Pakistani security forces on Saturday killed more than 60 militants in two districts of the country’s troubled northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, officials said.
Paramilitary Frontier Corps troops aided by helicopter gunships destroyed the headquarters of the pro-Taliban fighters in the Khyber tribal district and destroyed seven vehicles, a statement said.
The operation in Gogrina and Sanpal areas of Tirrah valley in the district killed at least 43 militants and injured several others, the Frontier Corps said.
The government launched an offensive earlier this week against Lashkar-e-Islam (Army of Islam), a guerrilla group active in the area and allegedly involved in numerous killings and kidnappings.
Rebel activity had increased with frequent attacks on the security forces and disruption of vital NATO supplies to the allied troops in Afghanistan, which pass through the area.
A suicide attack on Aug. 28 killed 22 tribal policemen as they were preparing to break the fast at the sunset.
The military on Thursday also destroyed an abandoned house of Lashkar-e-Islam leader Mangal Bagh, a hardline cleric and known facilitator of Taliban, who in the past had authorized a campaign of ruthless killings of his opponents.
Authorities vowed to continue the offensive until security was fully restored in the lawless district.
But similar commitments were made during military operations against local militants in the area last year, which failed to bring normalcy.
Separately, helicopter gunships and jets pounded rebel hideouts in the neighboring Orakzai tribal district.
“The aerial attack killed as many as 20 terrorists and destroyed their three hideouts,” said a local intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Orakzai district is the stronghold of the new leader of Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, who replaced Baitullah Mehsud after his death in US drone strike last month.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might