AFGHANISTAN

> Jonathan Harris, a Blackhawk helicopter pilot who withstood enemy fire to save a wounded crew member in Afghanistan, was awarded a Silver Star on Friday as his 60-year-old father was awarded a Silver Star and a Bronze Star in a simultaneous ceremony honoring his bravery in Vietnam.

The two generations watched each other through a video teleconference between Fort Campbell, Ky., where the elder Harris was honored, and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where his son is completing a tour.

Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told Gary Harris via video that he hoped the special ceremonies repaid the Army’s failure to give him an official ceremony nearly 40 years ago. Harris, of Corbin, Ky., was originally mailed the medals he received in 1969 for holding off attackers and getting wounded fellow soldiers safely aboard a medical helicopter.

> British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the U.K. government will carefully examine any request from the incoming U.S. administration to send more troops to Afghanistan. The government had previously said it should first be up to other allies to provide additional personnel. But Miliband and Defense Secretary John Hutton said separately that Britain —- which in June boosted its force in Afghanistan, the second largest after the American force —- could be prepared to offer more troops.

> Taliban insurgents killed 13 Afghan troops in an ambush of their convoy in northwestern Afghanistan, officials said. More than 300 militants attacked the Afghan forces’ convoy, a border police official said.

IRAQ

> A suicide bomber struck Shiite worshippers at a mosque in Musayyib run by followers of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, killing at least 12 people, as thousands of al-Sadr’s loyalists took to the streets to rally against the Iraq-U.S security deal in the main Baghdad Shiite district of Sadr City, 40 miles north.

> A car bomb exploded in a central square in Baghdad, killing at least three people and wounding 13,

PAKISTAN

> Pakistani police said a suicide car bomber killed seven people in the northwestern town of Bannu.

Bannu police chief Mohammed Alam Shinwari said the attacker rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into a police car patrolling the town’s streets, killing four police officers and three civilians.