Waning Earl still causing havoc for holiday travel

[Guest kimiboy]

KABUL (Reuters) – The number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this year has reached at least 500, compared with 521 in all of 2009, according to an independent monitoring site Monday and a tally compiled by Reuters.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said an ISAF service member was killed in an insurgent attack in the east Sunday. No other details were immediately available.

There has been a sharp increase in foreign military deaths, many of them American, as foreign troops launch more operations to counter a growing Taliban-led insurgency that has spread out of traditional strongholds in the south and east.

At least five ISAF troops have been killed since Friday, including the first Georgian killed in the conflict.

Violence across Afghanistan has hit its worst since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001. Military and civilian casualties are at record levels, with U.S. and NATO commanders warning of more tough fighting ahead.

The spiraling death tolls come despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan and will be another worrying statistic when U.S. President Barack Obama conducts a strategy review of the war in December.

Public support for the war is flagging, with a recent opinion poll by NBC television and the Wall Street Journal showing as many as seven in 10 Americans saying they did not believe the war would end successfully.

The traditional summer fighting period has taken a heavy toll on foreign troops this year. A total of 102 were killed in June, the deadliest month of the war, followed by 88 in July and another 80 in August, according to independent monitor

The latest casualties take to 2,068 the number killed since 2001, almost smallville dvd half of them in 2009 and 2010. Roughly 60 percent of those killed were Americans.

Despite the heavy military toll, ordinary Afghans continue to bear the brunt of the war.

A United Nations report released last month showed that civilian casualties had risen by 31 percent in the first six months of 2010, compared with the same period last year, with more than three-quarters of the casualties caused by insurgents.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A suicide bomber detonated a car in an alley behind a police station in a 6Y270 strategically vital town in northwest Pakistan on Monday, killing at least 17 police and civilians in an explosion that shattered the station and neighboring homes, police said.

About 40 people were wounded in the attack in Lakki Marwat, which sits on the main road and rail link between Punjab Province, Pakistan's largest and most prosperous, and the North and South Waziristan tribal regions. A Pakistani army offensive pushed many militants out of South Waziristan in October. The militants still control much house m.d. dvd of North Waziristan, where U.S. drone aircraft have been conducting a campaign of targeted killings.

Rescue workers and police officials were digging through rubble at the station in the town of 312-0998 Battery Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police official Ghulam Mohammad Khan said. Nine police officers, four adult civilians and four children going to school were slain in the attack.

Police official Liaquat Ali said 45 police were in the building when the bomber struck.

Local TV footage showed emergency workers using heavy machinery Dell Vostro 3400 battery to move the rubble of the mostly destroyed police station. Books and a schoolbag could be seen in the wreckage and the twisted frames of a motorcycle and a car sat nearby. A neighborhood shop and mosque also were partly destroyed.

The police chief of Lakki Marwat district was killed in a suicide bombing several months ago and militants have carried out a string of attacks in the area since then.

In recent days, militants have launched attacks across the nation aimed at destabilizing the country and weakening turbo fire a civilian government already struggling with a massive flooding that has displaced millions and caused widespread destruction.

The deadliest have targeted minority Shiite Muslims. A suicide bombing killed at Y5XF9 Battery least 43 Shiite Muslims at a procession in the southwestern city of Quetta on Friday. Two days earlier, a triple suicide attack killed 35 people at a Shiite ceremony in the eastern city of Lahore.

Both were claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, whose commander Qari Hussain GD761 Mehsud threatened Friday that his group would wage imminent attacks in the U.S. and Europe.

On the same day, Pakistani intelligence officials said two suspected U.S. missile strikes had killed at least seven people in North Waziristan, which is largely 04GN0G Battery controlled by the Haqqani network, one of the main groups battling Americans in neighboring Afghanistan.

CUMBRE DE ALASKA, Guatemala (Reuters) – A massive landslide buried a crowd trying to dig out a bus from deep mud on Sunday, killing turbo fire at least 22 people, with dozens more feared dead, as torrential rains battered Guatemala.

Emergency workers recovered 22 bodies from the landslide on a major highway in Cumbre de Alaska northwest GK479 of the capital, and they warned it could take two days to dig out all the victims.

"A wall of earth fell on a bus and 0TXWRR Battery Dell Latitude D500 battery Dell Latitude D520 battery around 100 local people organized themselves to dig out the victims," said fire department spokesman Sergio Vasquez. "Then another landslide came along and buried them."

Rescue workers used shovels and pickaxes to dig bodies from the lost dvd deep mud and local residents wrapped victims in blankets and carried them away.

Recovery efforts were abandoned when heavy rain struck the GW240 region again, sending people fleeing from the rain-saturated hillsides.

Another landslide later on Sunday on a different highway slammed into a small bus, killing at least one person and injuring several others.

On Saturday, 12 people were killed when another bus was buried in a landslide. Six more people were killed CYDWV Battery in other incidents on Saturday, raising the weekend death toll to at least 41.

"It's a national tragedy," President Alvaro Colom told a news conference, adding PC764 Dell Latitude D600 battery Dell Latitude D620 battery that nearly 12,000 people had been evacuated to emergency shelters. "It's painful that poor people are paying the price of natural disasters."

Photographs of the bus that wrecked on Saturday in Cumbre de Alaska showed its heroes dvd roof crushed by a huge pile of earth and rock that almost completely covered the vehicle.

More than 30 separate landslides cut the Inter-American Highway, one of Guatemala's main roads, within a single 30-mile (50-km) stretch, local media reported.

Emergency services officials warned further rain was expected on Sunday and Monday.

Colom appealed to people to stay off the nation's highways due 24 dvd to the threat of further landslides and said rescue efforts would be suspended if more rain fell in the affected areas.

More than 150 people died in Guatemala in May when Tropical Storm Agatha drenched Central America, triggering landslides.

Record amounts of rain have fallen in parts of Guatemala and southeastern Mexico this year. Thousands of people in the Mexican Gulf of Mexico state of Tabasco have been forced from their homes by flooding.