China’s military budget has grown steadily for 30 years, but its ‘world-class army’ is not a strategic threat — for now.
North Korea has put its missile units on standby to attack US military bases in South Korea and the Pacific.
United States-led coalition forces killed 30 militants, including a Taliban commander, in an air strike in west Afghanistan.
The United States military freed a Reuters television cameraman on Thursday after holding him for three weeks in Iraq without charges.
Controversy surrounding the United States military’s new Africa Command has forced the Pentagon to put plans for establishing a headquarters in the continent on a slow track.
Burma’s ruling military junta took diplomats on a tour of the storm-ravaged Irrawaddy delta on Saturday as its toll of dead and missing soared above 133 000 people, making Cyclone Nargis one of the most devastating ever to hit Asia. An estimated 2,5-million people are clinging to survival in the delta.
Burma will accept foreign aid but distribute relief itself, an official newspaper said on Friday, after a disaster rescue team from Qatar that arrived in Rangoon on an aid flight was turned back. Outside frustration is mounting at delays by the generals in giving visas to aid workers and landing rights for flights.
Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad’s International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the clubhouse and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel.
The United States military fired rockets at a target near a hospital in eastern Baghdad on Saturday, wounding 20 people. No patients were wounded at the hospital in the Sadr City stronghold of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but 20 people at the scene of the blasts were wounded.
Somali Islamist militants on Friday promised to avenge the killing of a man said to be an al-Qaeda’s chief, warning citizens from countries they considered hostile to stay away from the war-torn country. The United States military on Thursday killed Moalim Aden Hashi Ayro and 11 others when it bombed a house in Somalia’s central town of Dhusamareb.
A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of mourners in northern Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 50 people, a police officer said. The man detonated an explosives vest in the crowd in the Sunni Arab village of Bu Mohammed, 120km south of the oil city of Kirkuk, at about 11am local time, Captain Abdullah Jassim said.
Gunmen kidnapped 42 university students near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, police said, in one of the biggest mass abductions in the country in many months. ”Gunmen stopped two buses in a village south of Mosul,” said Khalid Abdul-Sattar, police spokesperson for Nineveh province. The group was freed hours after being kidnapped.
Kidnappers of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop found dead in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul had demanded a -million ransom, a senior police official said on Friday. Paulos Faraj Rahho, the archbishop of Mosul, 390km north of Baghdad, was abducted on February 29 after gunmen attacked his car and killed his driver and two guards.
Iraqi security forces found about 100 badly decomposed bodies in a mass grave north of Baghdad, the United States military said on Saturday, one of the largest such finds in the country for months. US and Iraqi security forces said it was not clear who was responsible for the grave near Khalis, 80km north of Baghdad, or when the victims had been killed.
The United States military targeted suspected ”terrorists” in a strike launched early on Monday in Dobley, Somalia, a senior US military official said. The official, who declined to be named, said: ”We launched a deliberate strike against a suspected bed-down of known terrorists.”
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/ 29 February 2008
Iraq’s presidency council has cleared the way for the long-delayed execution of Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as ”Chemical Ali”, to be carried out, Iraqi officials said on Friday. The execution of Majeed has been delayed for months by a legal wrangle over who has the authority to green light the hangings.
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/ 24 February 2008
A suicide bomber detonated a vest packed with metal ball bearings in a refreshment tent full of Iraqi pilgrims heading to a Shi’ite festival on Sunday, killing 40 people and wounding 60, police said. The United States military said it was trying to confirm reports that 60 people had been killed and 100 wounded.
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/ 18 February 2008
A suicide bomber targeting a military convoy in Afghanistan killed 35 people in an attack near the Pakistan border on Monday. The attack, a day after more than 100 people were killed in the deadliest suicide raid since 2001, comes as some Western politicians call for a stronger resolve to stop Afghanistan sliding back into anarchy.
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/ 13 February 2008
Negotiators have struck a deal to release two CBS News journalists missing, believed kidnapped, in Iraq and they could be free in hours, a leading Shi’ite militia group and the United States military said on Wednesday. Police in Basra said the men, a British journalist and an interpreter, were seized from a city centre hotel.
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/ 11 January 2008
American planes on Thursday mounted the biggest recent air strikes of the Iraq war, pounding what the United States military called al-Qaeda ”safe havens” south of Baghdad. US spokespersons said 18 tonnes of explosives were dropped by B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters in 10 minutes on targets in Arab Jabour.
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/ 25 December 2007
A suicide truck bomb killed at least 20 people and wounded 80 in the northern Iraqi city of Baiji on Tuesday, the United States military and police said, in one of the deadliest attacks in Iraq in two weeks. A Reuters photographer on the scene said the attack targeted a security checkpoint on a road leading to a residential compound.
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/ 7 November 2007
Afghans began three days of national mourning on Wednesday for 41 people, many of them children, killed in the country’s worst suicide attack to date. The attack shakes public confidence in the ability of the Afghan government and the 50 000 foreign troops in the country to provide security.
The United States military presents its new Africa Command as a helping hand offering aid and training to the world’s poorest continent, but many Africans fear it could bring double trouble to a conflict-racked region. US officials dress the new regional command to be launched on Monday in a shiny altruistic uniform, saying it is designed to help Africa improve its own stability.
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/ 13 September 2007
Dotted throughout the world are ”ungoverned territories” outside the control of the states in which they lie and which provide havens for extremists, according to a United States military-financed study by the Rand Corporation think tank. ”The world is full of safe havens for potential terrorists,” Angel Rabasa, director of the study, said this week.
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/ 13 September 2007
Tuareg rebels fired at a United States military plane dropping provisions to Malian troops in the north of the African country, but did not hit it, a US diplomatic source said here on Thursday. ”Our plane was shot at … but there was no damage,” the source said, adding that the plane completed its mission and returned to the Malian capital, Bamako.
The Iraqi government has called on armed groups to follow the lead of the biggest Shi’ite militia and freeze their operations, even as the United States military on Friday reported the deaths of two more American service members in fighting against Sunni insurgents.