US Seeks to Confirm Report of Terror Leader's Death

American military and intelligence officials said today they are attempting to confirm a report from the Chadian military of the death of al Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the alleged mastermind of the deadly attack on an Algerian natural gas facility in January.

If the new report is confirmed, Belmokhtar's death would be a significant victory against a growing al Qaeda threat in northern Africa.

Belmokhtar's killing was announced on Chadian national television by armed forces spokesperson Gen. Zacharia Gobongue, who said Chadian troops "operating in northern Mali completely destroyed a terrorist base."

"The [death] toll included several dead terrorists, including their leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar," he said.

However, an unidentified elected official in Mali told The Associated Press he doubted Belmokhtar had actually been killed and said he suspected the Chadian government of pushing the story to ease the loss of dozens of Chadian troops in operations in northern Africa.

SITE Intel Group/AP Photo

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Belmokhtar is known as Mr. Marlboro because of the millions he made smuggling cigarettes across the Sahara, but in the last few months the one-eyed terrorist leader has become one of the most sought after terrorists in the world. The attack on the plant near In Amenas in eastern Algeria left dozens of Westerns and at least three Americans dead.

Belmokhtar had formed his own al Qaeda splinter group and announced he would use his wealth to finance more attacks against American and Western interests in the region and beyond.

The U.S. has badly wanted Belmokhtar stopped and actively helped in the search by French and African military units to find him, as well as another top al Qaeda leader who was reported killed yesterday.

After the Chadian announcement, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said Belmokhtar's death, if confirmed, "would be a hard blow to the collection of jihadists operating across the region that are targeting American diplomats and energy workers."

Steve Wysocki, a plant worker who survived the attack in In Amenas thanked "military forces from around the world," especially the Chadian military, for bringing "this terrorist to an expedient justice."

"My family and I continue to mourn for our friends and colleagues who didn't make it home and pray for their families," Wysocki told ABC News.

The CIA has been after Belmokhtar since the early 1990s, Royce's statement said.

ABC News' Clayton Sandell contributed to this report.

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Chavez working amid chemotherapy: VP

CARACAS: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is still in charge and mulling political, social and economic policies even as he receives a new round of chemotherapy, his vice president said Saturday.

Vice President Nicolas Maduro said that the socialist leader, who is convalescing in seclusion at a Caracas military hospital, sent "guidance" to his Cabinet as recently as Friday.

"He is staying informed and in charge as chief who was ratified by our people various times," Maduro said during an event broadcast on state-run television. "Comandante Chavez is the supreme leader of the Bolivarian revolution."

The opposition says the government is lying about Chavez's condition and has voiced doubts that the 58-year-old president held a five-hour meeting with his Cabinet on February 22 as the government claims.

But Maduro repeated that the meeting took place and that the president sent more instructions the next day with Science Minister Jorge Arreaza, his son-in-law, before giving more guidance on Friday.

The leftist leader's chosen successor showed a dossier containing "political, social and economic actions" that Chavez has requested "to continue strengthening the economy to face the economic war of the parasitic bourgeoisie."

The "central document" will be sent to Chavez, he said, adding that the government was "respecting his treatment, we are not acting in an invasive way in his treatment."

Chavez, who was first diagnosed with cancer in June 2011, underwent a fourth round of surgery in Cuba in December.

Maduro disclosed for the first time late Friday that Chavez began a new cycle of chemotherapy in January and decided to return to Caracas last month to continue a "more intense" phase of treatment.

- AFP/ir

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Chad says it killed Algeria hostage mastermind in Mali

N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Chadian soldiers in Mali have killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the al Qaeda commander who masterminded a bloody hostage-taking at an Algerian gas plant in January, Chad's military said on Saturday.

The death of one of the world's most wanted jihadists would be a major blow to al Qaeda in the region and to Islamist rebels already forced to flee towns they had seized in northern Mali by an offensive by French and African troops.

"On Saturday, March 2, at noon, Chadian armed forces operating in northern Mali completely destroyed a terrorist base. ... The toll included several dead terrorists, including their leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar," Chad's armed forces said in a statement read on national television.

On Friday, Chad's president, Idriss Deby, said his soldiers had killed another al Qaeda commander, Adelhamid Abou Zeid, among 40 militants who died in an operation in the same area as Saturday's assault - Mali's Adrar des Ifoghas mountains near the Algerian border.

France - which has used jet strikes against the militants' mountain hideouts - has declined to confirm the killing of either Abou Zeid or Belmokhtar.

In Washington, an Obama administration said the White House could not confirm the killing of Belmokhtar.

Analysts said the death of two of al Qaeda's most feared commanders in the Sahara desert would mark a significant blow to Mali's Islamist rebellion.

"Both men have extensive knowledge of northern Mali and parts of the broader Sahel and deep social and other connections in northern Mali, and the death of both in such a short amount of time will likely have an impact on militant operations," said Andrew Lebovich, a Dakar-based analyst who follows al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Anne Giudicelli, managing director of security consultancy Terrorisc, said the al Qaeda commanders' deaths - if confirmed - would temporarily disrupt the Islamist rebel network but would also raise concern over the fate of seven French hostages believed to be held by Islamists in northern Mali.

Chad is one of several African nations that have contributed forces to a French-led military intervention in Mali aimed at ridding its vast northern desert of Islamist rebels who seized the area nearly a year ago following a coup in the capital.

Western and African countries are worried that al Qaeda could use the zone to launch international attacks and strengthen ties with African Islamist groups like al Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

'MARLBORO MAN'

Belmokhtar, 40, who lost an eye while fighting in Afghanistan in the 1990s, claimed responsibility for the seizure of dozens of foreign hostages at the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria in January in which more than 60 people were killed.

That attack put Algeria back on the map of global jihad, 20 years after its civil war, a bloody Islamist struggle for power. It also burnished Belmokhtar's jihadi credentials by showing that al Qaeda remained a potent threat to Western interests despite U.S. forces killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.

Before In Amenas, some intelligence experts had assumed Algerian-born Belmokhtar had drifted away from jihad in favor of kidnapping and smuggling weapons and cigarettes in the Sahara where he earned the nickname "Marlboro Man".

In a rare interview with a Mauritanian news service in late 2011, Belmokhtar paid homage to bin Laden and his successor, Ayman al-Zawahri. He cited al Qaeda's traditional global preoccupations, including Iraq, Afghanistan and the fate of the Palestinians, and stressed the need to "attack Western and Jewish economic and military interests".

He shared command of field operations for AQIM - al Qaeda's North African franchise - with Abou Zeid, although there was talk the two did not get along and were competing for power.

A former smuggler turned jihadi, Algerian-born Abou Zeid imposed a violent form of sharia, Islamic law, in the ancient desert town of Timbuktu, including amputations and the destruction of ancient Sufi shrines.

Robert Fowler, a former Canadian diplomat held hostage by Belmokhtar from 2008 to 2009, told Reuters, "While I cannot consider reports of the death of both Abou Zeid and Mokhtar Belmokhtar as anything but good news ... I must temper my enthusiasm by the fact that this is by no means the first time Belmokhtar's death has been reported."

President Francois Hollande said on Friday that the assault to retake Mali's vast desert north from AQIM and other Islamist rebels that began on January 11 was in its final stage and so could not confirm Abou Zeid's death.

A U.S. official and a Western diplomat said, however, the reports about Abou Zeid's death appeared to be credible.

U.S. Representative Ed Royce, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the killing of Belmokhtar "would be a hard blow to the collection of jihadists operating across the region that are targeting American diplomats and energy workers."

Washington has said it believes Islamists operating in Mali were involved in the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi in September.

After its success in dislodging al Qaeda fighters from northern Mali's towns, France and its African allies have faced a mounting wave of suicide bombings and guerrilla-style raids by Islamists in northern Malian towns.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday that a U.N. peacekeeping force to replace French troops in Mali should be discussed as soon as possible.

Chad was among the quickest to respond to Mali's appeals for help alongside the French, rushing in hundreds of troops experienced in desert warfare, led by Deby's son, General Mahamat Deby.

The country's president may be hoping to polish his regional and international credentials by assisting in this war, while bolstering his own position in power in Chad, which has been threatened in the past by eastern neighbor Sudan.

(Additional reporting by John Irish and David Lewis in Dakar, Gus Trompiz in Paris, and Mark Hosenball and Mark Felsenthal in Washington; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Peter Cooney)

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We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us.

In the story of how the dog came in from the cold and onto our sofas, we tend to give ourselves a little too much credit. The most common assumption is that some hunter-gatherer with a soft spot for cuteness found some wolf puppies and adopted them. Over time, these tamed wolves would have shown their prowess at hunting, so humans kept them around the campfire until they evolved into dogs. (See "How to Build a Dog.")

But when we look back at our relationship with wolves throughout history, this doesn't really make sense. For one thing, the wolf was domesticated at a time when modern humans were not very tolerant of carnivorous competitors. In fact, after modern humans arrived in Europe around 43,000 years ago, they pretty much wiped out every large carnivore that existed, including saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas. The fossil record doesn't reveal whether these large carnivores starved to death because modern humans took most of the meat or whether humans picked them off on purpose. Either way, most of the Ice Age bestiary went extinct.

The hunting hypothesis, that humans used wolves to hunt, doesn't hold up either. Humans were already successful hunters without wolves, more successful than every other large carnivore. Wolves eat a lot of meat, as much as one deer per ten wolves every day-a lot for humans to feed or compete against. And anyone who has seen wolves in a feeding frenzy knows that wolves don't like to share.

Humans have a long history of eradicating wolves, rather than trying to adopt them. Over the last few centuries, almost every culture has hunted wolves to extinction. The first written record of the wolf's persecution was in the sixth century B.C. when Solon of Athens offered a bounty for every wolf killed. The last wolf was killed in England in the 16th century under the order of Henry VII. In Scotland, the forested landscape made wolves more difficult to kill. In response, the Scots burned the forests. North American wolves were not much better off. By 1930, there was not a wolf left in the 48 contiguous states of America.  (See "Wolf Wars.")

If this is a snapshot of our behavior toward wolves over the centuries, it presents one of the most perplexing problems: How was this misunderstood creature tolerated by humans long enough to evolve into the domestic dog?

The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest.

Most likely, it was wolves that approached us, not the other way around, probably while they were scavenging around garbage dumps on the edge of human settlements. The wolves that were bold but aggressive would have been killed by humans, and so only the ones that were bold and friendly would have been tolerated.

Friendliness caused strange things to happen in the wolves. They started to look different. Domestication gave them splotchy coats, floppy ears, wagging tails. In only several generations, these friendly wolves would have become very distinctive from their more aggressive relatives. But the changes did not just affect their looks. Changes also happened to their psychology. These protodogs evolved the ability to read human gestures.

As dog owners, we take for granted that we can point to a ball or toy and our dog will bound off to get it. But the ability of dogs to read human gestures is remarkable. Even our closest relatives-chimpanzees and bonobos-can't read our gestures as readily as dogs can. Dogs are remarkably similar to human infants in the way they pay attention to us. This ability accounts for the extraordinary communication we have with our dogs. Some dogs are so attuned to their owners that they can read a gesture as subtle as a change in eye direction.

With this new ability, these protodogs were worth knowing. People who had dogs during a hunt would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't. Even today, tribes in Nicaragua depend on dogs to detect prey. Moose hunters in alpine regions bring home 56 percent more prey when they are accompanied by dogs. In the Congo, hunters believe they would starve without their dogs.

Dogs would also have served as a warning system, barking at hostile strangers from neighboring tribes. They could have defended their humans from predators.

And finally, though this is not a pleasant thought, when times were tough, dogs could have served as an emergency food supply. Thousands of years before refrigeration and with no crops to store, hunter-gatherers had no food reserves until the domestication of dogs. In tough times, dogs that were the least efficient hunters might have been sacrificed to save the group or the best hunting dogs. Once humans realized the usefulness of keeping dogs as an emergency food supply, it was not a huge jump to realize plants could be used in a similar way.

So, far from a benign human adopting a wolf puppy, it is more likely that a population of wolves adopted us. As the advantages of dog ownership became clear, we were as strongly affected by our relationship with them as they have been by their relationship with us. Dogs may even have been the catalyst for our civilization.

Dr. Brian Hare is the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at Duke University. This essay is adapted from their new book, The Genius of Dogs, published by Dutton. To play science-based games to find the genius in your dog, visit www.dognition.com.

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Obama Signs Order to Begin Sequester Cuts

President Obama and congressional leaders today failed to reach a breakthrough to avert a sweeping package of automatic spending cuts, setting into motion $85 billion of across-the-board belt-tightening that neither had wanted to see.

President Obama officially initiated the cuts with an order to agencies Friday evening.

He had met for just over an hour at the White House Friday morning with Republican leaders House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic allies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Joe Biden.

But the parties emerged from their first face-to-face meeting of the year resigned to see the cuts take hold at midnight.

"This is not a win for anybody," Obama lamented in a statement to reporters after the meeting. "This is a loss for the American people."

READ MORE: 6 Questions (and Answers) About the Sequester

Officials have said the spending reductions immediately take effect Saturday but that the pain from reduced government services and furloughs of tens of thousands of federal employees would be felt gradually in the weeks ahead.

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Federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the Pentagon, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education, have all prepared to notify employees that they will have to take one unpaid day off per week through the end of the year.

The staffing trims could slow many government services, including airport screenings, air traffic control, and law enforcement investigations and prosecutions. Spending on education programs and health services for low-income families will also get clipped.

"It is absolutely true that this is not going to precipitate the crisis" that would have been caused by the so-called fiscal cliff, Obama said. "But people are going to be hurt. The economy will not grow as quickly as it would have. Unemployment will not go down as quickly as it would have. And there are lives behind that. And it's real."

The sticking point in the debate over the automatic cuts -- known as sequester -- has remained the same between the parties for more than a year since the cuts were first proposed: whether to include more new tax revenue in a broad deficit reduction plan.

The White House insists there must be higher tax revenue, through elimination of tax loopholes and deductions that benefit wealthier Americans and corporations. Republicans seek an approach of spending cuts only, with an emphasis on entitlement programs. It's a deep divide that both sides have proven unable to bridge.

"This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over," Boehner told reporters after the meeting. "It's about taking on the spending problem here in Washington."

Boehner: No New Taxes to Avert Sequester

Boehner says any elimination of tax loopholes or deductions should be part of a broader tax code overhaul aimed at lowering rates overall, not to offset spending cuts in the sequester.

Obama countered today that he's willing to "take on the problem where it exists, on entitlements, and do some things that my own party doesn't like."

But he says Republicans must be willing to eliminate some tax loopholes as part of a deal.

"They refuse to budge on closing a single wasteful loophole to help reduce the deficit," Obama said. "We can and must replace these cuts with a more balanced approach that asks something from everybody."

Can anything more be done by either side to reach a middle ground?

The president today claimed he's done all he can. "I am not a dictator, I'm the president," Obama said.

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Obama to refocus attention on immigration, gun control

President Obama signaled Friday a desire to refocus his attention on second-term priorities, such as immigration and gun control, after weeks of fruitless wrangling with Republicans over his fiscal agenda.

“What I want to try to do is make sure that we’re constantly focused . . . on how are we helping American families succeed,” Obama said at a news conference after failing to strike a deal with congressional leaders to avert $85 billion in mandatory budget cuts.

“Deficit reduction is part of that agenda, and an important part, but it’s not the only part,” he said. “And I don’t want us to be paralyzed on everything just because we disagree on this one thing.”

For a president who has bemoaned Washington’s penchant for lurching between self-manufactured political crises over the past two years, the inability to compromise with Republicans appeared to leave him simultaneously exasperated and emboldened.

Though he had run out of ideas on how to get Congress to support his plan on taxes and spending — “What more do you think I should do?” he asked a reporter — Obama sounded an upbeat note on other initiatives, including raising the minimum wage, expanding preschool programs and changing voting laws.

“There are other areas where we can make progress,” he said. “This is the agenda that the American people voted for. These are America’s priorities. They’re too important to go unaddressed.”

The president’s tone came as a relief to advocates who have fretted that the ongoing fight over the deficit would drain attention and critical momentum from Obama’s promise to champion reforms to gun control and immigration laws.

Though Obama touched on both during his State of the Union address Feb. 12, the last event he dedicated solely to gun control was a Feb. 4 appearance at a Minneapolis police station, and on immigration it was a Jan. 29 speech at a Las Vegas high school.

In the meantime, the administration has tried to remain engaged via less high-profile means. Vice President Biden made policy speeches and met with advocates on gun control, and Obama used phone calls to Capitol Hill and a private Oval Office meeting with two Republican senators to push quietly on immigration.

“There are plenty of issues Congress needs to be getting to,” said David Leopold, an executive committee member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Manufactured crises like the ‘fiscal cliff’ or sequester do not advance anyone’s agenda, least of all the American people’s agenda.”

Advocates acknowledged that the White House’s decision to focus on the economy made sense in light of polls showing Americans overwhelmingly believe that jobs and growth should be Obama’s top priority. But they have learned from experience that momentum for their causes can disappear quickly.

Obama promised comprehensive immigration reform in his first term but pursued a major health-care overhaul that ate up his political capital and the administration’s attention. He gave a much-heralded speech about gun violence after the mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in January 2011 that wounded former representative Gabby Giffords (D), but no changes to gun laws followed.

Obama has “got to be an effective spokesperson on [gun violence] to do a good job, but the minute he changes focus from the economy, everybody goes bananas,” said Matt Bennett, a senior vice president at Third Way, a think tank that supports stricter gun control. “That puts him in a bit of a bind.”

On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan coalition of senators is working on legislation that would require mandatory background checks for all private gun sales, closing a long-standing loophole. The bill hit a snag after Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) opposed adding language to the bill that would require gun owners to keep transactional records of private firearms sales.

Another bipartisan Senate group is drafting a comprehensive immigration bill that would likely include a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants. Senators said they hope to produce a draft in March, but the bill could be delayed until after the Easter recess, which runs through April 5, several sources said.

In a pointed reminder of the difficulty of engaging on more than one issue at a time, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) were late to a meeting with the bipartisan immigration group last week because they were on the Senate floor blasting Democrats over the mandatory budget cuts. Only after their floor speeches ended did the pair join their colleagues for more cordial discussions.

On Friday, even as he bemoaned the lack of GOP cooperation on the spending cuts, Obama made a point to praise the Republican-led House for approving a renewed Violence Against Women Act this week.

“What I’m going to keep on trying to do is to make sure that we push on those things that are important to families,” Obama said. “We won’t get everything done all at once, but we can get a lot done.”

Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.

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Chilling documentary accuses Sri Lanka of war crimes

GENEVA: The Sri Lankan military committed numerous war crimes during the final months of the country's 26-year civil war, according to a documentary aired for the first time on Friday, amid vigorous protests from Colombo.

Using graphic video and pictures taken both by retreating Tamil Tiger rebels, civilians and victorious Sri Lankan troops, "No Fire Zone -- The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka" presents a chilling picture of the final 138 days of the conflict that ended in May 2009.

Filmmaker Callum Macrae insisted before the screening that the film at the UN headquarters in Geneva that it should be seen as "evidence" of the "war crimes and crimes against humanity" committed by government troops.

"The real truth is coming out," he said.

Sri Lanka's ambassador in Geneva, Ravinatha Aryasinha, strongly protested the screening of the film on the sidelines of the ongoing UN Human Rights Council.

He described it as "part of a cynical, concerted and orchestrated campaign" to influence the debate in the council about his country.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which hosted the screening, are calling for the council to order an international probe.

They charge that Sri Lanka's domestic Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) has glossed over the military's role.

The film for instance alleges that a "no fire zone" set up by the government in January, 2009, basically functioned as a trap for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who flooded into it in the hope of finding safety.

The area was heavily shelled, and in the film maimed and bloodied bodies, of men, women and children, lay strewn.

The UN has estimated that some 40,000 people were killed in the final months of the war, most of them due to indiscriminate shelling by the Sri Lankan military.

Peter Mackay, a UN worker who was trapped inside the zone for two weeks, questioned in the film why the government would set up the "no fire zone" within range of all of their artillery.

"Either you don't care if you kill the people in that safe zone or you are actively targeting them," he said, adding that he believed the latter was true.

He and others describe how aid-centres and make-shift hospitals were shelled soon after UN or Red Cross workers informed the government of their coordinates, which is ironically standard practice to ensure that such places are spared in bombing campaigns.

The footage provided by the retreating Tamil Tigers and civilians is devastating, showing parents wailing over their dying and dead children, but the images provided by the government forces are perhaps even more shocking.

Video of a Tamil Tigers commander first being interrogated, and then a picture of his mutilated body in the dirt; naked and bound prisoners coldly executed; dead, naked women, who have clearly been sexually abused filmed amid degrading comments by onlooking soldiers.

And then there is footage of the 12-year-old son of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, Balachandran, whose body is seen with five bullet holes in his chest.

He was not caught in cross-fire: a separate video shot two hours earlier, shows him sitting in military custody in a bunker eating a biscuit.

The Sri Lankan government has cast doubt on the authenticity of the footage, with Aryasinha insisting on Friday it was of "dubious origin".

Macrae however insisted that all the footage had been carefully checked and analysed to ensure none of it had been tampered with.

"All of it is, I'm afraid, genuine," he said.

- AFP/fa

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