Iraq

Skechers has agreed to pay $40 million to consumers who purchased its  rocker-bottom shoes under the mistaken belief that the shoes would help give them Kim Kardashian's booty or Joe Montana's stamina. So how do you get your piece of the payout if you purchased the shoes months, if not years ago, and don't have a receipt? No problem. This refund relies largely on the honor system. Anyone who purchased the company's line of Shape-Up shoes -- or its Resistance Runners, Tone-ups or Toners -- is entitled to a partial refund whether they have proof of purchase or not, officials said Thursday.

BAGHDAD - Less than a year and a half after the last U.S. troops left, Iraq's political leaders are openly debating the prospect of two dangerous paths for their country: de facto division or civil war. Perhaps both. Tension between the Shiite majority, now in control of the levers of power, and the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated under Saddam Hussein, has been building for months. But politicians on all sides agree that the country has entered a perilous new phase, highlighted in late April by an attack on a Sunni protest camp by security forces that killed at least 45 people.

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

Re "The Vietnam syndrome," Opinion, May 5 Frank Snepp, a former CIA analyst who was in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975, worries that we may not have learned the lessons of our war in that country. He may have missed the most important lesson. Vietnam today is a small country that represents no great threat to the United States or its allies. The collapse of South Vietnam didn't lead to falling dominoes or global disaster. We should ponder this outcome when we hear warnings of doom about our withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan or our refusal to intervene in Syria.

WASHINGTON - Minutes after Greg Hicks learned that the perimeter of the U.S. mission in Benghazi had been breached by men with guns, he punched a cellphone number to reach Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, his immediate boss, who was at the scene. "Greg, we're under attack," Stevens told Hicks, the deputy chief of the mission, Hicks testified to Congress on Wednesday. Then the connection was lost. Hicks never spoke to his boss again. Stevens died soon afterward, as the Benghazi mission went up in flames around him. Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee were universal in their praise of the gripping, soft-spoken, minute-by-minute account they heard Wednesday from Hicks, the first public testimony from a government official who was in Libya during the assault that killed four Americans in September.

BAGHDAD - Less than a year and a half after the last U.S. troops left, Iraq's political leaders are openly debating the prospect of two dangerous paths for their country: de facto division or civil war. Perhaps both. Tension between the Shiite majority, now in control of the levers of power, and the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated under Saddam Hussein, has been building for months. But politicians on all sides agree that the country has entered a perilous new phase, highlighted in late April by an attack on a Sunni protest camp by security forces that killed at least 45 people.

ABC News is scaling back its presence in Iraq and will rely on BBC News for daily coverage of developments there. "By working more closely with the BBC, we will increase our capabilities in Iraq and the region, while at the same time freeing our people and resources to concentrate on the unique reporting that our audiences value so highly," ABC News President David Westin wrote in a memo to employees Wednesday. The two networks have a long-standing relationship in which they share content.

They are known as the "men of the night." The rugged group sits in front of a liquor store in the northern foothills of Iraq, swapping stories and glasses of whiskey as their horses munch nearby. As dusk approaches, they begin strapping heavy cartons onto their animals for the long journey ahead. Their cargo: bottles of vodka and Scotch destined for Iran. Trade has flourished between the two regions for centuries. Some of it is legitimate, some of it not. In the ethnic Kurdish enclaves on either side of the border, many livelihoods are built on the illicit flow of alcohol, cigarettes and other contraband into Iran.

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California's largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election. Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church's former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.

Among the myriad military and intelligence agencies that make up Iran's security forces, none has the skill and reach of the Quds Force, an elite unit nominally within the command structure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - Army Sgt. John Russell opened fire on U.S. mental health workers at a combat stress center in Iraq out of revenge after doctors said he was not eligible to leave the Army, prosecutors said Monday at the opening of Russell's court-martial on charges of premeditated murder. Five U.S. servicemen were shot to death at the Camp Liberty clinic in 2009. The defense claims that Russell suffered from chronic stress and mental illness that flamed into a psychotic fury.

Thirty-eight years ago last week, I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the country. Just two years before that chaotic rush for the exits, the Nixon administration had withdrawn the last American troops from the war zone and had declared indigenous forces strong enough, and the government reliable enough, to withstand whatever the enemy might throw into the fray after U.S. forces were gone. That's the same story we told ourselves in Iraq when we pulled out of that country in 2011.

BAGHDAD - Shiite-dominated areas in southern and central Iraq were rocked Monday by car bomb explosions that killed at least 22 people and fueled fears that the country is sliding into a civil war. The violence occurred as Iraqi security forces surrounded the Sunni cities of Ramadi and Fallouja demanding that the area's tribes hand over those responsible for killing five Iraqi soldiers over the weekend. Authorities gave the tribes 48 hours. The deadline passed, but Jaber Jabri, a member of parliament from Ramadi, said late Monday that a tentative deal had been reached to defuse the situation.

Re "A 'red line' on Syria," Editorial, April 25 The lessons of our disastrous invasion of Iraq have been ignored. Syria presents no direct threat to the U.S., and yet the foreign policy elite and the media are increasingly saying we may have to intervene militarily in that country's civil war because a "red line" may have been crossed. The Obama administration must resist the urge to take on another war; it should focus on rebuilding our nation. Furthermore, any U.S. intervention in response to Syria's use of chemical weapons would be grossly hypocritical, since our forces in Iraq used white phosphorous and ammunition made from depleted uranium, which have been linked to an increased rate of birth defects there.

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government ordered 10 predominantly Sunni Muslim satellite television channels to cease broadcasting Sunday, accusing them of encouraging the sectarian unrest that left more than 200 people dead in a week of violence in northern Iraq. The stations included the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera and well-known local satellite stations. The move reflected the elevated tensions in the country since fighting erupted last week between Shiite Muslim-led security forces and Sunni Arab protesters, raising fears of a new civil war like the one that erupted from 2005 to 2008, when U.S. troops were still in the country.

BEIRUT - Security forces for the Shiite-led Iraqi government raided a Sunni protest camp in northern Iraq on Tuesday, igniting violence around the country that left at least 36 people dead. The unrest led two Sunni officials to resign from the government and risked pushing the country's Sunni provinces into an open revolt against Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite. The situation looked to be the gravest moment for Iraq since the last U.S. combat troops left in December 2011. The violence Tuesday started in the Sunni town of Hawija, where shooting erupted during the raid.

The bloodthirsty enemy had gathered on the city's perimeter, but this time the locals were ready. They had formed armed committees similar to the "Sons of Iraq" forces fighting off Al Qaeda in Iraq militants in western Iraq. They were gearing up for a fight. Their foes had been attacking them with increasing abandon on the outskirts of this river city 145 miles southeast of Baghdad. They struck along the harsh desert plain leading to Saudi Arabia. They came day or night.

'Nature: Braving Iraq' Where: KCET When: 8 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - U.S. Army Sgt. John Russell pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of five fellow service members and the attempted murder of another in Iraq in 2009 after the government agreed not to seek the death penalty. Russell, 48, was dispassionate and matter-of-fact as he gave his first public account of his methodical march with an M-16 rifle through the Camp Liberty combat stress center - the only mass killing of Americans by a U.S. serviceman during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi immigrant and former Fullerton resident who returned to Iraq in 2003 to lead a marshlands restoration project, has received the Goldman Environmental Prize, a $150,000 prize awarded to six environmentalists annually. Alwash led a project to reflood the dessicated marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, an ecosystem twice the size of the Florida Everglades. The marshlands became a political battleground during Saddam Hussein's 30-year reign in Iraq.