Military Officers

The Honduran president said Thursday that he would ignore a high court ruling ordering him to reinstate the military chief he had fired, escalating a showdown that has threatened the leftist leader's hold on power. President Manuel Zelaya's plan to hold a referendum Sunday on changing the constitution has pitted him against the country's top courts, the attorney general, military leaders and even his own party, all of whom say the vote is illegal.

Deep in the Mojave National Preserve, 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles, an 8-foot-tall metal structure juts upward from a rocky outcrop. The structure is a Latin cross -- the preeminent symbol of Christianity -- that the National Park Service has boarded up with plywood pending a decision on its future by the U.S. Supreme Court. The case, known as Salazar vs. Buono and slated to be taken up by the court on Wednesday, is the culmination of a nine-year legal battle over whether the cross is a religious symbol or a secular "commemoration" of soldiers who died in World War I. Like many legal cases, this one has grown more complicated over the years.

A Marine staff sergeant was ordered Monday to stand trial on charges stemming from the 2005 killing of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha. Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich is being charged directly with the deaths of several of the Iraqis and indirectly with the other deaths for failing to supervise his Marines as their squad leader. Under a decision by Lt. Gen.

He seems more fable than flesh and blood, a general who marched with serendipity at his side. Wartime comrades say he walked away from downed aircraft, defied bullets and dodged artillery shells. Once, the story goes, a barrage of bombs landed around him and not one exploded. Even in defeat, Gen. Vang Pao of the Royal Lao Army consistently beat the odds. After the communists conquered his homeland in 1975, he fled with six wives and more than 20 children to the U.S.

As he prepares to leave Iraq after a year as the top Marine, Maj. Gen. Walter E. Gaskin is upbeat about the future of Anbar province but candid about U.S. mistakes made in the early years of the war that allowed the insurgency to grow. U.S. officials created a "perfect storm" after the March 2003 invasion that allowed the insurgency to attract recruits, Gaskin said in interviews here this week.

Hector Febres was the man who knew too much. And, like a character in a spy novel damned with an excess of secrets, Febres met an untimely and grisly end: He was poisoned last month in his cell. That is the conclusion of Argentine officials investigating the death of the former coast guard officer, who was awaiting a verdict on charges of torture. The case arose from Febres' service under a military dictatorship decades earlier at the country's most notorious clandestine detention center.

A Spanish judge Wednesday indicted 40 Rwandan army officers on charges of mass murder and crimes against humanity in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, asserting a concept of justice championed by his nation known as "universal jurisdiction." Judge Fernando Andreu of Spain's National Court said he also had sufficient evidence to implicate current Rwandan President Paul Kagame in a long string of reprisal massacres after he and his forces seized power, ending the genocide.

A group of retired Israeli generals has launched a campaign urging the army to remove West Bank roadblocks, warning on Wednesday that the travel restrictions sow Palestinian hatred of Israel and stymie the peace process. The 12 former top commanders say that the hundreds of checkpoints dotting the West Bank are excessive and that other military means can be used to prevent suicide bombings in Israel.

Army-ruled Myanmar has finished writing a new constitution, to be put to a May referendum, which gives the military the "leading political role," official media said Tuesday. "I hereby declare that the draft of the state constitution has been approved by this commission," Chief Justice U Aung Toe, chairman of the military-appointed drafting commission, was quoted as saying on state radio and television.

They could be seen as the military odd couple. The Marine colonel is tall and lean. His parents fled Castro's Cuba for U.S. democracy. He talks in measured, confident tones. His expertise is in staff work: making bureaucratic organizations run smoothly. The Iraqi general is stocky, volatile and sometimes exasperated. He sheds no tears that Saddam Hussein is gone but worries that democracy here will descend into chaos and leave the country vulnerable to attack from Iran.