Tuesday, July 28, 2009 BRUSSELS: The United States is setting up a task force to investigate how money is reaching insurgents in Afghanistan, much of it from within the Gulf states, a US regional envoy said Tuesday. "This is a huge problem, and we are forming up a task force to work on this in which Treasury (Department) will take the lead," US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels. He said the Pentagon, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other "relevant agencies" would be involved. While he would not mention any figures, Holbrooke said: "More money is coming from the Gulf than is coming from the drug trade to the Taliban." NATO and US forces are battling Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters and their backers in Afghanistan, with substantial income from the illicit opium trade being used to finance their insurgency. Holbrooke said the money "is coming in from sympathisers all over the world, with the bulk of it appearing to come from the Gulf", although he said there was no evidence that governments were bankrolling the efforts. "There are a lot of ways that money flows. People carry it in suitcases," he said, after talks here with NATO, EU and Belgian government officials. "Money is probably coming from sympathisers in western Europe as well." "It's such a daunting issue," he added. Holbrooke said he believed the fundamentalist Taliban movement was using drug money to fund fighting in the so-called Pashtun belt, but that the wider insurgency effort was being financed from outside.
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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