Casualties

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor Monday defended using drones to launch missiles against militants in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, saying the growing use of armed unmanned aircraft had saved American lives and caused few civilian casualties. The comments by John Brennan, coming shortly before the first anniversary of the U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, marks the first time a senior White House official has spoken at length in public about widely reported but officially secret drone operations.

The Defense Department last week identified the following American military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq: Christopher S. Frost, 24, of Waukesha, Wis.; staff sergeant, Air Force. Frost was killed Monday along with seven members of the Iraqi air force when their Russian-built MI-17 transport helicopter crashed in a sandstorm near Baiji, Iraq, north of Baghdad. He was assigned to the 377th Air Base Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. -- Steven R. Koch, 23, of Milltown, N. J.; specialist, Army.

  In an apartment on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, an opposition activist retrieves stashes of medicine and bandages from hiding places. "What we need most right now are empty blood bags, oxygen masks and tetanus shots - and also a heart defibrillator," says the medical volunteer, tallying packages of antibiotics soon to be channeled out to protest strongholds. The trick is to move the supplies quickly so no evidence remains if security forces raid the premises, says the activist, who, like others interviewed, declined to be named for security reasons.

To help students cope if war breaks out in the Persian Gulf, Marine Corps officials and Irvine school principals and psychologists set up a contingency plan Thursday to exchange information about deaths, injuries and rumors. "We have to prepare ourselves as if we're going to war," said Dan Graham, principal of El Toro Marine School, an Irvine Unified School District elementary school with a large number of military children. "We can't assume we're not going to war. We'd like to think last-minute things happen, and we hope they do. If they don't, we are prepared to assist our families."

Their name conjures up the most celebrated moment of America's post-Sept. 11 military campaigns. Now the Navy SEALs belong to a grimmer chapter in history: the most deadly incident for U.S. forces in the 10-year Afghanistan war. Three months after they killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan and cemented their place in military legend, the SEALs suffered a devastating loss when nearly two dozen of the elite troops were among...

Alexander Gulanerian heard the mob pounding down the hall seconds before his door was broken down and they stormed in, brandishing knives, broken bottles and lengths of pipe. Gulanerian, an Armenian living in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, said the intruders, without uttering a word, began beating him. They slashed his neck and his feet and threw him out of a second-story window.

Government forces raiding a rebel camp killed 18 fighters, all but four of them girls, in a gun battle Sunday on the Jaffna peninsula, an official spokesman said. Child soldiers were leading the fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam near the camp in Navatkuli, 12 miles north of the city of Jaffna, a Defense Ministry spokesman said. Soldiers discovered after the gun battle that most of the dead guerrillas were children.

During a solemn 10 a.m. Mass at St. John's Cathedral on Sunday, Deacon Lester Mackenzie recited the names and ages of six Americans who had lost their lives in Iraq the previous week. Pray for them, he told the congregation, and for prisoners of war and those missing in action. Then Mackenzie, who is being ordained today as an Episcopal priest, called on parishioners "to pray for the Iraqi people who have died, whose names we do not know." St.

Five children were killed Sunday morning when their townhouse in Carson erupted in flames and they were trapped inside. Three girls and a boy, ages 6 to 8, were found dead upstairs inside the two-story unit, and a 9-year-old girl later died at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles County fire officials said. The four adults who were home, including the victims' elderly grandparents, tried to rescue the children but were pushed back by smoke and flames, officials said.

  A new round of fierce clashes and shelling was reported Wednesday in the battered Syrian city of Homs, while fresh recriminations flew aboutRussia'ssuddenly prominent role in the crisis. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin deplored what he called a growing "cult of violence" in international affairs, and emphasized that countries should have the opportunity to decide their own fates without interference from outside forces. "Of course, we condemn any instance of violence, whatever side this comes from, but one cannot behave like a bull in a china shop," Putin said at a meeting in Moscow with Russian religious leaders, Interfax news agency reported.

Reporting from Camp Pendleton -- Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich and the jurors in his court-martial are all wearing crisp Marine uniforms. All have had combat experience. And all have known Marines killed in combat. But the defendant and those who may decide his fate come from different eras in the Marine Corps mission in Iraq, divided by that November morning in 2005 when 24 unarmed civilians in the town of Haditha were killed by Marines in Wuterich's squad. All eight jurors served after that event, which scandalized much of the American public and shook the Marine Corps.

War casualties TOTAL U.S. DEATHS* In and around Iraq: 4,487 Afghanistan: 1,743 Other locations: 103 *Includes military and Department of Defense-employed civilian personnel killed in action and in nonhostile circumstances as of Friday Source: Department of Defense

Pakistan's ambassador to the United States stepped down Tuesday after accusations that he engineered a memo to the U.S. urging Washington to help rein in the Asian nation's powerful armed forces. Husain Haqqani's decision to step down made him the first political casualty in a scandal that has exposed the growing chasm between Pakistan's civilian government and military leadership. Haqqani, a close ally of President Asif Ali Zardari and widely regarded as an influential figure in Washington, quit after being requested to do so by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, according to a statement issued by Gilani's office.

  The tanks, mortars and firefights rumbling and crackling through the ancient city of Sana are endangering not only Yemen's future but also its magnificent architectural past of intricately decorated earthen houses and slender brick towers. The old city, with its stealthy alleys and fortress walls, is one of the most striking visions in the Arab world, a bit of fairy tale in a harsh, despotically ruled land. But once-peaceful protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh that have escalated to street battles involving tribes, government forces and mutinous soldiers are encroaching on the historic center, settled more than 2,500 years ago and named a World Heritage Site in 1986 by the United Nations.

Insurgents with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades launched a sustained attack Thursday against a U.S. base in Kandahar. No coalition casualties were reported, but the hours-long confrontation demonstrated the Taliban's continuing ability to strike in the heart of Afghanistan's main southern city. The attack, which began in midafternoon and stretched into the evening, targeted a joint civilian-military installation housing what is known as a provincial reconstruction team, or PRT, mainly devoted to development projects.

As the United States finally begins to wind down its military presence in Afghanistan, is the Obama administration poised to replicate that intervention in Yemen? The administration insists it has no such plans, but it has been evident for months that it regards the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as the most dangerous incubator of terrorist plots directed at America. And it is acting on that conviction. This week The Times reported that U.S. special operations troops, which were withdrawn from Yemen last year amid political turmoil in that country, have returned and are providing technical assistance to Yemeni forces.

War casualties TOTAL U.S. DEATHS In and around Iraq: 4,352 In and around Afghanistan: 793 Other locations: 72 Includes military and Department of Defense-employed civilian personnel killed in action and in nonhostile circumstances as of Thursday Source: Department of Defense

Moammar Kadafi remained in hiding Monday as rebels consolidated their grip on much of the Libyan capital amid celebrations and fierce gun battles in pockets ofTripoli that have refused to buckle to opposition forces. Heavy fighting rumbled outside Kadafi's compound Bab Al-Azizia in southernTripoli, and a rebel leader said insurgents sustained heavy losses overnight and this morning. Opposition forces told Al Jazeera they controlled about 80% of the city, depicting a still-precarious victory.