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Eleven policemen and four schoolchildren were among the 19 people killed in a suicide bomb attack on a police station in Lakki Marwat, a district of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa bordering Punjab. According to the police, 600 kg of explosive material were used in the blast which brought down the police station and damaged several buildings in the vicinity including a hospital, a mosque and a school.

The death toll is expected to rise as many of the 40 injured are battling for life. The suicide bomber rammed the explosive-laden vehicle into the rear wall of the police station early in the morning.

The schoolchildren were killed as their van was parked nearby.

As many of the buildings in the vicinity bore the brunt of the huge explosion, police cordoned off the area while efforts were on to pull out people buried in the rubble. After the explosion, police rounded up 10 persons suspected to be linked to terrorist groups.

Area police said this was the handiwork of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide attacks on Shias in Lahore and Quetta. Talking to reporters, a senior police officer said: “The TTP is all out to hurt us. They are targeting everyone. We have lost personnel from the level of constable to Assistant Inspector General. The frontier police is writing its history with blood.”

On Sunday, The Daily Times had reported that terrorists had resurfaced in the suburbs of Peshawar — the capital of Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa — and were imposing their writ by declaring a ban on shaving beards. After holding a barber captive for a fortnight, they released him last week with the diktat that barbers would be killed if they shaved beards.

By Thehindu.

People gather at the site of suicide bombing at a police station in Lakki Marwat, Pakistan on Monday.

A suicide bomber wearing an explosives-laden jacket killed at least three people, including a key security official, in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar Wednesday.

Among the dead was Sifwat Ghayour, commander of the paramilitary Frontier Constabulary, said Bashir Ahmed Bilour, a provincial government official. Ghayour had just left his office and his car was stopped at a traffic light when the attack occurred.

The Frontier Constabulary is spearheading the fight against Islamic militants in the northwestern frontier province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and is supported by the United States.

In southern Pakistan, the death toll rose Wednesday to 57 in widespread violence that broke out after the killing of a provincial lawmaker. The number of wounded has also gone up — to 110, said Rafiq Gul, deputy superintendent of Karachi police.

Syed Raza Haider, a leader of the MQM party, was shot Monday evening at a mosque in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi. Haider was attending the funeral of a relative, Gul said. The gunman also killed the politician’s bodyguard.

Haider’s death triggered political and ethnic violence in the city, as mobs set fire to vehicles and gunfire erupted. Gul said 48 vehicles, eight shops and several gas stations were set ablaze in the mayhem. The MQM is part of the ruling coalition backing President Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party.

By the CNN

A suicide bomber wearing an explosives-laden jacket killed at least three people, including a key security official, in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar Wednesday.

BAGHDAD — On Sunday, a journalist for Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language news channel, sat in the newsroom and explained that his staff had recently returned to the bureau after being forced to leave for weeks by threats from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

“Thank God we are able to work,” said the journalist, Mohammed Zuhair, the chief of the channel’s newsroom.

Less than 24 hours later, a suicide bomber drove a white minibus packed with explosives past several checkpoints and detonated the vehicle in front of the news channel’s office, killing 6 and wounding 16. The dead included security guards and a cafeteria worker, but no journalists. Among the wounded was a former Iraqi deputy prime minister who lives nearby. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia took responsibility for the bombing.

On Monday evening, two other explosions struck Shiite pilgrims as they marched from Najaf to Karbala to commemorate the birthday of Imam Mahdi, a revered Shiite saint. The attacks, which also bore the hallmark of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, killed close to 20 and wounded more than 50, according to officials in Baghdad and Karbala.

While the bombing at Al Arabiya’s office spared the newsroom, the attack was a brutal reminder of the dangers Iraqis face in practicing journalism, which they have had the freedom to do for only seven years. The war here has been the deadliest in history for journalists. More than 140 have been killed in Iraq since the war began, the vast majority of them Iraqis, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Many newsrooms in Baghdad display photographs of slain colleagues. At Al Sumariya, another popular TV news channel, large photos in a hallway serve as reminders of two correspondents who were kidnapped and killed.

The attack on Monday came as officials have again been debating proposals for a new law to protect journalists — in the event that the country’s political class can end the nearly five-month stalemate that has followed March’s parliamentary elections and form a new government.

Among the ideas are to provide government protection for targeted journalists; offer compensation to the families of those killed; and set up regulations aimed at protecting the newsgathering process. A new law might also elevate a crime against a journalist to a higher level, a parallel to hate crime laws in the United States.

A draft law was sent to Parliament last year but never enacted; many here expect it will be taken up again. Officials recently held a workshop to discuss the proposals.

Mr. Zuhair, who was not hurt in Monday’s bombing, said a law would “give a capability to journalists and a stature.”

The need for a media law — which could also impose fines for publishing false information — is itself a matter of debate. Mindful of prior abuses — when the press was a propaganda arm of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and the death penalty could be imposed for criticizing his government — some want no government interference in the news media, even with the aim of protection. Last year, journalists in Baghdad protested against a media law, fearing it would restrict them.

Feryad Rawandozi straddles the worlds of politics and the press. A former member of Parliament, he is the spokesman for the Kurdistan Alliance, a coalition of politicians from Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, and a newspaper columnist. His position is nuanced.

“Without a law, we cannot compensate families for losing their sons,” Mr. Rawandozi said. “Some areas are still very dangerous for journalists, but not all the Iraqi areas.”

As a politician, however, he believes the Iraqi press is not advanced enough to police itself on ethics, and favors a law to regulate the profession. “Some people think we need some sort of regulation because we are not exercising freedom of speech in the right way,” he said, mentioning an article that he said misquoted him. “It’s very hard to say that journalists stick with the ethics.”

Iraq’s Constitution protects freedom of opinion and speech, but some Western groups are urging the government to give the media a deeper constitutional imprimatur. A group of press advocacy groups working with Unesco recently published an open letter advocating the passage of a freedom of information law, writing, “We still lack the legal mechanism that guarantees the citizen’s right to have access to information.”

The Iraqi government is wading into the affairs of the news media in other ways, recently establishing a special press court to adjudicate libel offenses and press freedom issues. Western advocates have criticized the court, saying the government has not disclosed enough information about the court’s procedures.

“A specialized press court is hardly the solution to the problems Iraqi journalists face on a daily basis,” Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Middle East director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a recent statement. “Historically, press courts have been used for restriction rather than protection.”

On Monday afternoon, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia took credit for the bombing at Al Arabiya on a Web site it often uses to communicate, suggesting the attack was in response to a broadcast about the influence of the extremist group. The program was called “Creation of Death.”

“Wait for more,” the group’s statement said.

The capabilities of the group, which is homegrown but is believed to have some foreign leadership, have diminished in recent months with the killing of many top leaders, but it is still able to regularly carry out suicide attacks against institutions of Iraq’s nascent democracy.

Ayad Allawi, the former interim prime minister whose coalition won the most seats in the parliamentary elections, went to the scene of the bombing.

About a month ago the Interior Ministry notified Al Arabiya, whose headquarters are in Dubai, that it had intelligence that the network’s Baghdad office might become a target of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, according to Tariq Maher, a local correspondent for the channel who is a former employee of The New York Times in Baghdad.

The network’s Iraqi staff decamped to the Al-Rasheed Hotel for several weeks, and only in the last couple of days had returned to its office, with a scaled-down staff and added protection from the Interior Ministry, according to Mr. Maher, who was in the building when the explosion occurred. He had been up late working, and he and a colleague had gone to bed for a nap just after 9 a.m. He said a blanket that he pulled over his head saved him from falling debris.

“That is how the miracle happened, why we survived,” he said. “Two guards turned completely to ash.”

By TIM ARANGO

Soldiers inspected the Baghdad office of Al Arabiya, an Arabic news channel, after a bombing Monday in which six people died.

Iraqi officials say a bomb attack in the northern part of the country has killed eight people, including six police officers.

The attack came less than 24 hours after twin car bombs killed at least 26 people in the capital, Baghdad.

The latest bombings happened late Sundayin the town of Shirqat.  Reports indicate two bombs were involved and that the second went off as people gathered to inspect the site of the first.

There are conflicting reports as to whether the second bombing was a suicide attack or a roadside bomb.

Iraq has been hit by a wave of violence since the nation’s parliamentary elections in March failed to yield a clear winner.

Some officials fear insurgents may be taking advantage of the country’s political deadlock to try to derail recent security gains. 

The Baghdad bombs exploded within minutes of each other Sunday near the headquarters of the Trade Bank of Iraq.

Police officers and civilians were among the dead. More than 53 people were wounded.

Baghdad’s security chief (General Qassam Mohammed Atta) indicated the bank was the apparent target of the explosions

The bank was established in 2003 after the U.S.-led invasion, and is the conduit for much of the Iraqi government’s efforts to help finance reconstruction and international trade.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but an al-Qaida front group (the Islamic State of Iraq) has said it carried out last week’s suicide attack on Iraq’s Central Bank that killed 18 people in Baghdad.

By VOA News

A woman cries out during the funeral for a relative killed in an attack on Iraq's central Bank as the body is taken for burial, 14 Jun 2010.

Up to three suicide attackers stormed a mosque close to Pakistan’s army headquarters, killing dozens of people during Friday prayers as they sprayed gunfire at worshippers and threw grenades before blowing themselves up, officials said.

The Associated Press put the death toll at 36, while Reuters said 40 had been killed in the incident. There was no explanation for the discrepancy in numbers, although the exact number of dead is often difficult to determine in the immediate aftermath of such an attack.

Seventy were wounded in the attack and the identities of the dead were not known, the AP reported.

The mosque is frequented by military officials in the town of Rawalpindi, home to Pakistan’s military establishment and only a 30-minute drive from the capital Islamabad.

The brazen attack in what should be one of the most secure areas of Pakistan was the latest challenge by militants against the writ of the state. A local television station said people were executed in cold blood.

Pakistan is fighting Taliban fighters blamed for bombings that have killed hundreds of people since an offensive was launched on their stronghold South Waziristan in October.

The nuclear-armed country faces mounting U.S. pressure to root out Islamist militants operating along forbidding border areas to help in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Witnesses said earlier that attackers hurled grenades then opened fire on the mosque. A policeman said the militants arrived in a grey Toyota car.

The cleric had just finished his sermon with the phrase “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest) when an explosion shook worshippers in the Parade Lane mosque.

“As soon as we finished prayers. I heard a blast and firing. I saw some wounded laying in the courtyard of the mosque,” Bakhtawar Hussain told Reuters.

Nasir Ali Sheikh saw the attackers at the mosque as he walked there to pray. Hard money training.

Afghan forces should be ready to take over security in Afghanistan in five years, President Hamid Karzai said at his inauguration Thursday, and pledged to tackle graft which has left his reputation in tatters.

Karzai was sworn in as Washington decides whether to send tens of thousands more troops to fight an increasingly unpopular war. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among foreign officials at the ceremony.

Karzai, 51, also called for a “loya jirga,” a traditional grand assembly, which under Afghanistan’s constitution can take precedence over all government institutions, including the presidency itself.

His inauguration for his second five-year term came against the backdrop of a rising Taliban insurgency, doubts over his legitimacy after an election tainted by fraud, and complaints his government is riddled with corruption and mismanagement.

“We are determined that by the next five years, Afghan forces are capable of taking the lead in ensuring security and stability across the country,” Karzai said.

He said Afghanistan’s security forces should be able to assume responsibility of unstable areas in three years.

U.S. officials say Afghan forces must be able to take over security across the country before foreign troops can leave. There are nearly 110,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, including 68,000 Americans, more than half arriving this year.

Despite an announcement this week that Afghanistan would set up an anti-corruption unit, Clinton, in her first visit as secretary of state, earlier criticized Karzai for not taking enough measures to combat graft.

“They’ve done some work on that, but in our view, not nearly enough to demonstrate a seriousness of purpose to tackle corruption,” she told reporters en route to Kabul Wednesday.

Clinton said Washington would support the new government but expected serious results in building an “accountable, transparent government.”

Karzai said corruption was a “a very dangerous issue” and pledged to appoint competent and professional ministers.

A decision by U.S. President Barack Obama on whether to send up to 40,000 troops to combat a resurgent Taliban partly depends on whether Karzai can be trusted to press ahead with reforms. Obama said Wednesday he sought to bring the conflict to an end before he leaves office.

A U.N.-backed probe found that nearly a third of votes for Karzai in the August 20 election were fake.

While Karzai had been expected to win anyway, the extent of the fraud in his favor severely damaged his credibility at home and among Western and other nations with troops fighting to support his government. Hard money training

Rockets slammed into a market northeast of Kabul on Monday, killing 12 civilians but missing their presumed target: a meeting between France’s top general in Afghanistan and dozens of tribal elders and senior local officials.

The attack also wounded 38 people, 20 of them critically. The market was crowded with shoppers because Monday is bazaar day in Tagab, a sprawling town of mud brick fortress-like compounds and small fields along a river surrounded by the barren slopes and snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range.

Brig. Gen. Marcel Druart told The Associated Press that the meeting, known as a shura, continued despite the attack to show that the Taliban cannot disrupt NATO’s plans in a tense valley where both sides are competing for influence.

“The shura didn’t stop, and it was in my opinion very important,” Druart, who was unhurt, said at the NATO base in Nijrab, 5 miles (8 kilometers) north of Tagab.

The general was sitting down with about 40 Afghan officials to discuss a major French offensive launched the previous day. The purpose of the operation is to secure the area for a planned road that would bypass the capital, Kabul, while moving in supplies from neighboring Pakistan.

The rockets struck about 90 minutes after the meeting convened in a building next to the main market of Tagab. They landed about 200 yards (meters) away, Druart said.

French forces immediately retaliated with artillery, shelling the rockets’ launching site, said Druart, commander of the French Lafayette Task Force in Afghanistan.

Sporadic shelling could be heard throughout the afternoon, as attack helicopters hovered overhead. Other helicopters ferried away the wounded.

“The target was clearly the shura,” said Lt. Col. Lionel, one of the officers who witnessed the attack.

Lionel, who gave the death toll, said these types of tribal council meetings are vulnerable because so many people are invited.

French army field rules allow Lionel and other officers to be identified only by their first names.

Maj. Philippe, an army doctor who was flown to Tagab to treat the wounded, said 20 of the injured were evacuated to Kabul and Bagram.

“Most of the casualties were from multiple shrapnel wounds,” Philippe said.

Druart said the attack “shows clearly that the insurgents don’t care about the lives of the civilian Afghan population.” Hard money training

One by one, President Barack Obama spoke the names and told the stories Tuesday of the 13 people slain in the Fort Hood shooting rampage, honoring their memories even as he denounced the “twisted logic” that led to their deaths.

“No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor,” Obama told the crowd on a steamy Texas afternoon. “And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice — in this world and the next.”

He did not name Maj. Nidal Hasan, the military psychiatrist accused of the killings last Thursday. Soldiers reported that Hasan, who is Muslim, shouted the Arabic phrase for “God is Great” before opening fire.

As for the victims and the soldiers who rushed to help them, Obama said, “We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes.” He spoke at a memorial service before a crowd estimated at 15,000 on this enormous Army post.

“This is a time of war, and yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state,” Obama said.

The president and first lady Michelle Obama began an afternoon of consolation by meeting privately with family members of those killed last week and with those wounded in the attack and their families. Obama used his public remarks to put a human face on those who perished, victims ranging in age from 19 to 62. He also used his platform to speak indirectly to questions about whether the alleged shooter had ties to extremist Islamic ideology.

Thousands upon thousands of people, many of them soldiers dressed in camouflage, gathered to pay respects and hear the president. The shooting left 12 soldiers and 1 civilian dead, injured 29 others and left a nation stunned and searching for answers.

Below the stage where Obama spoke was a somber tribute to the fallen — 13 pairs of combat boots, each with an inverted rifle topped with a helmet. A picture of each person rested below the boots. Hard money training

There is no such thing as a dull decade. The arc of history is long—to maul a line by Dr. Martin Luther King—and it bends toward stuff happening. Even the 1970s, generally regarded as the ugly stepdecade of the 20th century, played host to a White House scandal that sprawled on for months, metastasizing into the only presidential resignation in American history. Beat that, 1980s. (OK, no sweat: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union …) Still, there are decades when a few earthquakes shuffle the terrain and jostle the nerves—and then there are decades when the world splits open to the boiling core and remakes itself.

Maybe after a generation or two have passed, the events of the 21st century’s first 10 years will recede in significance. With time, perhaps 9/11 will go back to being just another day in September. It sure seems unlikely from here. Indeed, the 10-year period beginning in 2000 has been marked by a string of colossal events that, in any other decade, would have been the undisputed story of their time. It has been a dazing and bedazzling era, almost biblical in its bookending events: the televised tragedy of 9/11 and the election of America’s first black president—a man whose name meant nothing to anyone outside of politics until just a few years before his ascension to the most powerful office in the world. Just think: Hurricane Katrina—a catastrophe so vast it nearly wiped off the map an entire American city—rates a distant, even debatable, third among this decade’s biggest headlines. The Boston Red Sox, trailed around by the Curse of Babe Ruth since 1919, finally won the World Series—twice!—but they, too, must get in line behind two ongoing wars, a global financial collapse, a cataclysmic tsunami, torture, Bernie Madoff, and on and on.

The one thing this decade hasn’t had, oddly, is a name. We could never seem to agree on one. Is it the Aughties? The Double-Zeroes? The Oh-Ohs? The 2K’s? The Zeds? It shouldn’t matter, except that it’s hard to wrap your arms around something when you don’t even know what to call it. “The ‘50s,” “the ‘60s”—for Americans, the terms conjure a specific, albeit oversimplified, portrait of those eras in America. But perhaps it’s fitting that this decade should remain stubbornly absent a name. It’s been too big, too vast, too cataclysmic, too transformative for just one.

And in any case, a decade is just an empty unit of time, arbitrarily walling off of events that exist both within and beyond them. They are mostly useful as a means to an end: when we get to the close of one decade, we use it as an excuse to indulge in two beloved pastimes, looking backward and making lists. As 2010 draws closer, Newsweek.com will be doing plenty of both. “NEWSWEEK 20/10” will commemorate the end of the decade by unveiling 20 top-10 lists over the next four weeks, each one surveying the past decade from a fresh perspective and featuring guest essays by some of the biggest names of the world, many of whom made the news they’ll be writing about. Additionally, thanks to a first-of-its-kind partnership with Facebook, NEWSWEEK is proud to offer readers the ability to reorder every one of the lists in “Newsweek 20/10.” It’s your chance to play along and tell us what we got wrong.

Along with our package of 20 lists, NEWSWEEK’s leading writers—a group that includes Fareed Zakaria on global affairs, Howard Fineman on U.S. politics, Daniel Gross on the economy, Sharon Begley on science, and Daniel Lyons on technology—will take turns over the coming days sharing “One Big Thought About the Decade.” We’ll also unveil a giant, decade-spanning slideshow, “120 Pictures, 120 Months,” in which our photography editors have chosen one picture to represent every month of the decade. (OK, technically, there are only 118 pictures because we haven’t gotten through the last two months of the decade yet. Once we get far enough into December, we promise to add in the 119th and 120th photographs in our series and complete the journey.) Finally, in the last week of November, we’ll wrap things up with a game of alternative history called “The Gore Decade,” in which a series of writers imagine what the last 10 years would’ve looked like if Al Gore had won the coin-flip election of 2000—essentially, a retrospective of the decade that didn’t happen. Hard money training

A British multiple sclerosis sufferer who hopes to die one day by assisted suicide will learn Thursday whether she can die with her husband by her side.

Debbie Purdy, 46, has been waging a lengthy legal battle to clarify Britain’s ambiguous laws on assisted suicide.

Her battle reaches its end Thursday afternoon when Britain’s highest court, the Law Lords, issues a ruling on her appeal.

Purdy’s condition is getting worse. She has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which means her symptoms deteriorate over time.

She has said she wants the option to travel abroad to have an assisted death should her condition one day become unbearable.

Britain’s current law makes it illegal to help someone commit suicide, and anyone found guilty faces up to 14 years in prison. But it doesn’t make clear at what point that person would face prosecution — whether that includes sitting with that person on the plane to the clinic, opening the door of the car to the airport, or even helping them arrange the trip. What’s your view? When is assisted suicide acceptable?

Purdy has said she wants to die next to her husband, Omar Puente. If she gets no clarity on the law, Purdy has said she will choose to die while her condition is still bearable, because that way she can make the trip unaided.

She would leave Puente behind so he would avoid prosecution, she has said. But that would mean Purdy would die alone.