Newspaper seeks release of captive U.S. journalist

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Christian Science Monitor appealed Monday for the release of an American freelance contributor to the newspaper who was taken hostage in Baghdad over the weekend.

Gunmen abducted Jill Carroll, 28, and killed her Iraqi translator Saturday morning as the pair rode with their driver through a notoriously dangerous and predominantly Sunni Muslim area of the capital, the Boston-based daily reported Monday.

Her driver was thrown from the car and escaped uninjured.

Carroll, a Michigan native who has worked as a journalist in Iraq since 2003, is the second American thought to be a hostage in Iraq. Also a captive is Tom Fox, 54, a member of a Christian peace-activist organization.

British general: Impeach Blair

LONDON — Britain's former U.N. military commander in Bosnia has said that Prime Minister Tony Blair should be impeached over his decision to go to war in Iraq.

Gen. Michael Rose said Blair's claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction had turned out not to be true, adding that he would have resigned rather than take troops to war on such a flawed case.

"The politicians should be held to account, and my own view is that Blair should be impeached," Rose said in a Channel 4 documentary to be broadcast later in the week. Excerpts of his remarks were released Monday. "That would prevent politicians treating quite so carelessly the subject of taking a country into war."

Responding to Rose's remarks to the BBC, Blair's official spokesman said the former military commander was "entitled to his view."

However, he defended the government's record, and noted that Iraq had its first free and democratic elections in more than a generation.

Study says war costs could top $2 trillion

BOSTON — The cost of the Iraq war could top $2 trillion, far above the White House's pre-war projections, when long-term costs such as lifetime health care for thousands of wounded U.S. soldiers are included, a study said Monday.

Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes included in their study disability payments for the 16,000 wounded U.S. soldiers, about 20 percent of whom suffer serious brain or spinal injuries.

They said costs will linger long after U.S. troops withdraw.

Before the invasion, then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels predicted that Iraq would be "an affordable endeavor" and rejected an estimate by then-White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey of total Iraq war costs of $100 billion to $200 billion as "very, very high."

Compiled from The Associated Press, Knight-Ridder Newspapers and Reuters