A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of US contract workers and military personnel in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul today, killing at least four civilians, officials said. A soldier opened fire on the crowd after the attack, killing one civilian.

TENS of millions of dollars have been wasted in Iraq reconstruction aid, some of it on an Olympic-sized swimming pool ordered by Iraqi officials for a police academy that has yet to be used, investigators say.

The US government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.

A British soldier was wounded in a roadside bombing today in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Iraqi insurgents carried out two dramatic ambushes yesterday, killing 11 people including two American civilians in a roadside bombing in Basra and an attack on an Iraqi convoy in Baghdad.

A roadside bomb targeted a convoy carrying a US security team in the southern Iraqi city of Basra today, killing two American civilians and seriously wounding a third, the US Embassy said in a statement.

A United States drug fumigation plane was shot down by rebels in north-eastern Colombia today and its Colombian pilot was killed, police said.

At least 16 people, many of them children, were killed in explosions at the office of a US security contractor in Afghanistan’s capital and a school in the south east as the country moves towards its first post-Taliban election.

A powerful explosion wrecked an office of an American security house in Kabul today, killing up to six people, officials said.

A United States officer was in serious condition today after a Jordanian policeman shot into a group of United Nations police officers in a prison compound in Kosovo, killing two American women before being fatally shot in the ensuing gun battle.