Thursday, November 05, 2009 LISBON: A strong 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck Wednesday hundreds of kilometres off Portugal's Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, US and Portuguese geologists said.The US Geological Survey said that the quake struck 445 kilometres (277 miles) south of the islands at a depth of 10 km at 4:41 pm (1841 GMT), but it was not felt in the region.The remote islands form a quake-prone Portuguese archipelago located some 1,500 kilometres from Lisbon and are home to some 240,000 Azoreans. "The event was not felt in the region," said the Azores's volcanic and seismic activity institute, CIVISA.
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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