Sunday, August 09, 2009 BEIJING: China's state news agency says a plane has been hijacked in the restive western region of Xinjiang, which was rocked by ethnic riots last month.China’s official News Agency did not give any details about the hijacking in a brief report Sunday.A man on duty at the government office in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, said he had not heard about the hijacking.The region saw the worst ethnic violence in China in decades last month when deadly rioting in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi killed 197people and injured more than 1,700, according to official count.The government said the violence was the work of terrorists, separatists and foreign forces as part of a plot to carve up China.
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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