Kabul – A suicide bomber wearing an Afghan border policeman’s uniform blew himself up Thursday at a U.S. base near the Pakistani frontier, wounding five Americans, an Afghan official said. The spokesman for Paktia province, Roullah Samoun, said the attack occurred after sundown in a barracks at a U.S. facility in the Dand aw Patan district [...]

India – The 26/11 Mumbai attacks accused Fahim Ansari’s lawyer Shahid Azmi was shot dead at his office in suburban Kurla, police said. Four assailants barged into his office in Taxi Men colony in Kurla and shot two bullets into him at point blank range, they said. He was rushed to Rajawadi Hospital in Ghatkopar where he [...]

New York, NY – New Yorkers better think twice before screening calls from area code (929) — the digits have recently be assigned to the existing (718) and (347) area codes serving the city’s outer boroughs. The code, which is already in effect, serves mainly the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Forecasters estimate that numbering [...]

Pennsylvania – A spokesman says Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine Corps officer who became an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 77. He had been suffering complications from gallbladder surgery. In 1974, Murtha became the first combat veteran of the Vietnam War elected to Congress. He wielded considerable [...]

New York, NY – A plan by New York City to fight blight by buying up foreclosed homes has been moving more slowly than expected. The city announced a year ago that it would spend $24 million in emergency federal funds to buy 115 foreclosed homes, fix them up and resell them. But the New York Daily [...]

Kiev, Ukraine – After the bitter Ukraine presidential campaign to an ugly turn this week with leaflets accusing Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of being Jewish and encouraging voters not to cast their ballots for her, as was reported here on VIN News, exit polls now predict that Viktor Yanukovych has beaten Yulia Tymoshenko in the [...]

Cedar Rapids, IA – A federal judge in Cedar Rapids has sentenced a former Agriprocessors, Inc., employee to one year of probation for helping to hire illegal aliens at the kosher slaughterhouse in Postville. U.S. Magistrate Judge Jon Stuart Scoles imposed the sentence Friday on 31-year-old Karina Freund of Fayette. Freund, who was an employee in the [...]

London – Prime Minister Gordon Brown says the record number of anti-Semitic incidents across Britain last year is deeply troubling and has called on Britons to exercise greater vigilance. Brown’s comments come as the Community Security Trust reported that 2009 was the worst year for anti-Semitic incidents in Britain since the Jewish group first began tracking [...]