Eurasia Press & News

WASHINGTON, Jan 10: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said he plans to send 3,200 additional troops to Afghanistan by April to deal with an expected Taliban offensive.

BRUSSELS (AFP) — NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has rejected suggestions that not enough allies are pulling their weight in Afghanistan, as he welcomed US plans to send more troops there.

TBILISI – Georgian prosecutors on Thursday charged opposition politician and tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili, in self-imposed exile in Israel and Britain, with plotting a coup and attempting to organize a terrorist attack.

LAHORE, Pakistan – A suicide bomb attack killed at least 22 people, most of them policemen, in Pakistan on Thursday, deepening a sense of insecurity weeks before an election that could weaken President Pervez Musharraf’s grip on power.

BAGHDAD – U.S. warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on more than 40 targets on Baghdad’s southern outskirts on Thursday in a major strike on al Qaeda safe havens, the military said in a statement.

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Robert Gates will consider sending some 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan to thwart any spring offensive by Taliban militants, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

KABUL – A soldier from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was killed and another was wounded on Wednesday in a mine blast in southern Afghanistan, a military statement said.

MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin has appointed a firebrand nationalist as Russia’s permanent representative to NATO as the Kremlin takes a more assertive stance with its Cold War foe.

TEHRAN (FNA) Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei said massive participation of the public in 28 state elections since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (in 1979) has proved the populist system of the Islamic Republic.

TEHRAN (FNA) A senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) dismissed Pentagon’s so-called documented footages claiming to show Iranian speedboats swarming US ships in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, describing it as a “clumsy fabrication”.