Airport gun-smuggling ends in 5-year sentence

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- A former employee at Los Angeles International Airport was sentenced to five years in prison for twice smuggling firearms past security checkpoints.

Lionel Rodriguez, 31, was accused of smuggling five unloaded firearms, four fake hand grenades and several defused explosives past security checkpoints in November 1999. A month before, Rodriguez had sneaked five guns past airport security, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean A. Kawahara.

"Because of his position at a duty-free shop, he had the means to get past security measures others could not," Kawahara said.

Rodriguez was sentenced on Monday, a day before terrorists hijacked planes that flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Trial to begin in police shooting in Cincinnati

CINCINNATI -- The trial of a white police officer whose shooting of an unarmed black man set off three nights of rioting in April is again focusing the city's attention on often-strained community-police relations.

Officer Stephen Roach, 27, was indicted in May on misdemeanor charges of negligent homicide and obstruction of official business in the shooting death of Timothy Thomas, 19.

His trial is scheduled to begin Monday.

Thomas' death touched off the city's worst racial violence since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, and prompted a citywide dusk-to-dawn curfew to restore order.

U.N. troops deploy in Sierra Leone

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- Armed U.N. peacekeepers were on patrol Saturday in a rebel-held mining town in Sierra Leone, deploying without interference in the key diamond-rich region.

About 250 Zambian U.N. troops rolled into the eastern town of Tongo late Friday, formally welcomed by rebel Revolutionary United Front leaders.

"We are at home with them," a local rebel commander, identified only as Col. Banya, told U.N. mission commander Gen. Daniel Opande of Kenya. A total of 700 to 800 of the Zambian peacekeepers are to move into Tongo in coming days.

Sierra Leone's rebels fought their 10-year war largely to win control of the West African nation's diamond fields.

NATO reviews ideas for keeping troops in Balkans

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Macedonia's government has asked NATO to keep its troops in the troubled Balkan country even after the expiration of its mandate to collect ethnic Albanian rebel weapons, government and NATO officials said Saturday.

Macedonia has requested that NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson keep 350 troops in the country to protect monitors who will assess the situation after the 4,700 troops of Operation Essential Harvest end their mission on Sept. 26, government sources said on condition of anonymity.

NATO found the government's proposals "very constructive and useful," alliance spokesman Mark Laity said, but he declined to confirm the troop figure cited by government sources.

Russia launches docking port for space station

MOSCOW -- A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off Saturday with a new, three-berth docking port, rocketing toward the international space station after a last-minute repair of the booster's control system.

The rocket lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakstan at 3:35 a.m. Moscow time Saturday.

-- From wire reports