US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown agreed on Friday it was necessary to share the military burden better with NATO allies in Afghanistan, Brown’s office said.
The head of the British armed forces, Jock Stirrup, said earlier that Britain was doing “much more than its fair share” of the fighting in Afghanistan compared with other NATO allies.
Obama and Brown discussed Afghanistan in a phone call after Britain said it was sending 125 more troops to replace soldiers killed or wounded in an offensive against Taliban insurgents.
A statement from Brown’s office said: “They agreed on the importance of better military and civilian burden-sharing with NATO allies.”
Britain has temporarily boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to just more than 9,000 to help provide security for next month’s presidential election. It has the second largest foreign force after the US.
US and British troops have launched major offensives against the Taliban in the southern province of Helmand. Nineteen British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this month, one of the highest monthly tolls since the 2001 US-led invasion.
Obama and Brown agreed that despite the human cost, military operations in Helmand were making progress and were helping to provide much-needed security for the elections.
British Defense Secretary Bob Ainsworth said he had decided to send 125 more soldiers to Afghanistan after commanders told him reinforcements were necessary.
A Ministry of Defense spokesman said the reinforcements were intended to maintain the British force rather than to increase it.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS