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"WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has ordered 3,100 troops, mostly based in Fort Hood, Texas, to deploy to Afghanistan as part of President Barack Obama's plan to beef up U.S. forces there. Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Tuesday the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division should arrive in summer. The 2,600 soldiers assigned to the brigade will be accompanied by about 500 support troops. Obama is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan with the expectation that U.S. troops would start leaving by July 2011. About 25,000 troops have been given deployment orders. Fort Hood was the site of shootings last November that killed 13. An Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan, has been charged in the case."

"SAN'A, Yemen - Yemen on Thursday provided the most comprehensive account yet of contacts between al-Qaida and the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a U.S. airliner, saying he may have met with a radical U.S.-born cleric who previously had contact with the alleged Fort Hood shooter. In the weeks before the attempted airliner attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab met with al-Qaida operatives in a remote mountainous region that was later hit in an airstrike that targeted a gathering of the group's top leaders, Yemen's deputy prime minister said. The account by Rashad al-Alimi, who oversees security issues in the government, filled in some of the blanks in Abdulmutallab's movements before his failed attempt to detonate explosives on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit. But al-Alimi also raised new questions. He contended that Abdulmutallab was recruited by al-Qaida in Britain and that the 23-year-old received the explosives in Nigeria. U.S. officials say Abdulmutallab told FBI investigators that al-Qaida operatives in Yemen gave him the material and trained him in how to use it."