Karachi, June 01: Renowned industrialist Riaz Lalji, who went missing in Karachi on Sunday hours after arriving in the city from abroad, has returned home safely on Monday, after nearly 24 hours, a police spokesman said.
Lalji landed in Karachi aboard PIA’s flight PK-214 and went missing along with his gunman and driver. He was last contacted while he was passing through Sharea Faisal near Karachi airport. His car was found abandoned a few kilometres from the airport.
Manila, May 01: Four soldiers were killed in an attack by communist rebels in the eastern Philippines, an army spokesman said on Monday.
The troops were ambushed Sunday in Presentacion town in Camarines Sur province, 255 km south-east of Manila, Major Harold Cabunoc said.
He said the rebels threw grenades and opened fire at the soldiers as they were negotiating steep terrain, killing four and wounding three.
Communist rebels have been fighting the Philippine government since the late 1960s, making the movement one of the longest-running leftist insurgencies in Asia.
—-Agencies
Toronto, June 01: Amid the shrill indignation over Canada’s “insults” to Indian security and intelligence personnel, what has got drowned are the actual questions Ottawa has been asking of Indians seeking a visa to visit that country.
The details sought by Canada in its visa form are extremely sensitive in nature. Retired and serving personnel from the armed forces are required to provide specific information on operational details like all past postings, names of units, their locations, detailed duties being performed, and the names of superiors.
Washington, June 01: U.S. intelligence agencies believe al Qaeda’s No. 3 leader was killed recently in a missile strike in the tribal areas of Pakistan, officials said on Monday.
The CIA has stepped up the pace of unmanned aerial drone attacks, targeting not only high-level al Qaeda and Taliban targets but largely unknown foot soldiers as well.
Mumbai, June 01: Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) MLA Prakash Bhoir on Monday locked the Kalyan Sport Complex entry gate. He said the lock will open only after the contractor, hired by the Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation (KDMC), completed the work assigned to him by the civic body on the sports complex premises.
Bhoir said 10 years ago the KDMC gave a contract on a built-operate-transfer basis to a contractor from the Wadhwa group to construct a hall, an amusement park and a swimming pool, but the contractor has so far only completed the construction of the hall.
Islamabad, June 01: A follower of the Ahmadi community was on Monday stabbed to death allegedly by a religious fanatic in Narowal, about 70km from Lahore.
“In the morning, a man identified as Abid Butt climbed the wall of the house belonging to an Ahmadi family and stabbed Naimatullah, 55, and his son Mansoor Ahmed,” local police station chief Riaz Sangha said.
Both people were rushed to a hospital in critical condition where Naimatullah succumbed to his injuries. The attacker later escaped, the poice officer said.
–Agencies
Kabul, June 01: Al-Qaeda has announced the death of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, regarded as its number three and Osama bin Laden’s one-time top money man, in what would be a major blow to the global terror network.
US monitoring groups said the death of Yazid, who was most recently the leader of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and its liaison with the Taliban, was announced by the group in a message to jihadist websites on Monday.
Kathmandu, June 01: Opposition Maoists in Nepal have given a three day ultimatum to Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal to step down and make way for a national unity government.
The PM’s resignation was part of a three-point deal reached between the ruling Nepali Congress and CPN (UML) and Maoists that led to consensus on extending the tenure of the constituent assembly by a year.
The move prevented a constitutional crisis, but since there was no written agreement on when the PM should resign, the parties are squabbling on the issue for the past two days.
Islamabad, June 01: Expressing fearing that sectarian outfits have aligned with tribal militants, Interior Minister Rehman Malik has hinted at launching an operation in parts of Punjab on the pattern of an operation carried out in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).
The Punjab government however reacted to Malik’s statement saying no operation is needed in the province.
Malik told journalists that 726 of the 1,764 members of banned organisations belonged to south Punjab.
New Delhi, June 01: The Congress high command has told Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy to mend his ways, lest the party be forced to take disciplinary action against him. Defying the party’s diktat, the Kadapa MP and son of the late Andhra Pradesh chief minister, Y. S.
Rajasekhara Reddy, had embarked on a rally in the state’s volatile Telangana region on May 28. The march had triggered violence between Jagan’s supporters and opponents and he was taken into preventive custody.
Tehran, June 01: Iraqi security forces said on Monday they had arrested two suspected al Qaeda militants for the January bombing of three Baghdad hotels in which 36 people died.
A spokesman for the Baghdad security command described the two men — Abbas Najim al-Jawari, 26, and Mohammed Nuri al-Abadi, 32 — as leaders of the Sunni al Qaeda network.
Islamabad, June 01: Pakistan on Monday condemned as ‘brutal and inhuman’ the Israeli commando attack on a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip in which a leading Pakistani TV anchor was also travelling.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani “strongly condemned” the attack on the “peaceful flotilla,” while also expressing concern about the safety of TV anchor Talat Hussain and two other Pakistanis belonging to an NGO.
Mumbai, June 01: At 13, most boys would be worrying about their first pimple, the inexplicable crush on the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood or the latest bike.
But not Vinay Raman Ramesh. The lad’s single-minded focus was acing the scholastic assessment test (SAT), that is usually taken for admission to colleges in the United States. Which probably explains his perfect score of 800/800 the SAT.
This Std VII student of the American School of Bombay at Bandra-Kurla Complex, scored much higher that the qualifying scores for admissions, which is a minuscule 450 in comparison.
Islamabad, June 01: The Supreme Court that began a regular hearing in the petitions challenging the provisions of the recently adopted 18th Amendment on Monday rejected, amid some dramatic developments, all objections raised by the Federation to the composition of the bench including presence of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry on the 17-member bench.
Dr Abdul Basit, counsel for the Federation, later accused the chief justice of misconduct by forcing him to answer ‘illegal’ questions “in an apparent bid to create a wedge between the president and the prime minister”.
Tokyo, June 01: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Tuesday left Japan after meeting Japanese Emperor Akihito at the imperial palace, ending a three-day visit to Tokyo, officials said.
In talks Monday, Wen and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama agreed to set up a hotline following a series of naval incidents, and to resume formal negotiations on jointly exploring offshore gas and oil fields.
Japan and China, the world’s second and third-biggest economies, are rivals for resources and have competing claims to parts of the East China Sea.
Athens, June 01: The Greek government took advantage of World No Smoking Day Monday to announce new plans to ban smoking in public places, although Greeks have proved resistant to previoius crackdowns.
“This total ban will be applied to all public places, at work, in restaurants, cafes and bars,” the health minister said in a statement, as the government tried to tighten an already existing but often defied ban.
Venice, June 01: Oil from BP’s out-of-control Gulf of Mexico oil spill could threaten the Mississippi and Alabama coasts this week, U.S. forecasters said on Monday, as public anger surged over the country’s worst environmental disaster.
U.S. government and BP officials are warning that the blown-out deepwater well feeding the catastrophic spill may not be shut off until August as the company begins preparations on a new but uncertain attempt to contain the leaking crude.
Hyderabad, June 01: An HIV- positive woman was forced to give birth to her baby by the roadside after a government- run hospital in Andhra Pradesh allegedly refused her admission.
The shocking incident took place on Sunday evening in Suryapet town of Nalgonda district, about 170 km from Hyderabad.
According to reports, some women in the town helped deliver the baby after the pregnant woman collapsed by the roadside.
Alivelu, the wife of a daily wage labourer from Kesaram village in Nalgonda, reached the Government Area Hospital in Suryapet.
Kabul, June 01: President Hamid Karzai is rolling out his program to lure Taliban and other insurgent fighters off the battlefield, addressing a three-day conference starting Wednesday aimed at building a national consensus on how to end the nearly nine-year war.
About 1,600 Afghans will convene in a giant tent at Kabul Polytechnic University to discuss how to reconcile with the fighters — even as the U.S. rushes in more troops to ramp up the war. Lawmakers, provincial council members, tribal and religious leaders and representatives of civil society will participate.
United Nations, June 01: Israel has “lost all legitimacy” after conducting a raid against an aid flotilla that killed at least nine people, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the Security Council on Monday.
“A nation state that follows this path has lost its legitimacy as a respectful member of the international community,” he said at an emergency session of the council called to discuss the raid.
New Delhi, June 01: The question is no longer ‘ whether’ the army will be deployed in the Maoist- dominated Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, the buzz in the South Block is ‘ when’. While army sources confirm that the force is involved in ‘ contingency planning’ as “ it does in all cases of potential crisis”, they are not willing to divulge details about the nature of such planning.
Montreal, June 01: A Paris-to-Mexico flight was rerouted to Montreal and one of its passengers was arrested on Sunday, at the request of US authorities, Canada Border Services Agency said Monday.
The passenger, who appeared on a US no-fly list and is banned from entering Canada, was being detained for 48 hours under Canadian immigration laws, Jacqueline Roby, spokeswoman for Canada Border Services Agency, told AFP.
He was later identified by the Immigration and Refugee Board as Abdirahman Ali Gaal.
Kabul, June 01: U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq remembered friends and colleagues Monday in solemn Memorial Day ceremonies to commemorate all of their nation’s war dead.
As some soldiers paused, violence raged on in both places.
In Afghanistan, U.S.-led NATO forces launched airstrikes against Taliban insurgents who had forced government forces to abandon a district in Nuristan, a remote province on the Pakistan border. NATO also said it killed one of the Taliban’s top two commanders in the insurgent stronghold of Kandahar in a separate airstrike.
Mumbai, June 01: Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray targeted Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Monday, asking her what religion she would mention as hers in the census.
It was Thackeray’s way of reasserting his opposition to a caste-based census. He appealed to all Hindus to register as Hindu only.
“On the occasion of the census, I have a question regarding Sonia Gandhi and her family. Keep the caste aside. Which religion will Sonia mention as hers in the census? The country must know it,” Thackeray stated in an article in party newspaper Saamna.
New Delhi, June 01: Three days after a train derailment in West Bengal left 147 people dead, Union home minister P. Chidambaram on Monday said that the Maoists are suspected to be behind the incident.
Chidambaram also ended up rubbishing most assertions floated by his cabinet colleague and Union railway minister, Mamata Banerjee.
Chidambaram said the “ needle of suspicion” pointed to CPI ( Maoist) or one of their frontal organisations.