Kabul, July 17: The Taliban threatened to kill a captured American soldier unless the US military stops operations in two districts of southeastern Afghanistan.
The Taliban said last week they were holding the soldier, who the US military earlier described as possibly being in enemy hands.
Abdullah Jalali, a spokesman for Taliban commander Mawlavi Sangin, said in a phone interview the soldier was healthy.
Jeddah, July 17: The love for the Holy Book and a determination to memorize it enabled a Saudi to overcome age and other barriers to fulfill a life’s ambition.
Though he was above 70, Abdullah Muhammad Musa was able to memorize the Holy Qur’an and graduate with honors from the Qur’an Memorization Group for Adults at King Abdul Aziz Mosque here. He scored an average of 91 percent.
Tehran, July 17: Ahmadinejad vowed that the Islamic Republic will “slap” any aggressors so hard they will lose their way home, according to a television news report.
State-controlled PressTV quoted Ahmadinejad as renewing his allegations against Western countries of having sought to influence the June 12 election in which he was re-elected.
The English-language channel said he told a “huge” crowd in the city of Mashad that some countries had even set up satellite television channels in their efforts to spoil the election, which the opposition insists was rigged.
Kabul, July 17: US war planes have killed and injured dozens of civilians in southern Afghanistan in attempted bombings of suspected Taliban militant hideouts.
The latest incident happened overnight in southern Kandahar province.
Residents in Shah Wali Kot said up to six people were killed and 16 wounded in the air attack in the district.
Another two people were reportedly killed and four others were wounded in neighboring Miawand district when US helicopters fired missiles in the region.
Doha, July 17: Qatar Telecommunications Company (Qtel) has announced that it is introducing syndication of its $1.5 billion (Dh5.5bn) loan in order to enhance the facility amount. The sources said that in March this fiscal, Qtel had inked the forward start pact on a revolving credit facility maturing in November, extending the credit by two years.
Under a forward start pact lenders typically agree to extend existing loans at final maturity in return for a hefty increase in pricing on the existing credit.
Jeddah, July 16: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah returned to Jeddah on Wednesday after a visit to Madinah province that began on Sunday.
While returning from Yanbu, King Abdullah made an inspection tour of the Petro Rabigh refinery, Saudi Press Agency reported.
King Abdullah was received at the refinery by Senior Vice President of Saudi Aramco Abdul Aziz Al-Khayyal, who is also chairman of the board of directors of Petro Rabigh, and Petro Rabigh President Saad Al-Dosari.
The top officials briefed the king on various aspects of the refinery.
Alkhobar, July 16: Twenty-eight-year-old Indian national Ahmed Fahhad Mohammad Al-Hajri’s story is stranger than fiction. It is a story that film directors in India would die for. It is straight out of Bollywood.
Kabul, July 16: Three officers have been killed and four others wounded in a car bomb attack on a police convoy in Afghanistan’s southwestern province of Nimroz.
The incident happened when a militant rammed an explosive-laden car into a police convoy on Thursday.
“A police supply convoy came under attack from a suicide bomber. As a result, three border police, including their commander, were killed and four other police wounded,” said the Interior Ministry.
Beirut, July 16: Lebanese President Michel Suleiman says his country will use ‘all legitimate and available means’ against the Israeli threats.
Speaking at the opening session of a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit on Wednesday, Suleiman reiterated that Lebanon has the right to defend itself against Israeli the threats and to liberate its lands occupied by Israel.
Suleiman slammed Israel’s daily violations of Lebanese territorial sovereignty and ‘its aggressive espionage acts in breach of the UN Security Council Resolution 1701’.
Jerusalem, July 16: Rioting ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem injured three people, including a municipal worker, Thursday morning, as they kept up protests against the arrest of a mother suspected of deliberately starving her three-year-old son.
The municipal worker, hit by stones in the face, head and shoulder, told police he was attacked when the rioters noticed his uniform.
Kabul, July 16: Taliban militants attacked a military supply convoy in southern Afghanistan, sparking a gunbattle that killed 21 insurgents and three border police, a provincial official said Thursday.
The convoy was targeted Wednesday soon after it crossed the border from Pakistan, said Hamidullah Zhwak, a spokesman for the governor of Paktika province. He said it was guarded by more than 80 private security guards, and he had no reports that any of them were killed or wounded.
Tehran, July 16: An Iranian minister who also holds a post in the Guardian Council has criticized a recent move that bans him from serving in both positions at the same time.
Commenting on the decision recently announced by the country’s Expediency Council, Minister of Justice Gholam-Hossein Elham claimed that it was ‘issuing directives in contradiction to the Constitution’.
Tehran, July 16: Investigators have recovered two of the three black boxes belonging to a Russian-made jetliner that crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran, Iran’s state radio reported Thursday.
All 168 people aboard the Caspian Airlines aircraft bound for Yerevan, Armenia, on Wednesday were killed. The radio’s report quoted chief investigator Ahmad Majidi as saying one of the two recovered boxes was damaged. It said the boxes — the plane’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders — would likely be sent to the aircraft’s Russian manufacturers for analysis.
Tehran, July 16: Senior US officials in Iraq have said that three Iranian diplomats, recently released by the US, had been taken ‘hostages’.
A former and a currently serving senior US official has claimed that the three diplomats were in effect ‘hostages’ taken by Washington in a bid to persuade Iran to ‘reduce its support for anti-US violence in Iraq’, the Washington Times said in an exclusive report on Tuesday.
Tehran, July 16: Defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi will take part in this week’s Friday prayers led by former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.
In a statement issued by his website Ghalamnews on Wednesday, the country’s last prime minister, who placed second in Iran’s June 12 presidential election, announced that he would join the lines of worshippers for this week’s Friday prayers.
Mousavi said he would attend the prayers as he feels ‘obliged’ to respond to calls concerning the path of defending the ‘legitimate rights to a free and decent living.’
Kabul, July 16: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Wednesday held out an olive branch to Taliban militants willing to lay down their arms, adding her support to an offer of talks from Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.
“Today we and our Afghan allies stand ready to welcome anyone supporting the Taliban, who renounces Al-Qaeda, lays down their arms, and is willing to participate in the free and open society that is enshrined in the Afghan constitution,” she said.
Tehran, July 16: The President of the International Judo Federation (IJF) voices sympathy with Iran over a deadly plane crash that killed members of Iran’s Junior Judo squad.
Marius Vizer extended his condolences over the tragic event in a letter to Iran’s Judo Federation, ILNA news agency reported on Wednesday.
Ten members of Iran’s Junior Judo squad — eight athletes and two coaches — were among the passengers of an Iranian plane which crashed in northwest Iran, killing all the 168 people on board.
Jerusalem, July 16: A Lebanese prosecutor has formally charged a car dealer with espionage activities for Israel and passing information about Hezbollah.
Military Prosecutor Rashid Mizher said the car dealer from Nabatiyeh was also accused of providing Israel with intelligence on the Lebanese Army’s positions.
Mizher initially recommended the death penalty for the suspect but later reduced it to a life sentence.
The indictment was the first step before the trial begins with no date set for the actual trial.
Tehran, July 16: Two black boxes of a passenger plane, which crashed near the Iranian city of Qazvin, have been found and search is underway to find the third one, an official has said.
Ahmad Majidi, Head of the Crisis Working Group of Iran’s Road and Transportation Ministry, told IRNA that experts from Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) have recovered the two boxes.
Majidi noted that the black boxes of the Tupolev plane were heavily damaged but experts are trying to retrieve data from them.
Tehran, July 16: A Tupolev passenger aircraft crashed in northwestern Iran on Wednesday on its way to neighbouring country Armenia and all 168 people on board were killed, Iranian media reported.
“There were 151 adults, 2 children and 15 crew members on the plane,” Caspian Airline’s representative in Yerevan Arlen Davudyan told Reuters at Yerevan Airport.
Jerusalem, July 15: The Israeli military used reckless force during the fighting in Gaza earlier this year, resulting in needless deaths and damage, a group of former Israeli soldiers charged in a report on Wednesday.
In testimonies collected by the organisation ‘Breaking the Silence’, formed by Israeli army reservists, soldiers who participated in the Gaza fighting, describe demolishing homes for no reason and using firepower beyond what was necessary given the relatively light resistance they encountered. None of the soldiers are identified.
Ghazni, July 15: Two civilians and a policeman were killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday, authorities said, as insurgent violence mounts weeks ahead of presidential polls.
The civilians died when an improvised bomb placed on an abandoned bicycle was remotely detonated near a convoy of trucks supplying foreign forces in the city of Ghazni, south of Kabul, police said.
A passer-by was injured in the blast, Khyal Baz Sherzai, the provincial police chief, told AFP. He blamed the attack on Taliban insurgents.
Gaza, July 15: Hamas Wednesday called on world leaders gathered in Egypt for the 15th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to take ‘all necessary measures’ to end the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, called on more than 50 world leaders gathered in the Sinai resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, to ‘take clear decisions toward ending the siege on the Gaza Strip’.
Israel and Egypt have imposed tight restrictions on the flow of goods and people through the Gaza Strip’s borders since Hamas took control of the territory two years ago.
Jerusalem, July 16: Israeli soldiers in the Gaza war were told to shoot first and worry about the consequences later, and used Palestinian civilians as human shields, an activist group’s report said on Wednesday.
The testimony of some 30 soldiers all unnamed shows that the massive destruction wreaked on the Palestinian territory was “a direct result of IDF (Israel Defence Forces) policy,” the Breaking the Silence group, made up of veteran troops, said in a report.
Ramallah, July 15: The Palestinian Authority (PA) Wednesday shut down the West Bank office of al-Jazeera, amid a storm over allegations that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas conspired with former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to assassinate late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
A statement issued by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s office cited incitement against the PA and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the reason for its decision to shut down the Qatar-based Arabic news channel’s local office.