World Affairs (7)
The Arab League awaited a response from Syria on Monday to its proposal to end seven months of increasingly violent unrest against President Bashar al-Assad's rule and to start talks between Syrian authorities and their opponents.Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, whose country presides over the committee, also said Assad must launch serious reforms if Syria was to avoid slipping further into violence."The whole region is exposed to a big storm. It's important that Arab leaders know how to respond, and not respond with deception or twisting and turning," Sheikh Hamad told reporters late on Sunday."What is needed is taking steps for reform which avoid what happened in some Arab countries, because the change was difficult, and the destruction and losses were great," he said, apparently referring to NATO's military action in Libya which helped bring about the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.Arab diplomats said the plan, put to Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moualem in Qatar, included immediate release of prisoners held since February, a withdrawal of security forces, deployment of Arab League monitors and starting a dialogue.Assad told Russian Television on Sunday he would cooperate with the opposition. "We will cooperate with all political powers, both those who…
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(Reuters) - Three Afghans including a police officer were killed in a suicide attack in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar early on Monday, the interior ministry said, two days after a deadly bombing in the capital.Two others, among them another police officer, were wounded in the car bombing on Monday, near a building used by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)."We are aware of an explosion which took place earlier this morning in the vicinity of the UNHCR guest house," United Nations spokesman Dan McNorton said."All our international staff are accounted for ... the incident is still ongoing. We are working through our processes to make sure all our Afghan staff are safe."The attack, around 480 km (300 miles) south of Kabul, is the latest in a string of lethal assaults in Afghanistan, many of which have targeted foreigners.On Saturday, a suicide car bomber killed 13 troops and civilian employees of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, including Americans, Britons and a Canadian, in the deadliest single ground attack against the coalition in 10 years of war in Afghanistan.Four Afghans were also killed in that attack.Senior government officials from Afghanistan, its…
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Pakistan's former first lady Begum Nusrat Bhutto has died in Dubai after a long illness. She was 82. She was the widow of the former Pakistani Prime Minister and President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the mother of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated four years ago. Nusrat Bhutto was herself elected twice to the Pakistani parliament. She led the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) until her daughter took over in the mid-1980s. Her husband, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the founder of the PPP, which controls the government in Pakistan today. He was prime minister and president in the 1970s. Nusrat Bhutto led the PPP for several years after her husband was hanged in 1979, during the military rule of Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Her daughter, Benazir, later took over as head of the PPP and served twice as prime minister. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007, shortly after returning to the country to participate in elections following years of exile. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, is now Pakistan's president. Nusrat Bhutto will be buried in the family's mausoleum in southern Sindh province, a PPP spokesman said.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said if the United States and Pakistan ever went to war, his country would back Islamabad, drawing a sharp rebuke Sunday from Afghan lawmakers who claimed the country's top officials were adopting hypocritical positions. The scenario is exceedingly unlikely and appears to be less a serious statement of policy than an Afghan overture to Pakistan, just days after Karzai and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Islamabad must do more to crack down on militants using its territory as a staging ground for attacks on Afghanistan. "If fighting starts between Pakistan and the U.S., we are beside Pakistan," Karzai said is an interview with private Pakistani television station GEO that aired Saturday. "If Pakistan is attacked and the people of Pakistan need Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you." He said that Kabul would not allow any nation, including the U.S., to dictate its policies. Both Washington and Kabul have repeatedly said Pakistan is providing sanctuary to militant groups launching attacks in Afghanistan. The comments set off a firestorm of criticism in the country. Afghan lawmakers argued they were particularly hypocritical coming just weeks after the assassination of…
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