An Afghan woman has been strangled to death, apparently by
her husband, who was upset that she gave birth to a second
daughter rather than the son he wanted, police say.
France has threatened to pull out early from the NATO-led war
in Afghanistan after a rogue Afghan soldier opened fire on
French soldiers, killing four and wounding about 15 others.
Avalanches have killed at least 29 people in Afghanistan's
mountainous northeast as rescuers struggled to reach the
worst-hit areas cut off by heavy snows, officials said.
A suicide attack has killed dozens of Shi'ite Muslims at a
crowded Kabul shrine, and four died in a smaller blast in a
key northern city in the worst sectarian violence Afghanistan
has seen since the fall of the Taliban.
Afghanistan's intelligence agency says it has thwarted a plot
to assassinate President Hamid Karzai after arresting a
bodyguard and five people with links to the Haqqani network
and al-Qaeda.
Gunmen killed eight policemen at checkpoint in southern
Afghanistan on Wednesday, while the United Nations said the
average number of armed clashes, roadside bombings and other
violence in the country each month is running 39 percent
higher in 2011 than in last year.
A Taliban suicide bomber has killed Burhanuddin Rabbani,
former Afghan president and head of a council tasked with
trying to negotiate a political end to the war, in what
analysts called a blow to peace efforts.
Writing recently in the Washington Post, Brian Michael
Jenkins, a senior adviser at the Rand Corporation think tank,
claimed that the 9/11 attacks 10 years ago were not a
strategic success for al Qaeda.
Six suicide bombers have attacked a governor's security
meeting in one of Afghanistan's most secure provinces,
killing 22 people and driving home the point that the Taliban
is able to strike at will virtually anywhere in the country.
