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President Barack Obama on Friday (October 21, 2011) announced that virtually all U.S. troops will come home from Iraq by the end of the year -- at which point he can declare an end to America's long and costly war in that Middle Eastern nation. "After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," Obama said. "The coming months will be a season of homecomings. Our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holidays."  Of the 39,000 troops in Iraq, about 150, a negligible force, will remain to assist in arms sales, a U.S. official told CNN. The rest will be out of Iraq by December 31.  The president said he was making good on his 2008 campaign pledge to end a war that has divided the nation since it began in 2003 and claimed more than 4,400 American lives.The announcement also came after talks that might have allowed a continued major military presence broke down amid disputes about whether U.S. troops would be immune to prosecution by

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud died in New York due to illness, officials said Saturday (October 22, 2011), raising succession questions in the key oil-producing country of the world.  No other details about his death were immediately available, but arrangements are under way to transport his body back to Saudi Arabia, officials said.  Crown Prince Sultan, thought to be in his 80s, was Saudi Arabia's minister of defense, and was one of the top figures in the Saudi kingdom. He's had various medical issues in recent years. In 2009, he was in New York for surgery for an undisclosed illness and had also flown to Morocco for medical treatment over the years.  The country's royal court released a statement about the death Saturday. "King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud mourns the death of his brother and his Crown Prince ... Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud," the statement said.  The statement also said he died "outsi

"We mounted a complex operation with unprecedented speed and conducted it with the greatest of care," Rasmussen said. "I'm very proud of what we have achieved."  NATO also called an end to its air war in Libya. At an understated and sparsely-attended news conference late on Friday (October 21, 2011), NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the Western alliance had taken a preliminary decision to call a halt to Operation Unified Protector on October 31.  Like other Western officials, Rasmussen expressed no regrets in public about the gruesome death of the deposed Libyan dictator, who was captured alive by the forces of the National Transitional Council but was brought dead to a hospital.  The NATO operation, officially intended to protect civilians, effectively ended on Thursday with French warplanes blasting Gaddafi's convoy as he and others tried to escape a final stand in Sirte.  NTC officials have said Gaddafi later died of wo

The clan of Muammar Gaddafi demanded a chance to bury the body that lay on display in a meat locker after a death as brutal and chaotic as his 42-year rule.  In a statement on a Syria-based pro-Gaddafi television station, the ousted dictator's family asked for the bodies of Gaddafi, his son Mo'tassim, and others who were killed on Thursday by fighters who overran his hometown Sirte. "We call on the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and Amnesty International to force the Transitional Council to hand over the martyrs' bodies to our tribe in Sirte and to allow them to perform their burial ceremony in accordance with Islamic customs and rules," the statement said.  Like other Western officials, Rasmussen expressed no regrets in public about the gruesome death of the deposed Libyan dictator, who was captured alive by the forces of the National Transitional Council but was brought dead to a hospital. "We mounted a complex operation

Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Moammar Gadhafi raised his hands and begged revolutionary fighters: "Don't kill me, my sons." Within an hour, he was dead, but not before jubilant Libyans had vented decades of hatred by pulling the eccentric dictator's hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck. The death Thursday of Gadhafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom. It also thrusts Libya into a new age in which its transitional leaders must overcome deep divisions and rebuild nearly all its institutions from scratch to achieve dreams of democracy. "We have been waiting for this historic moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in the capital of Tripoli. "I would like to call on Libyans to put aside the g

Deposed Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has been killed, interim Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril told reporters in Tripoli on Thursday (October 20, 2011). There are conflicting reports surrounding the circumstances of his killing, which reportedly happened in or near Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte on Thursday. Libya's ambassador to the United Kingdom says that Gadhafi's body is in Misrata, Libya. A different source – a spokesman for a member of the Tripoli military council – says that one of Gadhafi's sons, Mutassim, and Moammar Gadhafi's chief of intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi, also have been killed.  A grisly video that aired on the Al Jazeera Arabic network appears to show a lifeless Gadhafi with a wound to his head. A photograph distributed by the news agency Agence France-Presse also appeared to show the longtime dictator severely wounded.  CNN could not independently verify the authenticity of the images. In another major development, revo

Google earned a record $7.5 billion in the third quarter, and announced that its three-month-old Google+ social network now has 40 million users. That's a big increase from the 10 million users Google+ had at the end of Google's last quarter, when it remained in a "limited" trial phase. The network opened to the public in late September.  In an earnings release late Thursday, Google said it earned $9.72 per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast earnings of $8.74 per share.  Investors are looking to Google's advertising figures as a barometer of the overall economy, and the numbers were good -- though the cost-per-click increase was not as high as it was last quarter. Profit rose as both the number of clicks on Google's ads and the amount that advertising partners pay per click increased.  Paid clicks rose 28% and cost per click ticked up 5% compared to last year. Sales for the Mountain View, Calif., company rose 33% over the yea