SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Friday staunchly defended U.S. government programs conducting surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet activity, insisting that they were conducted with broad safeguards to protect against abuse.

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about," Obama told reporters on a visit to California's Silicon Valley.

He insisted that the surveillance programs struck the right balance between keeping Americans safe from terrorist attack and protecting their privacy.

Obama stressed that the programs are overseen by federal judges and by Congress, where senators and representatives are regularly updated on their use, and he said his administration has also instituted audits to make sure safeguards are observed.

The Washington Post reported late on Thursday that federal authorities have been tapping into the central servers of companies including Google, Apple and Facebook to gain access to emails, photos and other files allowing analysts to track a person's movements and contacts.

That added to privacy concerns sparked by a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been mining phone records from millions of customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

Obama said he came into office with a "healthy skepticism" about the surveillance programs, but came to believe the "modest encroachments on privacy" are warranted.

"They make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity," he said.

The government's Internet monitoring program does not apply to U.S. citizens or residents, he said.

"In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance," he said.

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton and Laura MacInnis in Washington; Editing by Vicki Allen)

OMAHA, Nebraska (Reuters) - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc invests in dozens of businesses, and a new book tries to explain it all to young readers, from A to Z.

Two Omaha residents, author Nancy Rips and illustrator Tom Kerr, have teamed up on "My First Berkshire ABC" to teach children about one of the world's best-known companies, and a little about the local billionaire behind it.

More than 1,000 copies were sold at Berkshire's annual meeting on Saturday, which draws thousands of people to Omaha, and where Buffett has a say on what gets sold.

"You need something to bring home to your kids and grandkids to explain Berkshire," Rips, who has also written three books about Jewish holidays, said in a joint interview with Kerr.

Most pages show companies that Berkshire owns or invests in.

G, for example, is for "Geico," and features the car insurer's talking gecko. And W is for "Wells Fargo", and features the bank's familiar stagecoach.

The book's theme changed at Buffett's suggestion.

"Our first effort was things like, S is for sharing. Mr. Buffett believes in sharing. K is for being kind,'" Rips said.

"I got an email back from Warren saying, it's too laudatory, they will lampoon him in the news," she continued. "And I wrote a whole new proposal: A is for Acme (Brick), B is for Borsheim's (jewelry), C is for Clayton Homes, D is for Dairy Queen. I got an email back: You're in the show.'"

Kerr has worked at many newspapers and drew McGruff, the Crime Dog for the National Crime Prevention Council.

"Part of what Warren talks about is investing in things that you know," he said. "Virtually everything in here is something that somebody can relate to and touch and understand."

Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger is shown under "Q," stamping boxes of "quality" merchandise.

Rips and Kerr have not heard from Buffett on whether he likes the book. Buffett's assistant Carrie Sova had no comment on that question.

Kerr depicted Buffett just four times, including on the cover holding his usual Cherry Coke.

"This book is not all about Warren Buffett," Kerr said. "I picked my spots. He's so synonymous with Dairy Queen that I wanted him there, and obviously on the cover with Coca-Cola."

"Cherry Coke," Rips interjected.

"Yep," Kerr said. "She had me change that."

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Vicki Allen)

TOKYO (Reuters) - From a phoenix-themed collection by a Japanese designer who has clothed Lady Gaga to touches of traditional Mongolian decorations, designers showing at Japan Fashion Week set their sights firmly on Asia and its huge market.

Chinese consumers have become the world's leading buyers of luxury goods and account for one quarter of this market globally with demand growing, according to a report by consulting firm Bain & Co.

The fashion extravaganza showcasing the autumn and winter collections of 2013/14 kicked off at the weekend but Japanese brands took to the stage on Monday with Masanori Morikawa and his self-directed label, "Christian Dada".

Morikawa has created several pieces for American pop star Lady Gaga including a pink dress reminiscent of an origami crane for her 2012 "Born This Way Ball" tour.

This time he turned to Asia for inspiration with an edgy, androgynous collection titled "Fenghuang," which is Chinese for the mythical bird phoenix, pairing long, loose pants with richly embroidered lace on shirt sleeves for men and women.

Leather pants and jackets mingled with down-paneled trousers and shirts in plain, solid colors of black, white, red, blue and gold, which Morikawa said represented the nature of the phoenix.

"There's also the idea that the phoenix contains within itself both the male and the female, so we took this concept of fusion for the collection," Morikawa told reporters.

Asian influences came to the fore on Sunday as well as Mongolian designer Ariunaa Surenjav mixed modern designs with traditional raised forms on the shoulders and bunched sleeves.

"That part of the clothing design where the material goes up on the shoulder ... comes from the tradition in old Mongolia, where the local people who were noble and respected had that design," said Surenjav.

A NOD TO CHINA?

Although Morikawa said taking a Chinese title for the collection was just a reference to Chinese mythology and not a nod to the huge potential Chinese market, other designers were more open about their goals.

Conny Groenewegen, a Dutch designer who led off the runway on Sunday with clothing heavily influenced by Japanese designers, said her ambitions in Asia do not end with Japan.

"I would be very much interested to visit Shanghai and present my work over there, because I think that it is moving very fast," she told Reuters. "It's like a big youth culture over there and it has also a big, very rich history."

Although growth in China slowed last year, Bain is still forecasting growth of 4-6 percent a year for the global luxury market through 2015, after growth of 10 percent in 2012 to about $280 billion, largely driven by Chinese consumers.

With 1.3 billion consumers, many with a strong inclination for expensive brands that scream status, China remains a driving force in the luxury market.

Japan Fashion Week continues until March 24 with names such as Vivienne Tam and Hiroko Koshino also taking part.

(Additional reporting by Mariko Lochridge, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two New York-area prosecutors said on Thursday they would no longer consider unused condoms seized from suspected prostitutes and sex traffickers as evidence, saying the public health benefit of making condoms available trumped their value in the courtroom.

"We need to put public health above the very little value of using condoms for prosecuting prostitution and trafficking," said Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice.

Rice and Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, who oversees prosecutions in the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, follow San Francisco prosecutors in ceasing to submit condoms as evidence.

Although carrying condoms is legal in New York, police have treated them as evidence of probable cause when making arrests in prostitution cases.

But condoms are rarely admitted as evidence in criminal court because most prostitutionrelated offenses end with guilty pleas to lesser charges.

Public health advocates say that treating condoms as evidence discourages prostitutes from carrying them and could accelerate the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS.

"A talented prosecutor can find ways to prosecute a case without using this piece of evidence that constitutes a public health risk," said Marc Fliender, who heads the Brooklyn major narcotics investigations bureau.

The move occurred as New York state lawmakers prepare to vote on a bill that would prevent unused condoms from being introduced as evidence in any criminal case, including sex trafficking.

Supporters of the measure said they hope the legislation will be voted on before the closing of the New York State Assembly session in two weeks. Previous attempts to pass similar bills have failed.

Hynes last week sent a letter to New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly asking the department to stop collecting condoms in Brooklyn prostitution cases, though police have defended the tactic.

Condoms have been confiscated by police and used as evidence by prosecutors in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington.

(Reporting by Francesca Trianni; Editing by Scott Malone and Xavier Briand)

Now scientists think they've found a possible culprit: another microbe called foraminifera. A billion years ago, these two single-celled species battled for supremacy in the world's oceans, andlost, according to a study published May 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We'll never be able to prove what happened back in the Proterozoic, but we've at least shown there's a potential explanation," said Joan Bernhard, lead study author and a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass.

Early ocean throw-down

Stromatolite mounds grow tall when waves cover the top layer of algae with mud or sand and a new algae layer covers the sunlight-choking sediment. The trapped sediments turn into . But the wavy layers disappear beginning about a billion years ago, replaced by thrombolites clumpy, jumbled microbial mats.

Researchers suspect the decline is due to a change in ocean chemistry or the sudden appearance of a creature that found the stromatolites especially tasty though there's no fossil evidence for this.

Bernhard said DNA evidence triggered her suspicion that forams (short for foraminifera) were guilty of turning stromatolites into thrombolites. Foraminifera are tiny organisms, usually the size of a sand grain, that grow hard shells. Their shells don't show up in the fossil record until just before the , about 550 million years ago. However, DNA evidence called a molecular clock suggests the first forams were shell-free, and evolved 400 million years earlier. (Without their shells, evidence of these early forams was less likely to survive in the fossil record.)

The rise of the forams thus neatly coincides with the demise of stromatolites, but a real-world test was needed to back up this idea. Bernhard and her colleagues collected modern stromatolites from the Bahamas, one of the few remaining spots where the microbial mounds survive today, and threw them in the ring with forams to see who came out the victor.

In this corner we have

In a lab, the researchers seeded the stromatolites with forams from the same Bahamas bay. Ever so slowly, thefanned out their hairlike pseudopods into the algae layers. Pseudopods help forams eat, move and explore their environment. After six months, the effect was devastating for the stromatolites. Their layers were scrambled. But during a control experiment, in which forams were treated with a chemical that kept them from using their pseudopods, the stromatolites were still pristinely layered at the end of the test. The team also found forams living in thrombolites from the Bahamas, supporting their hypothesis that forams turn stromatolites into thrombolites. []

Bernhard hopes to repeat the experiment with other single-cell species with billion-year-old ancestors, such as ciliates and flagellates.

"It's possible the foraminifera did this, but we certainly haven't resolved the question. It's an interesting one to keep studying," Bernhard said. "Foraminifera are often overlooked, but they are really diverse and they've been around for a long time. They may be a key player in a lot of Earth history," she said.

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HAY-ON-WYE, Wales (Reuters) - Europe has an extraordinary opportunity to re-introduce wolves, bison and beavers and allow its citizens to reconnect with their wild side, an environmentalist and author said.

George Monbiot told an audience at the Hay Festival of literature on the weekend that some 30 million hectares - an area the size of Poland - were expected to be taken out of agricultural use between 2000 and 2030 as farmers chose not to stay on unproductive land.

This was a unique opportunity for "re-wilding" and the restoration of species, including large predators, that have all but disappeared from much of the continent.

Bringing back wolves, for example, to some of Europe's least productive agricultural areas would increase biodiversity and increase economic opportunities, Monbiot said, whose latest book "Feral" was published last week.

Re-wilding the landscape was also "an opportunity to re-wild ourselves" and "to fill the world with wonders of which we have been deprived and alongside which we evolved," he said.

Monbiot said the re-introduction of two packs of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming had led to a greater diversity of ecosystems, allowing more species to flourish.

By reducing the local deer population, the trees on which they feed had grown, encouraging more migratory birds.

He attacked the system of agricultural subsidies in Europe, which rewarded some farmers for keeping grassland cropped even when it was not in use. This had seen areas of woodland in parts of Europe cut down.

Monbiot, who has caused controversy in Wales, where he lives, by saying sheep-farming is bad for the landscape and bad for employment, called for such subsidies to be capped to cover only limited areas.

He described nature conservation in Britain as "utterly perverse" in that it required many protected areas to be kept unchanged even if they were much depleted of wildlife that could flourish there. Re-wilding was an opportunity to reverse that process.

"We are beginning to see that the story we have told ourselves about the inevitable degradation and destruction of the natural world doesn't have to end that way," he said.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

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NWS officialsthat the tornado's diameter was measured with a "mobile radar unit" stationed on a stretch of U.S. Route 81 just south of El Reno, near where the twister passed through the town of 16,729 residents. The radar unit was, presumably, luckier than the  that was upended by the very tornado it was designed to chase — and the storm chasers who, miraculously, made it out of the car alive. .

Prosecutors say the hearing at the Pretoria Magistrate's Court will probably only last around 10 minutes and will be postponed until a date in August as police investigators continue to gather the evidence that will be presented at trial, possibly in September or October at the city's High Court.

There, a judge will determine if the double-amputee runner could spend 25 years in jail for the Valentine's Day killing of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

Since leaving the magistrate's court building in South Africa's capital city on Feb. 22, released on bail after being charged with premeditated murder, Pistorius has been seen in public just twice. And while Tuesday's hearing will likely provide little new insight into the case against him, it will give millions their first close if short look at the 26-year-old runner in months.

Pistorius was sobbing the last time he was in court, days after shooting Steenkamp dead through a locked toilet door in his home in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 14.

He says he killed his 29-year-old girlfriend by mistake, believing she was a dangerous intruder in his home. Prosecutors maintain he killed her intentionally, knowing she was behind the door when he fired four times into the stall with his 9mm pistol.

Since he was removed from public glare in an SUV with darkened windows at the end of that intensely scrutinized bail hearing, Pistorius has been photographed in his famous carbon fiber blades on his practice track in March, and reportedly visited a Johannesburg restaurant with some friends in April.

Other than that he has been living in self-imposed isolation, his family says, surrounding himself with memories of Steenkamp, sometimes growing a beard to disguise his identity and only occasionally leaving his uncle's house to attend church services.

The smiling global sporting inspiration is gone.

"He's battling. But with the family behind him, his sister living in the same house as he lives ... they assist him a lot," his uncle, Arnold Pistorius, said Sunday. "And we are preparing him. He will definitely be ready. Being the mind that he is, being the man that he is, he will know what it's going to take to do this event."

Arnold Pistorius said his nephew will be ready "once the court case starts and he will be able to stand as a man in that courtroom."

As his trial edges closer and prosecutors gather the final pieces of evidence and complete the state's witness list, Pistorius' team is preparing to defend the 11-page affidavit he presented in bail proceedings and which allowed him to be freed.

He will deny murder and argue he believed he was acting lawfully and in self-defense when he fired the shots that killed Steenkamp with his licensed handgun, criminal and firearm law experts say, even though the athlete concedes now that he made a deadly error.

Pistorius also will be expected to explain his justification for those tragic actions in minute detail by taking the stand and testifying at his trial. A judge will ultimately pronounce him guilty or innocent. South Africa does not have trial by jury.

The Olympian is claiming "putative self-defense," said lawyers who are knowledgeable about the case but are not representing Pistorius. The lawyers, drawing from the unusually detailed affidavit Pistorius' presented, said Pistorius will maintain that in the darkened room, and in a calculation that was gravely mistaken, he decided to fire the shots that killed the model and law graduate because he was certain she was an intruder and both their lives were in danger.

It's a difficult defense for any accused, legal experts say.

"The fact that he has admitted that he has killed her by pulling the trigger means the state has a prima facie case and it is expected of the accused to come and convince the court otherwise," Marius du Toit, a former prosecutor, magistrate and now defense attorney with over 20 years' experience in South Africa's justice system said. "His version is going to be exposed and scrutinized in the finest, finest detail."

And there will be many questions.

"I do not see how Oscar Pistorius could have concluded that a closed door constitutes danger to such an extent that his life is in danger, bearing in mind that he had gone into that situation," leading firearm lawyer Martin Hood said. "So, it begs the question, why did he go looking for trouble?"

___

Follow Gerald Imray at www.twitter.com/GeraldImrayAP

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So, when-ish will the War on Terror end? It's going to be a while — maybe long after Obama has left office. "A Pentagon official suggested last week that the current conflict could continue for 10 to 20 years," the Times reports. Last year, facing the possibility that Obama could lose the 2012 election, the administration began working onfor the drone program. So while Obama is justifying the use of drone strikes at a time when they've come under , he might also be establishing new norms ahead of a possible President Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or whoever.

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Obviously Obama trusted his own administration to control the drone program without these rules. In his new book, , the Times's Mark Mazzetti reports that Obama's "kill list" was the product of an early effort to "an early attempt... to establish procedures for the conduct of a secret war that most believed would last years beyond" Obama's administration. But the rules weren't totally binding. Mazzetti writes that "as much assome officials tried to keep strict criteria about who could be added to the kill list, those criteria were sometimes eased." According to Mazzetti and Daniel Klaidman's book , when General James Cartwright asked Obama why the CIA was "building a second Air Force" with its drone fleet, Obama replied ""

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In his speech, Obama will also address what to do with some terrorist suspects caught overseas instead of killed by drones: the people in Guantanamo Bay. He'll pledge to renew efforts to close the detention facility, and appoint a State Department official to oversee shrinking the population there. Guantanamo — where 170 people are held without trial in perpetuity — is a relic of a previous administration that is disturbing on the grand civil liberties scale and at the tiny human scale. Just like drones. Obama is paying Bush's favor forward with a theoretical end to perpetual war without borders.

The current mayhem began with a wave of protests by Sunnis alleging neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki. Violence has risen steadily since an April 23 crackdown by security forces on a Sunni protest in the northern city of Hawija.

Conflict between Iraq's two main religious communities sounds ominously like the explosion of sectarian hatred unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime and propelled the Shiites to power.

Adding to the tension is the civil war in neighboring Syria, where Sunni rebels are seeking to topple Bashar Assad's government, dominated by a spinout of the Shiite faith and backed by Shiite powerhouse Iran.

But the Iraq of 2013 is different from the country seven years ago. The Shiite government is more firmly entrenched in Baghdad. The Sunnis are divided and weakened from setbacks they suffered in the last sectarian war.

Violence is on the rise but far short of the levels when death squads roamed the streets.

Clearly, many Iraqis are still worried.

"I see no solution on the horizon in a country that is full of political and sectarian disputes," said Ali Abdullah, who has blocked parking in front of his mobile phone store in Baghdad's sprawling Shiite district of Sadr City to protect against car bombs.

Mohammad Majeed, a Baghdad businessman in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of Jihad, is considering fleeing the country.

"Terror is returning to us," Majeed said. "I survived the first round. I don't want to take my chances with a second one."

___

Two AP Chiefs of Bureau in Baghdad, past and present, paint a picture of what it was like then and how things have changed.

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By ROBERT H. REID

It began with fierce fusillades rapid bursts of gunfire aimed wildly, designed to drive people from the streets as much as to kill. The killing would come soon enough.

In rapid succession, and with military precision, gunmen set up checkpoints along the major streets in west Baghdad's religiously mixed Jihad district, while black-clad Shiite youths strung barbed wire along side streets.

As a blistering sun sent temperatures soaring above 100 degrees, gunmen bearing lists of names roamed house-to-house, taking away fighting-aged men. Some were never seen again. Others were found lifeless in the streets.

At the checkpoints, motorists were hauled from their cars and shot dead if they were found with ID cards identifying them as Sunnis.

By sunset on July 9, 2006, at least 41 people, mostly Sunnis, were dead, according to police. The U.S. military insisted it could only account for 14 deaths. The next day, two bombs exploded in a Shiite neighborhood, killing 10 people in what appeared to be payback.

Whatever the numbers, the Jihad massacre was emblematic of the cold-blooded savagery of Iraq's sectarian conflict, which raged from early 2006 until 2008 and transformed the character of the eight-year Iraq war.

In the month of July 2006 alone, at least 2,708 Iraq civilians were slaughtered, according to a Pentagon count released in 2010. Some at the time estimates put the civilian death toll that month at nearly 3,270. By contrast the U.S. and its international coalition allies lost 43 troops.

As the war entered its third year, the conflict morphed from a straightforward fight between U.S.-led troops and the mostly Shiite Iraqi forces on one hand and Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida on the other into a wave of uncontrolled slaughter and terror in which civilians were the main target.

It became a Shiite-Sunni fight for power with members of the U.S.-backed government surreptitiously involved. Longtime neighbors became mortal enemies based on their religious affiliation alone.

Ground zero was Baghdad and a handful of other religiously and ethnically mixed cities. In those battlegrounds, fear paralyzed daily life, even as people attempted to work or shop or attend school beneath the shadow of sudden and violent death. Streets of once-thriving neighborhoods turned into ghost towns, either largely abandoned or with residents cowering at home in fear.

Panic swept through families when loved ones were late returning from work. Hearts pounded when motorists were stuck in traffic. Did the driver in the next lane look like a would-be car bomber? Was the checkpoint manned by soldiers or militiamen from a rival sect?

Many Sunni families feared venturing to Baghdad's main morgue to claim bodies of loved ones because the area was controlled by Shiite gunmen. In February 2007, the Shiite deputy health minister was arrested for allegedly running death squads, using ambulances for kidnapping and funneling money to Shiite militias. Charges were dismissed a year later amid allegations of witness intimidation. Now that former official, Hakim al-Zamili, is a member of parliament.

Forgers did a thriving business selling forged ID cards bearing fake names identified with a particular sect Omar in case the gunmen were Sunnis, Ali or Hussein if the threat came from Shiites.

Armed men roamed the streets in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with overstretched American soldiers and Iraqi forces some of whom were in collusion with sectarian militias. American spokesmen argued vehemently against any suggestion that Iraq had descended into civil war.

Car bombs and roadside explosives still claimed victims. But much of the mayhem occurred at night and in silence.

Nighttime was when death squads many believed directed by the Shiite-led Ministry of Interior hunted for their victims. Their often mutilated bodies were left on the streets or vacant lots for all to see as dawn rose.

Other victims were dumped into the Tigris River. Their bodies would turn up southeast of the capital near Kut, trapped in underwater nets set up to collect vegetation that can clog the waterway.

How many died because of religion and how many fell victim to common criminals or personal vendettas? No one really knows. In the calculus of barbarity, the Americans came up with their own formula: anyone shot in the head was a victim of sectarianism. Bullets to the torso were deemed the work of common criminals.

___

By ADAM SCHRECK

Fast forward seven years to 2013.

The once-pervasive American troops and armored vehicles are gone. Baghdad neighborhoods are patrolled solely by the Iraqi police and army, which still draw heavily from the Shiite majority that controls the levers of power. At some of their posts, banners bearing the image of Shiite saint Imam Hussein wave proudly a not-so-subtle affirmation of the security forces' sectarian loyalties.

Traffic-clogging checkpoints still block streets lined with concrete blast walls, although many of the barriers have been removed. The car bombings and roadside explosives deployed primarily by Sunni extremists never really went away. It is only their frequency that goes up and down.

They're up sharply these days, with multiple blasts rocking Baghdad and other cities nearly every day.

Iraq again feels at an ominous turning point, even if the tallies of the dead are a fraction of what they were at the height of the bloodshed. A United Nations count said April was the deadliest month since June 2008, with 712 Iraqis killed in violent attacks. That total was surpassed in May, with the UN reporting 1,045 dead.

As recently as a few months ago, there was a feeling of optimism in many parts of Baghdad despite the threat of indiscriminate bloodshed. Parks filled with families out picnicking on holidays, car sales were booming and shiny new restaurants were opening.

But the relentless pounding of violence has brought a renewed sense of terror to the Iraqi capital. In an apparent attempt to thwart car bombings, authorities have imposed a sweeping ban on cars with relatively common temporary license plates, affecting large numbers of commuters.

Fewer people are venturing out on the streets, and businesses are pulling down the shutters earlier than usual.

The late-night televised press conference called by the Sunni finance minister, Rafia al-Issawi, to denounce a raid on his office by security forces back in December seemed at first like the latest in a series of moves that have sidelined prominent Sunnis in the Shiite-led government.

In hindsight, it was the trigger that reignited suppressed Sunni rage and would send masses of protesters into the streets of cities like Ramadi, Fallujah, Samarra and Mosul former insurgent strongholds that had been flashpoints in the U.S.-led battle to exert control over the country.

As the Sunni protest movement gathered steam, so did the sectarian tensions.

Some among the demonstrators in Sunni-dominated Anbar province waved al-Qaida flags symbols of Sunni supremacy and chanted that those with the distinctively Shiite name Abdul-Zahra would not be allowed into the province.

Back in Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood, overt threats not seen in years made a comeback. Leaflets left outside Sunni households warned recipients to leave or face "great agony." They were signed by the Mukhtar Army, a new Shiite militant group with ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Early on the morning of April 23, Iraqi security forces faced off against an energized group of Sunni protesters, some wielding swords, in the northern town of Hawija. A gunbattle eventually broke out.

By the time it was all over, at least 20 among the protesters were dead along with three soldiers. The Sunni deputy prime minister leading an official government probe into the incident puts the number of protesters killed at more than 40. Human Rights Watch said photos it obtained suggested some demonstrators had their hands bound and had been killed execution-style.

The violent reaction was swift.

Gunmen tried to overrun towns and army posts near Hawija. Bombs exploded outside of Sunni mosques and worshippers leaving others were felled by gunfire.

Iraqi officials believe more militant groups are joining Sunni jihadists like al-Qaida in attacks against Shiites and symbols of government authority. The attacks on Sunni holy sites, meanwhile, have killed more than 100 people since Hawija, raising the possibility that Shiite militias are getting involved in tit-for-tat attacks.

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Reid, currently Chief of Bureau for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, has covered Iraq since 2003 and can be followed at http://twitter.com/rhreid. Schreck has been Chief of Bureau in Baghdad since 2012 and can be followed at http://twitter.com/adamschreck.

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Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.