Jury convicts five men of plotting against U.S. soldiers. A jury convicted five Muslim men Monday of plotting to kill American soldiers at For Dix military base in New Jersey last year. After six days of deliberation, the jury agreed with prosecutors that three brothers – Shain, Eljvir and Dritan Duka – and Mohamad Shnewer and Serdar Tatar were planning to attack Fort Dix and kill the base residents. However, the jury, while agreeing with the conspiracy charge, did not find them guilty of attempted murder. Among the evidence accumulated by the prosecution were hundreds of tape-recorded conversations between the defendants and FBI agents, several propagandist videos from one of the suspects’ computers, and video of an illegal purchase of several machine guns. The defense contended that the government informants were shaky and that the feds coaxed the defendants into making damning comments on government wiretaps. One of the informants is an Egyptian-born illegal immigrant on probation for bank fraud; the other has been paid about $150,000 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for making the secret recording. The five men were arrested in May 2007 after one of the government’s informants secretly videotaped them paying $1,400 for seven machine guns in the informant’s apartment, in Cherry Hill, N.J.

U.S. missiles kill eight people in Afghanistan. U.S. missiles fired from an unmanned aircraft killed at least eight people in Afghanistan Monday, sparking anger among Pakistani authorities who argue that such actions are undermining their own strategy against terror, The Associated Press reports. Four of the deaths occurred when missiles slammed into a vehicle and a house. Four others died and one was injured in the second vehicle about five miles away by a dirt track. The U.S. military has launched than 30 missile strikes since August in Pakistan’s lawless, tribal areas, targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban militants blamed for attacks in Afghanistan.

Obama has an ambitious jobs plan. President-elect Barack Obama has an ambitious goal in mind when it comes to creating jobs over the next couple years. With the economy flying apart at the seams, 3 million to 4 million jobs could dry up over the next year, spiking the unemployment rate to an astronomical 9 percent, according to Vice-President-elect Joseph Biden. In what has become the worst economy since World War II, General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler have announced that they will close five dozen manufacturing plants over the next month – mainly because Americans have stopped buying cars. Read the rest here.

Portland preachers stand strong against violence. About a dozen Black Portland, Ore., preachers, fed up with the street violence rocking their city, have taken to the streets to demand that the gangbangers drop their guns and usher in a new era of peace. “The issue is urgent. Our house is on fire. Our children are dying. We need to take immediate action,” said the Rev. LeRoy Haynes Jr., at Northeast Portland’s Allen Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. His call comes a week after the fatal shooting of a 30-year-old on Dec. 12, inside of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. In this “unthinkable travesty,” as the Rev. Robert C. Jointer of New Hope calls it, Darshawn Cross, a gang member, was attending a noon funeral service when he got into a fight with Latwan Brown, a member of a rival gang. Police and witnesses said Cross suspected Brown was the man who shot him in the stomach four months ago. Brown was handed a gun by somebody else at the service and unloaded four shots into Cross, who slumped to the floor of the church. The pastors want the violence to stop and for Brown to turn himself in to authorities. “We call upon Latwan Brown to surrender himself to the Portland Police Bureau and take responsibility for the actions he has done,” Haynes said. “We plead to the family members to encourage him to surrender. Then we call upon the witnesses to do their moral and civic responsibility by contacting police.”