London, Sept. 20: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Daily Show last night that his decision to send British troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, had a lot to do with his equation with U. S. President George W Bush.

When interviewer Jon Stewart, said to Blair: "Your relationship with George Bush seems inexplicable," Blair replied: "Here's something I find always goes down well, particularly back home: I like him."

Stewart retorted: "I would probably like him too, if he wasn't in charge of me."

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”