Air Base

BEIRUT - Thwarted by aerial attacks, Syrian rebels appear to have begun systemically targeting government air bases and aircraft, while trying to capture antiaircraft missiles that can shoot down helicopters and fighter jets. An opposition group reported Saturday that insurgents had captured an air defense base in eastern Syria, close to the Iraqi border, and that battles were raging near a military airport in the area. News reports cited opposition sources as saying that some antiaircraft missiles were seized.

WASHINGTON — Six Air Force basic training instructors face criminal charges and six others are under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct with female recruits in a widening scandal at the service's training command at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Gen. Edward D. Rice Jr., commander of the Air Education and Training Command, told a Pentagon news conference that 31 victims had been identified so far. All were undergoing or had recently completed basic training when they were purportedly preyed upon by male instructors, he said.

In 1944, as head of the Office of Strategic Services in Bari, Italy, George Vujnovich guided a team of agents who worked with Yugoslav guerrilla leader Draza Mihailovich to airlift more than 500 airmen from a makeshift runway carved on a mountaintop in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. The World War II air rescue mission, "Operation Halyard," was relatively obscure until the 2007 release of "The Forgotten 500," a book by Gregory Freeman. "We didn't lose a single man. It's an interesting history.

On a day when President Obama personally apologized for the burning of Korans at an American-run military base, violence over the incident escalated ominously with the killing of two American troops by an Afghan army soldier during a demonstration in eastern Afghanistan. At least 13 people have been reported killed in unrest that broke out after Afghan laborers at the Bagram air base discovered late Monday that discarded Korans were being disposed of in the incinerator used to burn trash.

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

The Air Force said Tuesday that it had disciplined three top officials at the military's main mortuary in Delaware for "gross mismanagement" after finding that they twice lost track of body parts of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan, and cut off a deceased Marine's arm bone without his family's consent. An 18-month Air Force investigation said the three officials failed to take action "despite indications that procedures were inadequate" for tracking human remains at the Dover Air Force Base mortuary, which has handled most of the more than 6,000 U.S. service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade.

For Army Staff Sgt. David P. Senft , the years at war had taken a toll. The 27-year-old helicopter mechanic from Grass Valley, northeast of Sacramento, was reserved but tough. And with a love of flying and fast cars, his family said, he wanted to live life on the edge. But in the summer of 2010, in the time leading up to his latest deployment to Afghanistan, he was different. He resisted a return to war. His family and friends said he was depressed, emotionally fragile and, at least once, had tried to kill himself.

Though you could fit its story on the head of a pin, "A Bird of the Air" is a gently involving character dramedy with a pair of appealing leads who help give this offbeat movie flight. The movie's "Accidental Tourist"-type love match involves New Mexico highway worker Lyman (Jackson Hurst, star material), a loner nursing a traumatic past, and Fiona (Rachel Nichols), a chatty, unflappable librarian at the local college where Lyman has taken a decade's worth of courses. Their paths cross after a green parrot with an eclectic vocabulary flies into Lyman's trailer, inspiring him to track down the brash, old bird's former owner, which, thanks to Fiona's detective-like research, turns out to be owners, plural — many of them played by such deft character actors as Judith Ivey, Buck Henry, Phyllis Somerville and Gary Farmer.

The impromptu tributes began on a spring day in 2007 when church bell ringers stopped their weekly practice and tolled instead for two passing coffins carrying soldiers slain overseas. The rituals ended Wednesday with a sunset ceremony, as the town of Wootton Bassett said a solemn goodbye to its unique role in honoring Britain's war dead. The bodies of slain military personnel, which had been passing through the south England market town from nearby Lyneham air base, will now return to Brize Norton military airport close to the mortuary outside Oxford and Lyneham air base is to close this year.

A test flight of an experimental aircraft traveling at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped vehicle failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were monitoring the mission. The unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was meant to test new technologies that could give the Pentagon the capability to deliver non-nuclear military strikes anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.