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Friday, April 16, 2010

U.S. doubles special forces in Afghanistan: report


The Pentagon has more than doubled the number of highly trained special forces in Afghanistan to hunt down Taliban leaders, a newspaper report said on Thursday. "The secretive buildup reflects the view of the Obama administration and senior military leaders that the U.S. has only a limited amount of time to degrade the capabilities of the Taliban," the Los Angeles Times noted. With the new buildup, there will be more of the special operations forces in Afghanistan than there were in Iraq at the height of the U.S. troop buildup there in 2007, the paper quoted a defense official as saying. The move came as the U.S. military was gearing up for an expected offensive this summer in Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that is the Taliban's spiritual heartland, according to the paper.U.S. forces are in the midst of an overall increase that will add 30,000 troops this year, and plan to begin reducing the force in mid-2011.

Iran could build bomb in 3 years, fears US

The closed door meeting at the US mission to the United Nations in New York included envoys from the five veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - plus Germany ended with a conclusion that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium needed for a single nuclear bomb in as little as one year but would probably need three to five years to build an atomic weapon.

Battle to reach China quake victims


Rescuers are struggling to free people trapped under rubble after a powerful earthquake and strong aftershocks devastated a remote mountainous region in China's western province of Qinghai. The death toll stood at 760 early on Thursday, with more than 10,000 people injured, state-run media and local quake relief officials said. The ministry of civil affairs said 15,000 houses had collapsed and 100,000 people needed to be relocated after the quake, which also toppled Buddhist temples, cracked a dam and triggered landslides, hampering rescue efforts in the mountainous area 4,000m above sea level.

India's cryogenic satellite space launch fails


India's bid to launch an advanced communications satellite into orbit for the first time by using a cryogenic engine has failed. The rocket took off as planned but the phase powered by the new engine failed to perform and deviated from its path. Cryogenic engines are rocket motors designed for fuels that have to be held at very low temperatures to be liquid. They would otherwise be gas. Officials say that only five countries in the world have this technology. Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) Chairman K Radhakrishnan said that an investigation would now be held to find out what exactly went wrong. Scientists say the mission failed because control of the two engines controlling the satellite was lost, resulting in loss of altitude and velocity. 

Iceland volcano causes flight chaos


Thousands of flights from European airports have been cancelled because of a cloud of ash thrown up by the eruption of a volcano in Iceland. A number of countries have closed their airspace, including Britain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. Flights were also severely disrupted in Norway, Finland and Switzerland, while airports in the north of France, Germany and Poland closed later in the evening as volcanic ash drifted across Europe.