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WORLD

NYALA, Sudan – Unidentified gunmen killed a Ghanaian military officer in the African Union’s peacekeeping force in the Darfur region, and hijacked his car within yards of the AU mission’s headquarters, the AU said Sunday.

The officer was traveling alone in his vehicle when he was ambushed in the town of El Fasher late Saturday, AU spokesman Noureddine Mezni said.

The ambush took place hours after Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte visited the peacekeeper headquarters during his trip to push Sudan’s government to let U.N. troops reinforce the AU mission. He was in the capital, Khartoum, on Sunday to meet with Sudanese officials.

The officer was the ninth peacekeeper slain this month, raising to 18 the number of AU soldiers killed since the mission deployed in 2004 to try to stop a brutal conflict between ethnic Africans and Arabs. An AU officer also has been a hostage since December.

“If this growing hostility continues, truly the mission will be compromised, and we will have to take the necessary measures,” Mezni told The Associated Press.

Mezni and other AU officials said they did not know the identity of the gunmen, who struck on the outskirts of El Fasher, a government-controlled town in North Darfur. The 7,000-soldier AU mission has had its headquarters there since deploying to Darfur in 2004.

NATION

WASHINGTON – Global warming poses a “serious threat to America’s national security” with terrorism worsening, and the U.S. will likely be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report.

Joining calls already made by scientists and environmental activists, the retired U.S. military leaders, including the former Army Chief of Staff and President Bush’s former chief Middle East peace negotiator, called on the U.S. government to make major cuts in emissions of gases that cause global warming.

The report warned that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees.

“The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,” the 35-page report predicted.

“Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations,” former U.S. Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan told Associated Press Radio. “Everybody needs to start paying attention to what’s going on. I don’t think this is a particularly hard sell in the Pentagon. … We’re paying attention to what those security implications are.”

Gen. Anthony “Tony” Zinni, Bush’s former Middle East envoy, said in the report: “It’s not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism.”

STATE&LOCAL

PORTSMOUTH – Since last summer, the Virginia Fraternal Order of Police has raised nearly $90,000 for private education and other causes with a poker tournament held in a bingo hall.

Now, with continuing questions about the legality of the games, the Texas Hold ’em games are folding.

“We’re done,” said Skip Blanchard, an event organizer and a second vice president for the Virginia FOP. The FOP’s one-year contract with the bingo hall where the games are played ends in June.

“We’re keeping our promise that we have with the city . that if they asked us to stop, we would,” he said.

The tournament’s scheduled demise follows months of debate among officials in the city and elsewhere because of what some say is Virginia’s unclear law on gambling.

The law defines illegal gambling as “the making of any bet … of money or other thing of value made in exchange for a chance to win a prize, stake or thing of value … the outcome of which is uncertain, or a matter of chance.”