review security at all U.S. defense installations worldwide and examine the granting of security clearances that allow access to them.

Asked Wednesday about security improvements in the wake of the shootings, Hagel said, "Obviously when we have these kinds of tragedies on our bases, something's not working."

___

Associated Press writers Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston; Eric Tucker and Alicia Caldwell in Washington; Lolita C. Baldor in Honolulu; and Nedra Pickler in Chicago contributed to this report.

7.6 aftershock rattles Chile's far-northern coast

Chile's Emergency Office and navy issued a tsunami alert and ordered a precautionary evacuation of low-lying areas on the northern coast, meaning many people could be spending another sleepless night away from their homes.

The aftershock caused buildings to shake and people to run out into the streets in the port of Iquique, which was one of the cities that saw some damage from Tuesday night's big quake. But there were no immediate reports of new damage or injuries from the latest tremor, which was one of dozens that have followed the 8.2 quake.

"I was evacuated like all citizens. One can see that the people are prepared," tweeted President Michelle Bachelet, who was in the nearby city of Arica to assess the damage.

The aftershock was centered 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Iquique at a depth of 25 miles (40 kilometers), the U.S Geological Survey said. The USGS initially reported the tremor's magnitude at 7.8, but downgraded it to 7.6.

It was felt across the border in southern Peru, where people in the cities of Tacna and Arequipa reportedly fled buildings in fear.

Raw: Chile Quake Sends People ScramblingPlay video

On Tuesday, authorities reported just six deaths from the initial quake, but said it was possible others could have been killed in older structures made of adobe in remote communities that weren't immediately accessible.

About 2,500 homes were damaged in Alto Hospicio, a poor neighborhood in the hills above Iquique, a city of nearly 200,000 people whose coastal residents joined a mandatory evacuation ahead of a tsunami that rose to only 8 feet (2.5 meters). Iquique's fishermen poked through the aftermath: sunken and damaged boats that could cost millions of dollars to repair and replace.

Still, as President Michelle Bachelet deployed hundreds of anti-riot police and soldiers to prevent looting and round up escaped prisoners, it was clear that the loss of life and property could have been much worse.

The mandatory evacuation lasted for 10 hours in Iquique and Arica, the cities closest to the epicenter, and kept 900,000 people out of their homes along Chile's 2,500-mile (4,000 kilometer) coastline. The order to leave was spread through cellphone text messages and Twitter, and reinforced by blaring sirens in neighborhoods where people regularly practice earthquake drills.

But the system has its shortcomings: the government has yet to install tsunami warning sirens in parts of Arica, leaving authorities to shout orders by megaphone. And fewer than 15 percent of Chileans have downloaded the smartphone application that can alert them to evacuation orders.

Chile is one of the world's most seismic countries and is particularly prone to tsunamis, because of the way the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera ever higher.

___

Associated Press writers Eva Vergara in Santiago, Michael Warren in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Frank Bajak in Lima, Peru, and Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

7.6-magnitude aftershock rattles Chile

Precautionary evacuations are ordered in the same coastal areas where a powerful earthquake hit a day ago.
Felt across border in Peru

Are drone strikes creating more enemies for America than they are killing extremists? That’s the question at the heart of new bipartisan legislation aimed at requiring the executive branch to issue an annual report detailing the combatant and civilian death toll from missile strikes by U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Republican Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, a frequent critic of “war on terrorism” policies, introduced the “Targeted Lethal Force Transparency Act.” The goal? Find out who is dying in drone strikes.

“Tactically, drones can be enormously effective. We’ve taken some really bad actors off the battlefield,” Schiff told Yahoo News in a telephone interview. “Strategically, it’s more of a mixed bag because it does alienate large numbers of people when there are civilian casualties.”

The measure calls for an annual report on the number of combatants and civilians killed or injured in strikes by remotely piloted aircraft. It also aims to require that the administration define what it considers “combatants” and “civilians.” And it seeks a full accounting of casualties over the past five years.

“It would be helpful to counter some of the propaganda that’s used against us, having the ability to show how many combatants were taken off the battlefield, as opposed to how many civilians were killed,” said Schiff.

“Our government’s use of drones for targeted killings should be subject to intense scrutiny and oversight,” Jones said in a statement. “This legislation is an important step in that direction.”

The bill would exclude strikes in “theaters of conflict” — which really just means Afghanistan, Schiff said. That’s because singling out drone strikes, as opposed to bombings, raids and firefights, is of “less significance in a war zone than in a third country,” he explained.

While the U.S. public broadly supports the use of drones — often seen as a way to kill suspected extremists without risking American casualties — the practice is shockingly unpopular across most of the Muslim world.

But while Obama called in a speech in May 2013 for an overhaul of the law at the core of the “war on terrorism,”lawmakers say there is zero appetite ahead of the 2014 midterm elections for any sweeping changes.

“Drone strikes are sort of a resolved issue on Capitol Hill,” said Micah Zenko, a drone warfare expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I don’t see how this (bill) passes,” Zenko said. “These are CIA operations that are covert by definition. You cannot acknowledge or describe them in any way. I don’t see how they could disclose this.”

Asked about this potential obstacle, Schiff said the bill “doesn’t require identification of any agencies that may be involved, it doesn’t require that specific incidents be identified, only the raw counts at the end of each year.”

Still, he acknowledged, “it’s going to be a tough legislative pathway.”

The human rights group Amnesty International USA endorsed the bill.

“The White House approach to drone killings has been ‘trust us,’ but that’s untenable,” Steven W. Hawkins, its executive director said. “Instead of responding with generalizations to our documentation of potentially unlawful drone killings, the White House needs to provide the data it’s apparently sitting on.”

Zenko, who has underlined the challenges of compiling a complete and accurate toll from targeted killings, says that it’s hard to know how such attacks are affecting people who did not already hate the United States.

“The blowback question is something nobody has a good answer to,” he told Yahoo News by telephone. “It’s hard to prove.”

“In the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) of Pakistan, people hate three things: the Pakistani Army, jihadists living among them and CIA drones,” Zenko said. But “nobody really knows what makes a neutral person become a terrorist.”

The intelligence community has shown little appetite for Schiff’s proposal, which he previewed in a Feb. 4 House Intelligence Committee hearing with CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Schiff asked Brennan whether he could support it. The CIA director said it would be “certainly a worthwhile recommendation” to make but stopped short of endorsing it.

“What we would need to do is to take a look at it analytically and determine whether or not this is something that the U.S. government feels as though would be worthwhile to do,” he said.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat on the committee, asked Brennan whether signature strikes might be motivating people to join extremists groups, effectively increasing the threat of attacks on the United States.

“From an intelligence community perspective, we're always evaluating and analyzing developments overseas to include any counterterrorism activity that we might be involved in to see what the impact is,” Brennan replied. "And I think the feeling is that the counterterrorism activities that we have engaged in with our partners — we the U.S. government broadly, both from an intelligence perspective as well as from a military perspective — have greatly mitigated the threat to U.S. persons both overseas as well as in the homeland.”

Lawmakers want answers from Obama on drones

A bipartisan bill seeks to require the White House to disclose the combatant and civilian death toll from the covert strikes.
CIA position

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Marriage exists for its procreative potential, not just as recognition of a loving relationship between two people, and the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, lawyers for an Oklahoma clerk said in a new court filing.

The 63-page brief filed Tuesday is the latest volley in a battle between a lesbian couple of 17 years and Tulsa County Court Clerk Sally Howe Smith, who refused to grant them a marriage license in 2009.

Mary Bishop and Sharon Baldwin subsequently sued to be allowed to marry in their home state, where voters had approved a ban on same-sex marriage in 2004. U.S. District Judge Terence Kern ruled in Bishop and Baldwin's favor in January this year, and Smith appealed.

Lawyers for Smith argued that marriage is about furthering "potentially procreative sexual relationships into stable unions" rather than recognizing the love and commitment of two people.

"They (plaintiffs) reduce marriage from an institution that exists to benefit children and society, and relegate it to a mere stamp through which the government approves loving, emotional unions between adult couples," they said in the brief filed in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

They further argued that the Supreme Court has found repeatedly that marriage is fundamental to the survival of the human race. In one of the cases cited, Loving v. Virginia in 1967, the court ruled that the prohibition of interracial marriage was unconstitutional.

Bishop and Baldwin said in a statement Tuesday that lawyers for Smith are reducing marriage to nothing.

"They say it is only one thing, when it clearly is not," the two said in the statement. "Marriage is many things to many people, and we believe that it is a right that should (be) granted to all citizens and not a bastion of individual states to discriminate against people within their borders."

LGBT people want nothing more than stable families, many of which include children, and relationships that benefit society, Bishop and Baldwin added.

Lawyers for the couple argued in a brief last month that the marriage ban demeans same-sex couples and their children because it sends the message that their relationships are secondary to those built in traditional families.

Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for later this month in the Denver appeals court. The same panel will hear a similar appeal out of Utah on April 10.

Tuesday's brief was the second filed by the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Smith.

___

Follow Kristi Eaton on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kristieaton .

TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) — A teenager from central Syria became the one millionth Syrian refugee to register in Lebanon on Thursday, a "devastating milestone" for the tiny Arab country with about 4.5 million people of its own, the U.N. refugee agency said.

Signing up for aid, 19-year-old Yahya recounted his long ordeal. After being trapped by the fighting for more than two years in his native city of Homs, he was evacuated earlier this year and traveled to Yabroud, a rebel held town near the Lebanese border that soon came under a crushing government offensive.

When staying there was no longer an option, he crossed into Lebanon with his mother and two sisters on March 8. Yahya's father was not with them — he died from sniper fire in Homs in September 2011.

On Thursday, Yahya registered at the UNHCR center in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

"We didn't know where to go. We just wanted to get away from all the shelling and fighting," he said, giving only his first name for fear that his relatives back in Syria would be targeted.

The conflict in Syria, a country with a pre-war population of 23 million, has killed more than 150,000 people, according to the Britian-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which documents the fighting through a network of activists on the ground.

The war has uprooted millions of Syrians from their homes, and the U.N. estimates there are now more than 2.5 million Syrians registered in neighboring countries, with more than 47,700 more awaiting registration.

In addition to those, there are hundreds of thousands of Syrians who fled Syria and have not registered as refugees.

View gallery

A man looks down at an unexploded barrel bomb dropped by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al …

Neighboring Turkey and Jordan, in addition to Lebanon, have taken in most of the refugees.

But three years after Syria's conflict started, Lebanon has become the country with the highest per-capita concentration of refugees recorded anywhere in the world in recent history, the UNHCR said.

"The number of refugees fleeing from Syria into neighboring Lebanon surpassed 1 million today, a devastating milestone worsened by rapidly depleting resources and a host community stretched to breaking point," the agency statement said.

As a result, Lebanon is struggling to cope with a massive crisis that has become an unprecedented challenge for aid agencies.

Along with the social and economic strain of the refugees, Syria's sectarian war has also frequently spilled over into Lebanon with deadly clashes between factions supporting opposing sides in the fighting next door.

Militants from Lebanon's Shiite militant group Hezbollah are fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's forces in Syria while many among Lebanon's Sunni population support the rebels trying to topple him.

The 1 million Syrians are a huge burden for Lebanon, which has a 4.5 million-strong population, UNHCR said. The agency registers 2,500 new Syrian refugees daily in Lebanon — more than one person per minute.

In addition to the registered refugees, there are tens of thousands of other Syrian refugees who are not registered and Lebanese officials estimate the number of unregistered refugees to be as high as 400,000.

"The influx of a million refugees would be massive in any country. For Lebanon, a small nation beset by internal difficulties, the impact is staggering," said António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees in a statement. "Lebanon hosts the highest concentration of refugees in recent history."

For Yahya and his family, there was no other place to go than Lebanon. "We were looking around to go somewhere else in Syria but no place is safe," he said.

UNHCR said the influx from Syria is accelerating.

In April 2012, there were 18,000 registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon and by April 2013 they reached 356,000 and at the beginning of April this year they reached, 1 million.

The World Bank estimates that the Syria crisis cost Lebanon US$2.5 billion in lost economic activity during 2013 and threatens to push 170,000 Lebanese into poverty by the end of this year, the UNHCR statement said.

Related video

'Devastating milestone' for Syrian neighbor

Lebanon has 4.5M people of its own. Now, it also has 1M refugees from war-torn Syria.
Only a fraction of total displaced