A major earthquake struck a region near the Iran-Pakistan border on Tuesday, killing 34 people in different parts of Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, officials said.

The worst-hit areas from the 7.8 magnitude quake were reported to be close to the Pakistan-Iran border.

Officials confirmed to Dawn.com that up to 34 people had died due to the Continue Reading…

A second successive bomb exploded Wednesday near a Shia Imambargah in Karachi where an explosion about half an hour earlier had killed at least two people.

The second explosion ripped close to the same location as police personnel and TV reporters were present at the site of the first blast.

The nature of the second blast and resulting casualties could Continue Reading…

AT least 47 young children were killed in Egypt after the bus carrying them to kindergarten collided with a speeding train.

The bus was carrying about 60 children, aged between four and six, from a nursery school when it was hit by a train near Manfalut, 230 miles south of Cairo.

It collided with the train as it drove through a railway crossing near Manfalut, a village near Assiut. All but two of the dead were children. A woman and the bus driver Continue Reading…

Gaza—Israel expanded its four-day assault on Gaza on Saturday, broadening its airstrikes from military targets to the civilian political infrastructure, levelling the headquarters here of the Hamas prime minister and striking police and security buildings.

Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel, including a pair intended for the city of Tel Aviv. One landed harmlessly, probably at sea; the other was thwarted in midair by Israel.

In Cairo, the leaders of Hamas, Turkey and Qatar gathered to try to broker a truce. Hamas officials were in indirect contact with Israel through Egyptian intelligence intermediaries, an official of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said.

The talks were reported to be deadlocked on Saturday evening, while continued attacks in Gaza and Israel, and Israeli preparations for a possible ground invasion, suggested that neither side was ready to end the fight.

The air raid that struck the office of the Hamas prime minister, Ismael Haniyeh, came about 4 a.m., reducing the four-story building where weekly cabinet meetings were held to a huge pile of rubble.

Three Palestinian flags that used to hang over the entryway were draped across the dusty mess, with datebooks and personnel records scattered about. Mr. Haniyeh’s gray-bearded face beamed from a page of a Hamas booklet promoting “the government’s achievements despite the obstacles.”

A security official, who asked to be identified only as Abu el Abed, took one of the fallen flags and replanted it upright. “We will rebuild this place as we have rebuilt others,” he said. “Every structure that is demolished or destroyed is a big loss, but the blood of anybody wounded is more important than any structure. This place will be rebuilt and the occupation will go and we will stay.”

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said government buildings had been targeted because Hamas “makes no distinction between its terrorist military machine and the government structure.”

“We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons,” Mr. Regev said.The Israeli military said that it had struck more than 200 targets overnight, including underground rocket launchers and smuggling tunnels in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border.

The military also said that it struck the police and homeland security headquarters of Hamas, as well as the house of a Hamas commander, Ahmed Randor.

Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for firing an Iranian-made rocket at Tel Aviv.

Israel appeared to be keeping up the pressure on military targets as well.—Agencies

Adding to the woes of thousands of people still reeling from Super storm Sandy’s blow, another significant storm hit already-ravaged New York and New Jersey states bringing in high winds, storm surge and snow in some areas.
The storm, termed as the Nor’easter, brought down tree limbs and electrical wires, and utilities in New York and New Jersey reported that nearly 60,000 customers Continue Reading…