Free Republic

CARACAS, Venezuela — Russia has offered to help Venezuela set up its own space industry, including a satellite launch site, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made his first visit to the South American country on Friday. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced Russia's offer before Putin arrived, saying officials would discuss the possibility of setting up a "satellite launcher and a factory." The two countries are also discussing new weapons deals, Chavez said Thursday night in televised remarks, without giving details. Chavez has built close ties with Russia, buying more than $4 billion in Russian weapons since 2005, including helicopters, fighter...

U.S. Army Battles Its Way Into Hindiyah By CHRIS TOMLINSON .c The Associated Press HINDIYAH, Iraq (AP) - Fighting street by street, U.S. Army troops punched their way into this town Monday in the closest known battle in the U.S.-led advance on Baghdad. The Americans captured several dozen Iraqis who identified themselves as members of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. Further south, the Army encircled the Shiite holy city of Najaf and said it killed about 100 paramilitary fighters and captured about 50 Iraqis. At least 15 Iraqi troops were killed in the fighting in Hindiyah, 50 miles south of Baghdad...

DIWANIYA, Iraq, March 26 - The aftermath of the firefight was a tableau of twisted Iraqi bodies, tins of unopened food and the dirty mattresses where they had spent their final hours. But the Iraqi private with a bullet wound in the back of his head suggested something unusually grim. Up and down the 200-mile stretch of desert where the American and British forces have advanced, one Iraqi prisoner after another has told captors a similar tale: that many Iraqi soldiers were fighting at gunpoint, threatened with death by tough loyalists of President Saddam Hussein. Here, according to American doctors...

CIVILIANS have fought with axes and knives against Saddam Hussein's heavily-armed militiamen during an uprising in Basra, an Iraqi opposition group has said. The "Iraq Headquarters" of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), located in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, said it had received reports from "field officers" by satellite phone. "Civilians fought with axes and knives against Saddam's Fedayeen", who used mainly mortars and Kalashnikov rifles, an INC spokesman said. There were casualties, but no figures were available, he added. Saddam's Fedayeen, a paramilitary militia which according to the British military has 1000 men in Basra, is headed by the Iraqi...