TEGUCIGALPA: A powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook Honduras on Thursday, killing at least six people, knocking down flimsy homes and causing damage in neighboring Guatemala.The offshore quake destroyed some 60 houses and damaged scores of other buildings across the north of Honduras, a poor country of 7 million people, and briefly triggered a tsunami alert for Central America's Caribbean coast. Emergency services officials said six people died and at least 25 were injured in the earthquake but the toll could rise as reports come in from poor villages in the mountainous area along the coast."It is not alarming, it is not a calamity. For the type ofearthquake it was, the damage is minor," Honduran PresidentManuel Zelaya told local radio.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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