Tag: Afternoon Edition

“A giant step is being taken today in announcing the opening of the major crime task force,” Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar told a news conference with the British and US ambassadors.

The government denied that the creation of the new entity was in response to huge Western pressure for concrete action to wipe out corruption.

A similar bombing killed eight people in another northwest town, the latest in a spate of attacks as 30,000 troops press their most ambitious assault yet against Taliban militants in their mountain strongholds on the Afghan border.

The attack devastated the three-storey Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) provincial headquarters in the northwestern city of Peshawar, sending huge clouds of smoke spewing into the sky and destroying more than half of the building.

The Washington Post and The New York Times reported that Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired army general who commanded US forces in Afghanistan from 2005-2007, detailed his concerns in classified cables last week.

Eikenberry also expressed worries about the behavior of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was re-elected to a five year term in August polls tainted by widespread fraud, the Post said.

In London, Queen Elizabeth II led tributes to the war dead, including the growing number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. But the last British veteran of the 1914-18 conflict boycotted official events.

President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel rekindled the flame on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and vowed that their nations would never wage war on each other again.

The bomber blew up his vehicle in the heart of the northwest town of Charsadda on a road lined with fruit and juice shops, ripping off shop roofs and littering the ground with slippers, human flesh and broken push carts.

The United States has put Pakistan on the frontline of its war against Al-Qaeda and has been increasingly disturbed by deteriorating security in the country where attacks and bombings have killed about 2,500 people in 28 months.

World leaders joined huge crowds recalling the defining moment of the end of communist rule in Europe, when the embattled East German state finally opened the despised concrete border on November 9, 1989. Facts about the Wall

Merkel, who grew up in the communist state, attended a “very moving” memorial service at a church where pro-democracy rallies were held in the weeks before the end of the communist regime.

Friday’s Labor Department report, seen as one of the best indicators of economic momentum, showed job losses narrowed last month to 190,000.

The improvement was not enough however to prevent the jobless rate from surging to the first double-digit level for more than 26 years, from 9.8 percent in September.

But the UN said it had no intention of abandoning Afghanistan, where 100,000 US-led foreign troops are battling a bloody insurgency eight years after the extremist Taliban regime was driven from power.

About 600 expatriate staff, from a total of 1,100 foreigners, will be temporarily relocated either within Afghanistan or abroad, UN spokesman Dan McNorton told AFP.

Three days after quitting a scheduled run-off, Abdullah Abdullah said the subsequent decision by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to hand Karzai another five years in power had no basis in law and underlined its bias.

“This (IEC) decision does not have a legal basis,” the former foreign minister told reporters, albeit refraining from calling on his supporters to take to the streets in protest.

Karadzic called the proceedings “bad from the start” after he entered the accused dock of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for a hearing on how to move forward in the face of his trial boycott.

He faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the 1992-95 Bosnia war.

Two-and-a-half months after Afghans went to the polls to elect a president for the second time, Abdullah’s move appeared to guarantee President Hamid Karzai a second term but flung his legitimacy into doubt.

After Karzai snubbed a series of demands promoted by his rival as a chance to avoid a repeat of massive first-round fraud, Abdullah said he saw no point in standing, but stopped short of calling for a boycott.

At the heart of their story is the bizarre fact that there are more fine fish swimming in the tiny tanks than there are in the surrounding sea.

Having overfished and polluted its own waters to the point where they are home mainly to great ghosts of the past, Hong Kong now imports up to 90 percent of its seafood.