Taliban says targets Cheney in Afghan suicide blast
By Caren Bohan, Reuters, 27 February 2007
KABUL – A Taliban suicide bomber killed up to 12 people at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday in an attack the rebels said was aimed at Dick Cheney, but the visiting U.S. vice president was not hurt.
An American and South Korea soldier were killed, as well as a U.S. government contractor whose nationality was unknown, NATO and Korean officials said. NATO said 27 people were wounded.
A Reuters photographer at the scene at Bagram Airbase, 60 km (40 miles) north of Kabul, saw eight bodies in addition to NATO’s tally of four dead, putting the toll at 12.
“We wanted to target … Cheney,” Taliban spokesman Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location.
Wall St. Tumble Adds to Worries About Economies
By FLOYD NORRIS and JEREMY W. PETERS, New York Times, 27 February 2007
Stock markets around the world plummeted Tuesday in a wave of selling set off by a plunge in China.
Asian Markets Fall Again on Worries About U.S. Economy
By KEITH BRADSHER, New York Times, 28 February 2007
HONG KONG, Feb. 28 — Stock markets fell sharply across most of Asia on Wednesday morning.
But most of the worries were not about China, which started a global sell-off on Tuesday, but about the strength of the American economy and the continued willingness of international investors to keep buying shares far from home.
U.S. Set to Join Iran and Syria in Talks on Iraq
By HELENE COOPER and KIRK SEMPLE, New York Times, 28 February 2007
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.
The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.
The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush’s avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.