Thursday, December 03, 2009 KABUL: Afghanistan's president says he is willing to talk with the Taliban chief in a bid to bring peace to the country.President Hamid Karzai said in an interview Thursday with a foreign news agency that he would do “whatever it takes” to bring peace, including meeting with Taliban leader Mullah Omar.But Karzai says he wants guarantees that the U.S. and its international partners are backing any peace bid. He says previous efforts at talks with the Taliban were undermined when ex-members of the hard-line movement were “harassed” by international forces even though they had quit the insurgency.Karzai says not all Taliban are terrorists but members of al-Qaida and other terror groups are not welcome in the country.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...
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