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Senator presses Pentagon for records about military base assault cases WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is coming under pressure to give Congress detailed information on the handling of sex crime cases in the armed forces following an Associated Press inves- tigation that found a pattern of inconsistent judgments and light penalties for sexual assaults at U.S. bases in Japan. Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who's led efforts in Congress to address military sexual crimes, is pressing the Defense Department to turn over case informa- tion from four major U.S. bases: Fort Hood in Texas, Naval Air Station Norfolk in Virginia, the Marine Corps' Camp Pendleton in California, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Such records would shed more light on how military commanders make decisions about court martials and pun- ishments in sexual assault cases and whether the inconsistent judgments seen in Japan are more widespread. AP's investigation, which was based on hundreds of internal military documents it first began requesting in 2009, found that what appeared to be strong cases were often reduced to lesser charges. Suspects were unlikely to serve time even when military authorities agreed a crime had been commit- ted. In two rape cases, commanders overruled recommendations to court-martial and dropped the charges instead. Gillibrand, who leads the Senate Armed Ser- vices personnel panel, wrote Monday to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel asking for ''all reports and allega- tions of rape, forcible sodomy, sexual assault, sex in the barracks, adultery and attempts, conspiracies or solicita- tions to commit these crimes,'' for the last five years. White House delays health law coverage mandate for some firms WASHINGTON (AP) — Trying to limit elec- tion-year damage on health care, the Obama administration Monday granted business groups another delay in a much-criticized require- ment that larger firms cover their workers or face fines. In one of several con- cessions in a complex Treasury Department regulation, the adminis- tration said companies with 50 to 99 employees will have an additional year to comply with the coverage mandate, until January 1, 2016. For businesses with 100 or more employees the requirement will still take effect in 2015. But other newly announced provisions, affecting technical issues such as the calcu- lation of working hours, may help some of those firms. Some major business organizations were quick to praise the administration's com- promise. ''These final regula- tions secured the gold medal for greatest assis- tance to retailers, and other businesses, and our employees,'' said Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the Nation- al Retail Federation. American terror suspect possibly targeted for drone attack WASHINGTON (AP) — The case of an Ameri- can citizen and suspected member of al-Qaida who is allegedly planning attacks on U.S. targets overseas underscores the complexities of President Barack Obama's new stricter targeting guide- lines for the use of deadly drones. The CIA drones watching him cannot strike because he's a U.S. citizen. The Pentagon drones that could are barred from the country where he's hiding, and the Justice Department has not yet finished build- ing a case against him. Four U.S. officials said the American suspected terrorist is in a country that refuses U.S. military action on its soil and that has proved unable to go after him. And Obama's new policy says Ameri- can suspected terrorists overseas can only be killed by the military, not the CIA, creating a policy conundrum for the White House. Two of the officials described the man as an al-Qaida facilitator who has been directly respon- sible for deadly attacks against U.S. citizens overseas and who contin- ues to plan attacks against them that would use improvised explosive devices. The officials said the suspected terrorist is well-guarded and in a fairly remote location, so any unilateral attempt by U.S. troops to capture him would be risky and even more politically explosive than a U.S. missile strike. Iraqi militants accidentally set off car bomb at their own camp BAGHDAD (AP) — An instructor teaching his militant recruits how to make car bombs acci- dentally set off explo- sives in his demonstra- tion Monday, killing 21 of them in a huge blast that alerted authorities to the existence of the rural training camp in an orchard north of Baghdad. Nearly two dozen people were arrested, including wounded insurgents try- ing to hobble away from the scene. The fatal goof by the al-Qaida breakaway group that dominates the Sunni insurgency in Iraq happened on the same day that the speak- er of the Iraqi parlia- ment, a prominent Sunni whom the militants con- sider a traitor, escaped unhurt from a roadside bomb attack on his motorcade in the north- ern city of Mosul. Nevertheless, the events underscored the determination of the insurgents to rebuild and regain the strength they enjoyed in Iraq at the height of the war until U.S.-backed Sunni tribesmen turned against them. The militants are currently battling for control of mainly Sunni areas of western Iraq in a key test of the Shiite- led government's ability to maintain security more than two years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops. While the Iraqi army has been attacking insurgent training camps in the vast desert of western Anbar province near the Syrian border, it is unusual to find such a camp in the center of the country, just 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of the capi- tal. The discovery shows that ''the terrorist groups have made a strong comeback in Iraq and that the security problems are far from over, and things are heading from bad to worse,'' said Hamid al- Mutlaq, a member of the parliament's security and defense committee. Pilots head to wrong airports more often than officials admit WASHINGTON (AP) — At a time when a cellphone can guide you to your driveway, com- mercial pilots attempt to land at the wrong air- port more often than most passengers realize or government officials admit, according to an Associated Press search of government safety data and news reports since the early 1990s. On at least 150 flights, including a Southwest Airlines jet last month in Missouri and a jumbo cargo plane last fall in Kansas, U.S. commercial passenger and cargo planes have either landed at the wrong airport or started to land and realized their mistake in time. A particular trouble spot is San Jose, Calif. The list of landing mis- takes includes six reports of pilots prepar- ing to land at Moffett Field, a joint civilian- military airport, when they meant to go to Mineta San Jose Inter- national Airport, about 10 miles to the south- east. The airports are south of San Francisco in California's Silicon Valley. ''This event occurs several times every win- ter in bad weather when we work on Runway 12,'' a San Jose airport tower controller said in a November 2012 report describing how an air- liner headed for Moffett after being cleared to land at San Jose. The plane was waved off in time. In nearly all the inci- dents, the pilots were cleared by controllers to fly based on what they could see rather than relying on automation. Many incidents occur at night, with pilots report- ing they were attracted by the runway lights of the first airport they saw during descent. Some pilots said they disre- garded navigation equipment that showed their planes slightly off course because the information didn't match what they were seeing out their win- dows — a runway straight ahead. Aid workers rush to evacuate blockaided Syrian city BEIRUT (AP) — Aid officials rushed to evacu- ate more women, chil- dren and elderly from rebel-held areas that have been blockaded by government troops for more than a year in Syria's third-largest city, Homs, after a U.N.-bro- kered cease-fire in the city was renewed for three more days Monday. The truce, which began Friday, has been shaken by continued shelling and shooting that prevented some res- idents from escaping and limited the amount of food aid officials have been able to deliv- er into the besieged neighborhoods. U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos sharply criticized the two sides, saying U.N. and Syrian Red Cres- cent workers were ''deliberately targeted.'' The drama in Homs, where Amos said around 800 civilians have been evacuated so far, played out as activists on Monday reported new sectarian killings in Syria's civil war. A l - Q a i d a - i n s p i r e d rebels killed more than two dozen civilians, including an entire fam- ily, when they overran a village populated by minority Alawites on Sunday, Rami Abdur- rahman of the British- based Syrian Observato- ry for Human Rights said. 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