Saturday, October 25, 2008 SANAA: At least 14 people have drowned and around 35 are missing in Yemen after torrential rain left swathes of the impoverished country underwater, officials said on Saturday.At least 500 homes have been damaged and hundreds of families displaced by the floods that swept the south-eastern provinces of Hadramout and Mahra following 30 hours of heavy rainfall, they said.Yemeni authorities have declared the eastern provinces to be a disaster area and President Ali Abdullah Saleh visited some of the worst hit areas on Friday.
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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