BAGHDAD — The Iraq War formally ended for British forces yesterday as America's main battlefield ally handed control of the oil-rich Basra area to U.S. commanders and prepared to ship out most of its remaining 4,000 troops.

A U.S. flag was raised over the British base outside the southern city of Basra in a ceremony held after a memorial for the 179 British military personnel who died in more than six years of warfare.

"Today marks the closing chapter of the combat mission in Iraq," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in London after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

At the height of combat operations in the months after the U.S.-led invasion, Britain had 46,000 troops in Iraq. Washington still has about 130,000 troops in Iraq and has shifted units south ahead of the British pullout.

CRUISE SHIP HIJACKER OUT OF PRISON

ROME — One of the Palestinians who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed an American passenger in 1985 has been released after more than 23 years in prison, officials said yesterday.

Youssef Magied al-Molqui left prison in Palermo, Sicily, on Wednesday and was transferred to a holding center for immigrants in nearby Trapani while officials work to expel him, police in the Sicilian capital said.

Al-Molqui, a member of the four-man team that hijacked the Achille Lauro off the Egyptian coast, had been serving a 30-year sentence, which was reduced for good behavior.

He was convicted of shooting Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly Jewish man from New York, and ordering him to be dumped in the sea while in his wheelchair.

TEXAS EXECUTES 14TH PRISONER THIS YEAR

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A Texas man was executed yesterday for the rape and slaying of a woman abducted while she was trying to make a call at a pay phone 10 years ago.

Derrick Lamone Johnson, 28, was the 14th Texas prisoner executed this year in the nation's most active death penalty state. He was pronounced dead at 6:23 p.m.

His victim, LaTausha Curry, 25, of Dallas, was robbed of less than $10, driven away in her car, raped, beaten with a two-by-four and suffocated with her own blouse.

Authorities determined the 1999 slaying was part of a two-week crime spree involving Johnson and a companion that left numerous women robbed or raped from Dallas to south of Waco, some 100 miles away.

JUDGE WON'T CLOSE DESERT SHANTYTOWN

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A federal judge yesterday rejected government appeals to close the sprawling desert shantytown known as Duroville.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson said shutting the trailer park in Thermal would result in a "major humanitarian crisis" because it would displace thousands of poor farmworkers.

"To close the park under these conditions would create the largest forced migration since the Japanese internment, but there is no Manzanar for them to go to," Larson said.

The case has been ongoing since 2003, with the government urging the park be closed for health and safety reasons.

ELDERLY SISTERS FACE DRUG-DEALING CHARGES

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Elizabeth Marie Grube, 70, and her sister, Elaine Volkert, 65, would seem to most people to be typical women of their age, living modest lives in their mobile home park just outside Stroudsburg.

But Wednesday, authorities said the two sisters had been arrested and charged with dealing heroin — about $10,000 worth apiece per week — from their trailers tucked off Route 611 in Stroud Township. Investigators said an Allentown man, Julio Cesar Checo, 28, who also was arrested and charged, was suspected of recruiting the women. Neighbors said the women drove older-model vehicles and lived in narrow trailers that rent for about $600 a month.

8-YEAR-OLD SAUDI GIRL DIVORCES HUSBAND

CAIRO — An 8-year-old Saudi girl has divorced her middle-aged husband after her father forced her to marry him last year in exchange for about $13,000, her lawyer said yesterday.

Saudi Arabia has come under increasing criticism at home and abroad for permitting child marriages.