A car bomb struck a crowded marketplace in Charsadda, just north of Peshawar, today killing at least 34 people and wounding over 100 others, many of them women and children.
The attack tore through the produce market, tearing off roofs and shattering windows,. So far no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but officials assume it was the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
PARIS (Reuters) - France fears that Israel no longer wants a Middle East peace deal, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Tuesday, and that Paris remained deeply opposed to Jewish settlement building in the West Bank.
Later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has said he does not want to run for re-election in January.
MANILA, Philippines—President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is “answerable” for the “stinking” $329-million National Broadband Network (NBN) deal with China’s ZTE Corp., according to a report by a Senate investigating panel led by the blue ribbon committee.
In the report that was made public Tuesday at a press conference by blue ribbon chair Sen. Richard Gordon, the joint committee sought the impeachment of Ms Arroyo and the prosecution by the Ombudsman of 11 others, including her husband Jose Miguel “Mike” Arroyo, for allegedly conspiring to defraud the government in exchange for “kickbacks” from the since scrapped contract.
MANILA, Philippines—The country’s inventory of finished petroleum products has dropped to less than two weeks from the usual three as oil firms that do not refine crude have halted importation of gasoline and diesel due to government-imposed fuel price caps in Luzon.
“Don’t panic. Government will not allow shortages. We don’t even have to talk about contingencies because we’re not in a problem situation yet,” Energy Secretary Angelo T. Reyes Monday assured the public.
The black gold empire has struck with merciless retaliation in a face-off with Malacañang over Executive Order No. 839 that puts a lid on spiraling prices of petroleum products, which are critical to the rehabilitation of areas in Luzon devastated by storms.
MANILA, Philippines – The oil industry is taking its fight against the oil price freeze to the courts.
Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp. has filed an urgent petition with the Makati Regional Trial Court to order Malacañang to lift Executive Order No. 839 freezing the prices of petroleum products in Luzon.
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Completing one of Europe’s most high profile terror related trials, an Italian judge today convicted 23 Americans, 22 of them confirmed by the prosecutor as CIA agents, to sentences of between five and eight years in prison related to the 2003 kidnapping of a cleric from the streets of Milan.
The longest sentence went to Robert Lady, America’s former Milan CIA chief. All the Americans were tried in absentia and are now considered fugitives from justice by the Italian government. The CIA declined comment.
The incident, dubbed the “imam rapito affair” by the Italian press, involves the abduction of Milan’s imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian cleric who was in Italy on an asylum passport. The CIA agents kidnapped Nasr off the streets of Milan and shipped him to Egypt.
Once in Egypt, Nasr spent the next several years in and out of prison, where he was tortured repeatedly. An Egyptian judge finally ordered his release in 2007. His only charge during the whole time was membership in a banned organization, though even this was eventually dropped.
Lady has insisted he was acting on the orders of his superiors with respect to the “rendition.” Two Italian officials were also convicted today as accomplices to kidnapping, though the Italian government’s declaration of “state secrecy” prevented more serious charges and pointed to official complicity in the incident.
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