At least 18 people were killed in Afghanistan suicide attack. According to the officials of the Interior Ministry, a man wrapped in explosives walked into a compound filled with Afghan police officers.
Monday’s attack was the second in as many days. On Sunday, a man drove a car filled with explosives into a convoy carrying French and Afghan soldiers on the southwestern edge of Kabul, killing himself and injuring three others, including one a French soldier.
The attacker struck in Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, the birthplace of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement.
The Interior Ministry said the attacker was dressed in a police uniform and set off the explosives during a training exercise in the compound. Eight officers were also wounded.
In 2007, about 140 suicide bombers struck Afghanistan; 2008, the number dropped to about 80.
Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said that his country is not planning another attack over Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Barak said in an interview with the YNet news Web site, using Israel’s name for its recent 22-day offensive in Gaza, “It is not our intention to have an Operation Cast Lead 2.”
“We said there would be a response and there was a response last night,” he added.
His comments clashed with statements on Sunday by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni who said that, if necessary, Israel would mount a new offensive in the Gaza Strip to choke off cross-border rocket fire.
Both Barak, head of the center-left Labor Party, and Livni, chairman of the ruling, centrist Kadima party, are candidates for prime minister in Israel’s February 10 election.
Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has strengthened his position as the country’s leader in Iraq voting.
The leaders of rival Shia parties acknowledged on Monday that al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition appeared to be heading for a strong win.
According to the reports, if confirmed, the results in the second major election since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein would overturn six years of provincial rule by mostly religious parties and give al-Maliki strong momentum in his bid to hold on to power in a general election due this year.
Nobody has expected that they would achieve this in Basra, in Nassiriya, in Samawa, in Kut. In this government, nobody had expected they could achieve such a result, an official said.
Hundreds of thousands of eligible voters out of the 15 million eligible to vote in 14 of the country’s 18 provinces were reported to have been left off ballot lists. Election officials have said they will investigate.
Amid the cease-fire Israel bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip Sunday. Hamas has not taken responsibility for, or condemned, the new attacks. Some of them have been claimed by members of the militant al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
The Hamas militant group that runs Gaza said Israeli aircraft bombed an unoccupied police station and at least six tunnels used to smuggle weapons and goods from Egypt into the Palestinian enclave. There were no reported casualties in the air strikes.
Hamas demanded that Israel open its border crossings with Gaza as part of a cease-fire.
Israel said that will not happen until Hamas releases a captive Israeli soldier held in Gaza for 2.5 years.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government is trying to hammer out a long-term truce acceptable to both sides.
Gaza militants have launched two rockets into southern Israel, said Israel military.
Before this, Israel halted the operation after saying its goals had been achieved. But Hamas declared victory and militants have kept up sporadic attacks.
Sunday morning’s rockets demonstrated the fragility of a cease-fire that ended Israel’s devastating Gaza offensive on Jan. 18.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says one landed near a kindergarten, but that there was no damage and no one was injured.
Since the cease-fire, militants have fired rockets into Israel and killed one soldier in a border attack. Israel has conducted retaliatory strikes and pounded tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle in weapons from Egypt.
Israeli forces have also killed three men Palestinians identified as farmers in violence along the Gaza-Israel border.
A female graduate student was stabbed to death last night at a cafe inside a Virginia Tech dormitory. According to the authorities, police have nabbed a suspect and he was being questioned regarding this.
According to the reports, yesterday in the evening police responded to a 911 call reporting that a woman was being assaulted inside the Graduate Life Center at Donaldson-Brown.
It’s situated on the outskirts of the campus. Investigators believe the victim and the suspect knew each other, officials said. Police said they recovered a knife at the scene.
Last week, Burris, was nominated by the controversial Illinois Governor, Rod R Blagojevich, to the Senate. Reports said Burris could be sworn in later this week.
Blagojevich was earlier arrested by FBI on charges of “selling” the Senate seat vacated by Obama. Later released on bail, Blagojevich, who was impeached by the state House of Representatives, has denied the charges.
On Thursday, Burris told an impeachment inquiry in the state legislature that he had made no deals with Blagojevich to secure the appointment to the seat of Obama.
Tom Britt received the e-mail Monday night from neighbor Marcus Schrenker. Authorities believe Schrenker let his plane crash in the Florida panhandle and apparently parachuted to safety.
His single-engine plane continued flying on autopilot and eventually crashed late Sunday more than 200 miles away in a swampy area of the Florida Panhandle, authorities believe.
Authorities believe Schrenker was last seen Monday morning in Childersburg, Ala., just south of Birmingham, when a man using his Indiana driver’s license told police that he’d been in a canoe accident.
The tanks rolled in al-Karramah neighborhood in the northwest and the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in the northeast. But after the respite, the explosive sounds that punctuated the nighttime hours underscored a resumption in offensive operations.
In the mean time, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya remained defiant, however, declaring in a speech Monday, “I say to our people that by God, we are closer to victory that ever. These precious bloods will not be wasted for nothing.”
The Israeli military on Monday paused for a fifth day for a three-hour break from its assault on Gaza to allow residents to pick up humanitarian supplies, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.
At least 14 rockets were fired into Israel on Monday, many between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. towards Sderot, Ofakim and Ashkelon, an Israeli police spokesman said. One rocket landed on a house in Ashkelon, causing damage but no injuries, an Israeli ambulance services spokesman said.
Meanwhile, President George W. Bush, speaking Monday at his final scheduled news conference before leaving office, said that a “sustainable cease-fire” in Gaza could only be accomplished when “Hamas stops firing rockets into Israel.”
A regional maritime official confirmed on Tuesday that pirates freed the African Sanderling and its 21 Filipino crewmen on Monday after three and half months in captivity.
In the mean time, a report said that at least 33 Filipino sailors are still held by pirates in separate incidents. The latest development came after the pirates released the Saudi oil tanker, Sirius Star.
The Sirius Star which was released on Thursday had been held near the Ukrainian cargo ship MV Faina, which was loaded with 33 Soviet-designed battle tanks and crates of small arms.
MINSK: Belarus is ready to deploy advanced Iskander Russian missiles that could hit targets deep inside Europe.
President Alexander Lukashenko is in talks with Moscow regarding this, a report said.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lukashenko said that he would like to see closer relations with the West but that he sympathizes with Russia on two flashpoints that have rocked relations — the conflict in Georgia and U.S. plans to place antimissile systems in Europe to counter a potential threat from Iran.
The talks raise the ante in the debate over a U.S. plan to deploy missile defense in Europe.
Mr. Lukashenko said he “absolutely supports” Russia’s plans to place Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad that would target the U.S. missile system.
Mr. Lukashenko said Russia also had proposed putting Iskander missiles in Belarus. The country is situated between Russia and Poland.
Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll died today after a battle with a rare form of cancer. She was 78 and the first woman elected to that office in Pennsylvania history.
She will be replaced as lieutenant governor by Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R., Jefferson).
According to the Governor’s Office, Knoll died about 6 p.m. at National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, where she was recovering from treatment for neuroendocrine cancer. she was surrounded by her family, when she died.
Knoll announced this summer she was suffering from the disease, which generally affects specialized cells that work to keep many of the body’s hormonal and digestive functions in check.
She had vowed to return to work and did so for a day, presiding over the Senate for the start of its fall session, but she looked drawn and tired.
CHICAGO: Three months after Barack Obama defeated Sen. Hillary Clinton in an intense contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, she will be a candidate to be U.S. secretary of state for the President.
But Clinton was not available for the comment and described by her office as having flown to Chicago on Thursday on personal business.
Her selection as top U.S. diplomat could also mean a more hawkish foreign policy than that advocated by Obama during his presidential campaign.
But both Obama and Clinton were adamant about improving the image of the United States abroad and correcting what they considered the “failed policies” of the outgoing Bush administration.
On the campaign trail, Clinton was more reluctant than Obama to commit to a firm timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
WASHINGTON: CIA has reported that al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden is alive and fighting to survive. IA Director Michael Hayden said hunting down bin Laden remains his agency’s priority.
Though Hayden said al Qaeda has been hurt by a sustained fight with the United States and its allies, but remains a threat.
Regardless of whether bin Laden is actively helping lead the terrorist organization, the CIA believes capturing or killing him would be a huge blow to al Qaeda, according to Hayden.
Hayden said in a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington, “He is putting a lot of energy into his own survival — a lot of energy into his own security.”
“In fact, he appears to be largely isolated from the day-to-day operations of the organization he nominally heads,” he said.
In recent weeks, there have been several U.S. missile strikes by unmanned drones around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The United States maintains that Taliban and al Qaeda forces operate with relative impunity in tribal areas.
MIAMI: In a surprising move Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin addressed a press conference here. She never held a news conference in her entire campaign as the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee.
But the question-and-answer session lasted only four minutes, and for only four questions.
In a reply to the reporters she said, “The campaign is over.”
Ms. Palin tried to play down her celebrity style and look. In her speech, she tried to shift the focus from herself to the work that Republican governors must now do, including developing energy resources and overhauling health care.
According to the sources, the conference has been dominated by soul searching among Republicans worried about their future after last week’s poor Election Day showing.
To that end, Ms. Palin was again asked whether she would run for president in 2012.
“The future is not that 2012 presidential race; it’s next year and our next budgets,” Ms. Palin said. It is in 2010, she said, that “we’ll have 36 governor’s positions open.”
