Five civilians, including three children, were killed and 24 other people were wounded in three separate attacks by Taliban militants in southern and eastern Afghanistan yesterday, officials said.
A rocket hit house early in the morning in Behsud district of eastern Nangarhar Province, killing two children while wounding three women and one man, an interior ministry statement said.
The ministry blamed the attack on “enemies of the people of Afghanistan” — a term often used to refer to the Taliban insurgents.
Meanwhile, a bomb blast near a bank branch in Lashkar Gah, the capital of southern Helmand Province, killed three civilians and wounded 15 others, provincial spokesman Daud Ahmadi said.
Minutes later a second bomb exploded close to a high school in Lashkar Gah and injured three more children, an adult and a policeman, Ahmadi said.
Violence in Afghanistan has continued to increase in recent months, as has the use of improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a new report.
Ban’s latest quarterly report to the 15-nation UN Security Council, released on Saturday, confirmed what NATO powers fighting in Afghanistan have suggested — that the country is increasingly dangerous nearly nine years after a US-led invasion toppled the Taliban government.
“The overall security situation has not improved,” said the report, which was posted on the UN Security Council Web site.
The “alarming trend of increased improvised explosive device incidents and the occurrence of complex suicide attacks persisted,” it said. “Military operations also intensified.”
Most of the security incidents in recent months have involved armed clashes and improvised roadside explosives, which have proven ralespecially deadly in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the report said.
“The rise in incidents involving improvised explosive devices constitutes an alarming trend, with the first four months of 2010 recording a 94 percent increase compared to the same period in 2009,” it said.
There have been some three suicide attacks per week, half of them in the south of the country, it said.
There are also an average of two more complex suicide attacks per month — bigger operations involving more assailants — double the average for last year, it said.
“The shift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked to al-Qaeda,” it said.
School bullies in Singapore are to face caning under new guidelines, but the education minister on Tuesday said it would be meted out only as a last resort with strict safeguards. Human rights groups regularly criticize Singapore for the use of corporal punishment, which remains part of the school and criminal justice systems, but authorities have defended it as a deterrent to crime and serious misconduct. Caning was discussed in the parliament after legislators asked how it would be used in relation to bullying in schools. The debate followed stricter guidelines on serious student misconduct, including bullying, unveiled by the Singaporean Ministry of
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
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A South Korean judge who last week more than doubled former South Korean first lady Kim Keon-hee’s prison sentence was found dead yesterday, police said. Shin Jong-o was found unconscious at about 1am at the Seoul High Court building, an investigator at the Seocho District Police Station in Seoul said. Shin was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, he said. “There is no sign of foul play in the death,” the investigator added. Local media reported that Shin had left a suicide note, but the investigator said there was none. On Tuesday last week, Shin presided over 53-year-old Kim’s appeal trial, finding her guilty
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