Washington, Sep 20 : A resurgent Taliban “has turned much of Afghanistan into ‘No Go’ zones for aid workers and civilians”, according to a new report.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report says that the security situation in Afghanistan is assessed by most analysts as having deteriorated at a constant rate through 2007.

Statistics show that although the numbers of incidents are higher than comparable periods in 2006, they show the same seasonal pattern.

The nature of the incidents has, however, changed considerably since last year, with high numbers of armed clashes in the field giving way to a combination of armed clashes and asymmetric attacks countrywide.

Washington, Sep 20: Congressman Edward J Markey has slammed the US State Department for its misleading Senate testimony on the Indo-US civil nuclear deal.

Markey, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and founder of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Non-proliferation, said in a statement that President Bush’s State Department continued its three-year campaign to undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by ignoring glaring non-proliferation problems with the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Washington, September 20 : NASA''s Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected, designated GRB 080913, which arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion light-years away. 

"This is the most amazing burst Swift has seen," said the mission''s lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA''s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It''s coming to us from near the edge of the visible universe," he added.

Because light moves at finite speed, looking farther into the universe means looking back in time.

GRB 080913''s "lookback time" reveals that the burst occurred less than 825 million years after the universe began.

Peshawar, Sep 20 : Increasing home-grown militancy, mounting American frustration at the continued Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and militant ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas will dominate President Asif Ali Zardari’s maiden address to the joint session of parliament in Islamabad today.

New York, Sept. 20: Republican presidential candidate John McCain has launched another broadside against Democratic rival Barack Obama.

Using his starkest language to date in the run-up to the November 4 presidential poll, McCain on Friday repeatedly asked the American voter to make a choice between “Country First” or “Obama First”

Lahore, Sep 20: A long-delayed plan to send dozens of US military advisers to Pakistan to train the Pakistani Army in counter-insurgency could begin in a matter of weeks on a training base north of Peshawar under a new agreement.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen as saying that the US and Pakistan had cleared the remaining obstacles to the arrival of the advisers.

Washington has been urging the Pakistani military to accept the training team for months, the report said. However, Pakistan has resisted such advice, and asked for additional weaponry and equipment that the paper said “some US officials believe is best suited for its standoff with regional rival India”.