World/Nation Briefs July 14, 2012

Famed Afghan commander dies in suicide attack

KABUL, Afghanistan - A suicide attacker blew himself up early today in a wedding hall in northern Afghanistan, killing more than 20 people including a well-known commander and other local leaders, Afghan officials said.

The death of Ahmad Khan Samangani, an ethnic Uzbek who is also a member of parliament, is a blow to efforts to unify Afghanistan's various ethnic factions.

Conflict between the Taliban - who come mostly from the country's biggest group, the Pashtuns - and members of its ethnic minorities is nothing new in a nation whose history is scarred by bloody civil strife, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai needs minority groups - loosely known as the Northern Alliance - to back his efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.

Samangani became famous during Afghanistan's fight against the Soviets, who left the country in 1989 after a 10-year occupation. He became a member of parliament last year and was considered a key leader in Samangan and northern Afghanistan.

Romney insists he had no role in Bain after 1999

LACONIA, N.H. - His credibility under attack, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney insisted on Friday that he had "no role whatsoever in the management" of a private equity firm after early 1999, and demanded that President Barack Obama apologize for campaign aides who persist in alleging otherwise.

"This is simply beneath the dignity of the presidency of the United States," Romney said in an interview on ABC, one of several he granted to network and cable stations in hopes of extinguishing the controversy.

Under pressure from Democrats and even some Republicans to release tax returns going back several years, Romney indicated he wouldn't do so. "You can never satisfy the opposition research team of the Obama organization," he told CBS.

Romney said after he left Bain Capital he retained ownership "until we were able to negotiate a departure" from the company he had founded. "I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999," he said, adding that officials at the company and independent fact-checkers had said the same thing.

Diplomacy falters amid latest Syria massacre

BEIRUT - The U.N. singled out government forces Friday for blame in the latest massacre in Syria, a frenzy of killing that raises new questions about whether diplomacy has any chance to end the crisis more than 16 months into the bloodiest revolt of the Arab Spring.

As the violence turns ever more chaotic, analysts warn the effort by special envoy Kofi Annan has become nothing more than a pretense, with government forces, rebels, jihadists and others fighting for power.

"Violence and escalation have outpaced political and international diplomacy," said Fawaz A. Gerges, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.

"I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. ... All I see is more violence and more escalation, and this horrible massacre is another sign that Syria is spiraling out of control."

Final audit of Iraq reconstruction: Billions wasted

WASHINGTON - After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can't say how much.

In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation" in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.

"The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known," the report said.

The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company's billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.

Blame piles up after chimps shot in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS - Poker pro Lee Watkinson put up the money and girlfriend Timmi De Rosa gave her heart to an effort to rescue two adult chimpanzees that had outgrown their youthful cuteness in a northwest Las Vegas neighborhood.

"We wanted to build a sanctuary," Watkinson said Friday. "We found them in a bad situation. People have them and play with them for five years and then someone has to come and rescue them. That's what we tried to do. We failed."

On Thursday, after three straight days of stifling 110-degree days, the chimps burst through one door of their outdoor pen, opened a secondary door with two dead bolt latches, and escaped.

For 30 minutes they rumbled through yards and climbed into and out of at least one unoccupied vehicle. The male, Buddy, dented fenders and jumped atop a police car before veering toward a gathering crowd of people. A Las Vegas police officer killed him with three shotgun blasts.

Buddy and the female, named C.J., had become unmanageable for their former owner, who signed part ownership of the animals over to a nonprofit that De Rosa heads, called the Cortland Brandenberg Foundation.

- The Associated Press