Kids socialize in a virtual world as avatars (By Yinka Adegoke )

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Children have always enjoyed make-believe. Now, some new Web sites are letting them live out their fantasies in virtual worlds using self-designed avatars.
Unlike the often-violent world of videogames, virtual sites such as Stardoll, Doppelganger, Club Penguin and Gaia Online hark back to a more innocent time of tea parties and playing outdoors -- and they are winning young users in droves.

The success of Second Life, one of the most popular virtual lifestyle sites for adults, with even its own banks and real estate agents, has helped to raise interest in the genre.

At Stardoll, young girls can create their own online 'MeDoll' identities from a template that allows the user to choose everything from skin tone to eyebrow shapes.

Most important, it allows the user to dress-up their avatar in the latest teen fashion.

Stockholm-based Stardoll, which only started four years ago, has been a huge hit with girls aged seven to 17 years.

The founders say they have over 7 million users in dozens of countries, even though Stardoll only very recently became available in four languages other than English.

"Role-playing is a hugely important part of growing up, especially for girls," said Matteus Miksche, chief executive of Stardoll, whose backers include venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures.

Like many new-generation Web sites popular with youngsters, the attraction is as much in the ease of use as it is the ability to interact with others.

Stardoll users can measure their popularity by the number of "friends" they accumulate on their page, just as they might do on MySpace or Facebook -- except the photos are not real.

And as in real life, popularity has its benefits.

One of the most obvious on Stardoll is that you can be a "cover girl" of the Stardoll fashion magazine by getting the most votes for your MeDoll.

Fashion is important for young girls who buy the latest clothes and accessories from the various virtual stores in Stardoll with made-up fashion brands.

VIRTUAL HOLLYWOOD

Another virtual life site, Doppelganger, was built to support music, media and fashion.

Aimed at a slightly older crowd than Stardoll, users can throw parties, attend live shows and recordings of talk shows.

Doppelganger has tied up with major fashion and entertainment names in the real world, including ex-model and talk show host Tyra Banks and youth fashion brands like Rocawear and Kitson, the Los Angeles brand made famous by Paris Hilton.

Acts like Maroon 5 and the Pussycat Dolls have also performed on Doppelganger and given virtual interviews.

"The fashion element is a big part of Doppelganger," said founder Tim Stevens. "It's like a virtual Hollywood."

Most of these sites also have virtual economies with their own currencies, which users can earn or buy with their parents' credit cards, other online payment systems or premium text messages widely available in Europe.

On Gaia Online, another rapidly growing site, users earn 'gold' to buy virtual goods -- usually clothes for their avatar. "Up to 99 percent of the experience online is free at Gaia," said Gaia Online Chief Executive Craig Sherman.

"In a world where teens are constantly packaging and branding themselves, whether it's on MySpace or in their high school, Gaia is a place for them to get away from it all to just hang out and be yourself," Sherman said.

Stardoll's Miksche agrees, saying the young visitors to his site are not in as much a hurry to grow up as adults might think. For his users, he says, it's more important to be who you want to be.

"Part of our success is that some users are maybe getting tired of having pages where they feel forced to look sexy or cool or write some outrageous stuff in order to stand out."

Poll: A fifth vacation with laptops (By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer )

WASHINGTON - Sun block. Beach umbrella. Laptop. One in five people toted laptop computers on their most recent vacations, an AP-Ipsos poll released Friday said. Along with the 80 percent who said they brought along their cell phones, the survey shows going on vacation no longer means being out of the electronic loop.
Sizable numbers are interrupting their unwinding time to check in at the office and, even more so, to keep up with the social buzz.

About one in five said they did some work while vacationing, and about the same number checked office messages or called in to see how things were going, the poll showed. Twice as many checked their e-mail, while 50 percent kept up with other personal messages like voice mail.

The credit — or culprit, depending on one's view — is in part today's array of devices that can easily keep people digitally tethered to workplaces, friends and family. The electronic gear was most commonly brought along by younger people — one in four below age 40 brought laptops, compared to 15 percent of those 50 to 64 and even less for older people.

Reasons vacationers performed work-related tasks include an expectation that they be available; a worry about missing important information; or in some cases the enjoyment of staying involved, according to analysts and some of those surveyed.

"I'm the final guy, so I make sure my customers are happy," said Don Schneider, 43, a plumbing contractor from Buena Park, Calif., who also runs an online business that supplies video equipment for plumbers.

Schneider says he limits his holiday check-ins to about a half-hour daily and tries to do it unobtrusively so he won't annoy family and friends, making calls from his hotel room or car.

Nineteen percent said they worked on their vacation even though they were technically off. Twenty percent said they checked work messages like voice mail, and another 15 percent said they called to check in.

"It's like a cloud hanging over my head until I get it done," Lee Ann Harrison, 37, a third-grade teacher from Halls, Tenn., said of the work she did on a family trip to Southaven, Miss., for her young son's baseball team. She said she found herself grading papers "between games, somewhere in the shade."

Men — particularly white men — were the likeliest to have checked for messages or worked while on vacation. Higher educated and higher-earning people were also likelier to do work-related tasks, in part reflecting the demands of professional or managerial jobs.

"Increasingly, especially when you're in a managerial sort of role, it's very difficult to walk away from the job totally given the communications technology we have today," said Suzanne Bianchi, who chairs the University of Maryland's sociology department and said she checks in about weekly while off.

Some, like attorney Barry Eisenson, 64, of Hollywood, Fla., said it would probably be more stressful not to check in while away. He said he stayed in touch with his office during a cruise to Alaska last year but had trouble getting through while sailing off the state's panhandle, "so I rested."

People under age 40 were likeliest to check their personal e-mails, voice mails or other messages from vacation spots. But people checking for work-related messages tended to be a bit older, perhaps reflecting the greater work responsibilities that can come with age.

"Men in their late 40s and early 50s, middle managers, feel they can't afford to miss something, and a vacation is secondary to them in terms of importance," said Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Penn State University.

The AP-Ipsos poll had not previously asked about people's work habits while on vacation. A Fox News-Opinion Dynamics poll in August 2005 had comparable figures to the AP's on those checking in from vacation.

"There are a lot of things about work that are very pleasurable," John Robinson, a University of Maryland sociologist who has studied time use, said of staying in touch with work during vacation. "The question is, is it something you want to do or feel obligated to do?"

Overall, about six in 10 in the AP-Ipsos poll said they were planning a vacation trip in the next year, with men a bit likelier than women to express that expectation. About half said they had taken one in the last year.

Seven in 10 women and half of men said they had read a book on their last vacation. About three in four men, and six in 10 women, said they had read a newspaper.

The AP-Ipsos poll was conducted from May 15 to 17 and included telephone interviews with 1,000 randomly chosen adults. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Google Unplugged: Why Its Offline Approach Is A Strategic Turning Point (By Thomas Claburn)

Offline's Business BenefitsArizona State University is one of the most aggressive enterprise adopters of Google apps, with more than 40,000 students and faculty using Gmail instead of campus-run e-mail, and a portal to provide access to calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets. Adrian Sannier, ASU's technology officer, is eager for his team to deploy and develop using Google's online-offline framework, but he sees the risk for Google to mess up what makes the apps so appealing. Google's strength is making a light, browser-based client that makes adoption and upgrades easy, he says. "Depending on how heavy the offline client starts to become, that has the potential to dilute Google's advantage."
Prudential Preferred Properties CRE, a real estate firm affiliated with Prudential Financial, has about 80 employees using Gmail and Google Calendar. Offline access to Web apps hasn't been a high priority there; network uptime is so critical to doing business, if the network goes down, there are more serious problems than whether the calendar is available, IT director Cameron Daily says. Still, Daily would like to give agents on-the-go access to their Gmail archives and Calendar when they're not online. Aung Zayar Lwin, head of IT at building consultancy Drew George & Partners, sees similar potential for offline mail and calendar. Neither Daily nor Lwin sees Google Gears as any reason to stop using Microsoft Office. Prudential just bought new Office licenses, and Lwin expects Drew George eventually to deploy Office 2007. Offline access or not, Google Docs & Spreadsheets doesn't stack up on features. The only reason Lwin sees to even experiment with Google Docs & Spreadsheets now is for the online collaboration capability.
Google's not offering much help for IT planning. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an obvious candidate for offline use, but it's not saying when it might offer offline options. Huber notes that apps from companies other than Google may be the most important uses for Gears, since the APIs can be used to develop any browser-based application for PCs or mobile phones.
Google expected about 5,000 developers across 10 cities worldwide for its Developer Day. In Beijing, about 800 programmers shook off the drizzling weather to attend one of two tracks, one for the Google product development platform and the other for Linux and open source. They heard Shiva Shivakumar, founder and director of Google's Seattle R&D Center, praise Chinese developers for their skills and potential to "develop world-class products." Zhou Jiahao, an R&D manager with a company that provides local mobile search, came away interested in using the improved map mashup features Google announced.
Compared with Microsoft's developer community, which includes more than a million professionals using Visual Studio 2005, Google's community doesn't seem like much--yet.
The measure of Google's success in attracting developers will be in whether they help move the company beyond being a Getting online apps to run well offline is certainly good for Internet users. Google's theory is that helping people unplug those apps will make the company all the more indispensible when they log back on.
-- with J. Nicholas Hoover, Richard Martin, and Ding Yaling of InformationWeek China
Google acknowledged last week that, sometimes, people aren't connected to the Internet. It was a strategic turning point for the Web's highest-flying company.
At Google's first Developer Day, the company introduced free, Nonetheless, Google Gears makes browser-based apps more of a threat to Microsoft's business model of getting people to pay for software. Google is first applying it only to its Reader, which checks a person's favorite Web sites and stores updates. Google's mail, calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets applications are likely next candidates. And any developer can use the platform to offline-enable their apps. By opening up more ways for developers to build on Google data and infrastructure, the company's making it easier for others to tap into the source of its wealth--the half a billion people who visit Google's network of sites every month.
But Google's offline approach also is a recognition that Microsoft's right in insisting that not all computing will take place in the Internet cloud. Microsoft's been touting a vision of "software plus services" that relies on Internet-connected desktop apps, and more enterprise software-as-a-service companies, such as CRM vendor RightNow, recognize the need for some client software.
Google's get-together last week shows it's paying more attention to developers. Google presented its vision of software development by piling TV-sized blocks, painted in Google red, yellow, green, and blue, on the conference stage. If that's too subtle, the keynote address was titled "Building blocks for better Web applications." In addition to Gears, it introduced Mashup Editor for creating map mashups with less than 10 lines of code and Mapplets for combining Maps and Google Gadgets, and it updated its Web developer toolkit, which lets coders write Ajax apps in Java and translate them into browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.
View the Image Gallery:Google Developer's DayGoogle's pitch is that it takes a lot less code to engage and amass an online audience than it does to craft a standalone desktop app. And that audience can be substantial--like the 6.7 million pages views that the creator of the PacMan widget, which can be installed on iGoogle pages, got last week. "By being able to leverage these building blocks, you're able to create amazing applications in probably a tenth the time it would have taken you previously," says Jeff Huber, Google's VP of engineering.
Gears is typical of how Google's trying to build a developer ecosystem with APIs. The growing portfolio includes APIs for Maps, Ajax Search and Ajax Feed, AdWords and AdSense, Google Base Data, GData, and Google Calendar Data. These schemes for accessing Google data and services help developers help themselves while making computing without Google increasingly awkward. Google hopes Gears will become the standard for adding offline capabilities such as data storage, application caching, and multithreading to online applications.
Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, welcomed the addition of "a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability" and said the Gears API would work with Apollo, Adobe's new Web application development platform. Yet Gears could weaken the case for rich apps that exist outside the browser, says Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith. "Rich clients become less compelling the more the Web applications continue to grow," says Smith.

Fighting continues in Lebanon camp(By HUSSEIN DAKROUB, Associated Press Writer )

TRIPOLI, Lebanon - Heavy gunfire rang out from inside a bombed out Palestinian refugee camp Sunday as the Lebanese army pounded Islamic militants holed up inside during the third day of a military offensive aimed at crushing the al-Qaida-inspired group.
Plumes of white and gray smoke rose from the Nahr el-Bared camp as the army bombarded
Fatah' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Fatah Islam militants with heavy artillery shelling. The militants appeared to be retreating deeper inside the camp, but one of their leaders vowed the group would not surrender.
Tanks and artillery pounded Fatah Islam positions on the northern edge of Nahr el-Bared, located on the outskirts of this northern Lebanese port city, in a wide area concentrated around 10 buildings.
According to an Associated Press photographer near the camp, a Fatah Islam sniper could be seen moving from one destroyed building to another, as Lebanese troops bombarded the damaged structures from where he was shooting.
Lebanese security officials said a Fatah Islam militant was firing rocket-propelled grenades at army positions from the minaret of a mosque. It was not clear if the army was going to strike the minaret.
The Lebanese government has demanded the group surrender, saying it's the only way to end the attack. But Abu Hureira, Fatah Islam's deputy commander, rejected the government calls.
"This is not only impossible, this is unthinkable. Our blood is cheaper than handing over our weapons and surrendering," said Abu Hureira, a Lebanese whose real name is Shehab al-Qaddour, in a telephone interview with the AP.
The refusal to surrender came as militants said one of their top leaders had been killed in the fighting.
The Fatah Islam leader killed, Naim Deeb Ghali, who is also known as Abu Riad, was the third-in-command of the group, Lebanese security officials said.
Abu Hureira confirmed that Ghali was killed Friday, but would not say whether he was a senior Fatah Islam official, referring to him only as "a brother."
Sunday's army artillery fire appeared directed at militant positions deep inside the camp, indicating the military was advancing further inside.
There was no way to tell exactly how deep the army had advanced, because the area had been sealed off and journalists were kept away.
But as part of the intensifying assault, the army on Saturday added air power to the battle. A helicopter gunship was deployed for the first time since fighting began May 20, firing two missiles and strafing militant positions. The air attack was an apparent attempt to block an escape route to the Mediterranean Sea.
Four soldiers were killed and 10 wounded Saturday in the offensive aimed at uprooting the militant gunmen barricaded inside the camp on the outskirts of this Lebanese port city. Abu Hureira said six militants have been wounded since the offensive began Friday.
The casualties raised the army's deaths to 38 in two weeks. At least 20 civilians and about 60 militants have been killed, but casualties in the camp in the last two days were unknown because relief organizations were banned from entering.
In other the developments, the main road linking Tripoli with the province of Akkar and the Syrian border reopened Sunday for the first time since Friday. Vehicles were seen passing on the road that was closed for two days by Lebanese troops over fears of snipers.
A wounded Palestinian civilian also was seen being evacuated from the camp in a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance. The man, in his 50s, suffered head and shoulder injury, according to reporters on the scene.
Meanwhile, about 30 Palestinian and Lebanese women who came from the nearby Beddawi Palestinian refugee camp demonstrated at the southern entrance Nahr el-Bared to protest the army's shelling.
Lebanese security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make statements to media, have said Nahr el-Bared had been strategically divided into three zones. The army was controlling one zone, the militants held another, while Palestinian civilians and guerrillas controlled the third and were refusing the militants sanctuary, they said.
The army alleged the armed militants had taken up positions in the camp mosques and humanitarian centers, holding civilians as "human shields." It was not clear how the military knew this or how many Palestinians were used as human shields. The militants have denied the accusation.

Canadian police find rare Austrian jewel

TORONTO - Police have found a rare pendant that belonged to a 19th century Austrian queen and was stolen from a castle there in 1998.
The pendant, known as the Koechert Diamond Pearl, was found at a home in a Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the investigation of a crime network accused of committing fraud and bank robberies in Canada, Europe and Africa.
The jewel was made for Austrian Queen Elisabeth, known as "Sissi," who died 100 years ago at the age of 60 after being stabbed by an anarchist.
"When you look at the history of (the pendant), I was impressed by the value for the country that it must hold," Winnipeg police Sgt. Mitch McCormick said. Austrian authorities have been alerted to the discovery, he said.

China rejects U.S. warning on toothpaste (By ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Writer )

BEIJING - China rejected a warning issued by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Food and Drug Administration urging consumers to avoid using Chinese toothpaste because it may contain a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze.
Calling the FDA warning "unscientific, irresponsible and contradictory," China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a statement posted on its Web site late Saturday that low levels of the chemical have been deemed safe for consumption.
The FDA increased its scrutiny of toothpaste made in China because of reports that the products may contain diethylene glycol, a thickening agent used as a low-cost — but frequently deadly — substitute for glycerin, a sweetener commonly used in drugs.
The agency was not aware of any poisoning but found toothpaste with the chemical in a shipment at the U.S. border and at two bargain retail stores, a Dollar Plus in Miami and a Todo A Peso in Puerto Rico.
China's main food safety regulator said in its statement that the ingredients of toothpaste exported to the U.S. is offered to the FDA, showing the amount of diethylene glycol. Also, the toothpaste's labeling has already been registered with the FDA, allowing it to be sold in the U.S, the statement said.
The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said experts from the Health Ministry had deemed diethylene glycol a "low-level" poison that does not accumulate in the body and found no evidence the substance caused cancer or deformities.
It also said
European Union' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> European Union standards allow for a certain amount of the chemical and cited a 2000 Chinese study that found toothpaste containing less than 15.6 percent diethylene glycol was not harmful. The Chinese toothpaste the FDA is concerned about contains between 3 percent to 4 percent of the drug, according to the FDA.
"Therefore the warning issued by the FDA ... is unscientific, irresponsible and contradictory," the agency said.
The agency "requests the U.S. clarify the facts in a scientific manner as soon as possible and properly handle the issue."
The FDA alert Friday said the agency found diethylene glycol, or DEG, in three products manufactured by Goldcredit International Trading in China: Cooldent Fluoride, Cooldent Spearmint and Cooldent ICE.
The agency also found the chemical in one product manufactured by Suzhou City Jinmao Daily Chemical Co. Analysis of that product, Shir Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste, found it contained about 1 percent DEG.
Phones at both companies rang unanswered Sunday.
Companies that make brands previously found with DEG will have to prove the toothpaste is free of the chemical before it's allowed into the U.S., the FDA said. Meanwhile, all other brands of Chinese-made toothpaste will be stopped for testing, something the FDA has been doing since May 23.
A slew of Chinese exports have recently been banned or turned away by U.S. inspectors including, wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine that has been blamed for dog and cat deaths in North America, monkfish that turned out to be toxic pufferfish, drug-laced frozen eel, and juice made with unsafe color additives.
DEG was blamed for the deaths of 51 people in Panama after they took tainted cold medicine. China has admitted it was the source of the deadly chemical but insists it was originally labeled as for industrial use only.
Officials in Panama and several other Latin American countries have removed tens of thousands of tubes of Chinese-made toothpaste from stores amid concerns that they contain DEG.

2,000 gather for Amsterdam nude photo (By TOBY STERLING, Associated Press Writer )

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Dozens of women posed naked on their bicycles on a bridge over one of Amsterdam's historic canals Sunday — a unique sight even in a city famed for its relaxed attitude toward nudity and sex
They were among 2,000 men and women who participated in a series of four nude group photos in the city in the early hours of the morning as part of the latest project of U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick.
The first and largest composition was in a decidedly prosaic location: a parking garage on the outer ring of the city.
But what the location lacked in romance, it made up for in style. Participants lined the railings of the garage's twin circular towers, creating a pattern of multicolor stripes against the white building and an overcast sky.
The women on bikes were selected from the larger group and posed with their chins pointed triumphantly upward toward the sky.
Other compositions included a group of men posing together near the parking garage and a mixed group of men and women on another bridge.
Tunick, from Brooklyn, N.Y., has become famous for photographing thousands of naked people in public settings worldwide, from London and Vienna to Buenos Aires and Buffalo. He set a record for naked photography with a photo of 18,000 people in the buff in Mexico City last month.
Photos from Sunday's session were to be exhibited at an Amsterdam club later Sunday

Mahdi militia hit by U.S., Iraqi troops (By HAMID AHMED, Associated Press Writer )

BAGHDAD - As U.S. jets roared overhead, Mahdi Army militiamen on Sunday battled with Iraqi troops and local police searching for two militia leaders in the southern city of Diwaniyah. At least three people were killed and 24 wounded, official Iraqi sources reported.
The southern clashes came just hours after American helicopter gunships attacked targets in Mahdi Army-dominated Shiite east Baghdad, killing four suspected militants, the U.S. military reported, as the radical Shiite militia faced growing pressure to bow to central government authority.
In unrelated action, the U.S. military reported six American soldiers killed and six wounded in attacks Friday and Saturday. In one, southwest of Baghdad on Friday, a soldier on a foot patrol was killed after approaching two suspicious men outside a mosque, one of whom blew himself up.
Two other Americans were killed Saturday by a makeshift bomb while on patrol in the northern province of Nineveh, bombs killed one in western Baghdad and one in the volatile Diyala province northeast of the capital. Another soldier was killed by small arms fire south of Baghdad.
In another of
Iraq' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Iraq's unending terror bombings, meanwhile, a car parked near a police station and an open-air market exploded Sunday in Balad Ruz, northeast of Baghdad, killing nine civilians and one policeman and wounding 25 other people, police said.
The latest round of bloodshed came as private talks were reported between al-Sadr's Mahdi militia and Iraqi government officials to win the release of five Britons kidnapped last Tuesday from Baghdad's Finance Ministry, an abduction believed carried out by the Shiite militia.
Recent American and Iraqi military operations in east Baghdad are believed aimed at finding and freeing those hostages.
London's Sunday Times, quoting an unidentified senior Iraqi government official, said al-Sadr's representatives were demanding an end to assassination attempts against militia leaders, an end to British army patrols in the southern Shiite city of Basra, and the release of nine Mahdi officials from British and U.S. custody.
Al-Sadr's office denies involvement in the kidnappings — of four security guards and a computer consultant. But the Times reported a al-Sadr official visited Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to tell him the men were "safe and sound" but would not be free until the demands were met.
The clashes in Diwaniyah erupted Saturday evening after Iraqi soldiers and police cordoned off a market in search of two senior Mahdi Army figures wanted by U.S.-led coalition forces in connection with sectarian killings.
Maj. Gen. Othman Ali, commander of the Iraq army's 8th Division, said his forces captured one of the men, but he escaped when fellow militiamen came to his aid.
The fighting on the east side of the city, 80 miles south of Baghdad, resumed about 9 a.m. Sunday with the support of U.S. fighter jets and helicopter gunships skimming over Diwaniyah's rooftops, police said.
Ali said his forces raided two locations in "fierce" fighting that lasted three hours. They failed to find their target suspects, but did uncover weapons caches, he said.
Police and medical sources said 20 wounded Iraqis, including two policemen, were brought to the local hospital from Sunday morning's fighting. The clashes erupted anew around 1:30 p.m, and one soldier and two other people were killed, and three civilians wounded, an army officer said on condition of anonymity, since he was not authorized to speak with the media.
It could not immediately be determined how many of the reported casualties may have been Mahdi Army militiamen. The U.S. military had no immediate report on the action.
The Mahdi Army, under the stridently anti-American al-Sadr, has emerged as one of the strongest autonomous forces in U.S.-occupied Iraq, and has been implicated in the wave of sectarian killings — of Sunni Muslims by Shiites and Shiites by Sunni groups — that has bloodied Iraq.
American and Iraqi forces launched "Operation Black Eagle" about two months ago in Diwaniyah, in search of five wanted senior Mahdi Army figures. About 180 suspected members were rounded up, but none of the five, said Ali.
The two sides had agreed on a truce two weeks ago, an accord that broke down with this weekend's clashes.
In the U.S. air attack late Saturday in east Baghdad, the U.S. command said an Apache helicopter team was alerted to men setting up multiple rocket firing positions aimed at the Green Zone, home to the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi government offices.
Four men were killed and one vehicle and 10 rockets destroyed by the Apache fire, the military said, and six other suspects were captured by ground forces of the 82nd Airborne Division. State-run Iraqiya television said the attack occurred in Habibiyah, a Shiite area on the edge of the Mahdi Army's Sadr City stronghold, five miles northeast of the Green Zone.
A recent increase in mortar and rocket attacks on the U.S.-controlled area has raised concern, especially since they are occurring during the U.S.-led crackdown in Baghdad.
In other violence Sunday:
• Gunmen at a fake checkpoint in Baqouba, 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of Baghdad, killed two passengers and wounded eight others when they opened fire on three minibuses that sought to flee from the highway trap.
• Police found eight unidentified bodies in an industrial area of the western city of Fallujah.