Deadly attack on Methodist church in Pakistan

A suicide bomb and gun attack on a Methodist church in Pakistan has killed at least five people, rep..

A suicide bomb and gun attack on a Methodist church in Pakistan has killed at least five people, reports say.

The attack happened in the city of Quetta, some 65km (40 miles) from the border with Afghanistan.

More than a dozen people were also wounded after gunmen wearing explosive vests tried to enter the building.

The two attackers were intercepted at the entrance, the region's home minister, Sarfaraz Bugti, said on Twitter.

Had the men not been stopped there could have been hundreds of casualties, he added.

One of the men detonated his bomb vest and the other was stopped in a gunfight with police.

Security forces are conducting a search operation and have surrounded the site of the attack, in the city's high-security zone, local Urdu-language TV channels report.

A spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry, Dr Mohammed Faisal, condemned the attack.

Skip Twitter post by @ForeignOfficePk

Attack of terrorists on Zarghoon road church in Quetta is condemned. Pakistan’s resolve against terrorism cannot be deterred by these cowardly acts.

— Dr Mohammad Faisal (@ForeignOfficePk) December 17, 2017

End of Twitter post by @ForeignOfficePk

Attacks in the mainly Sunni Muslim region are not uncommon, often targeting the Hazara Shia Muslim community in suicide bombings.

But Pakistan's Christian minority has also frequently been the subject of militant attacks, and guards had been placed near the church in Quetta as a result.

The Balochistan province is home to unrest from several groups with religious or separatist groups, some of which cross the border from nearby Afghanistan.

Original Article

BBC

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World

How to Build a Successful Business Without Social Media

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Nuclear annihilation just one miscalculation away, UN chief warns

The world is one misstep from devastating nuclear war and in peril not seen since the Cold War, the UN Secretary General has warned.

“We have been extraordinarily lucky so far,” Antonio Guterres said.

Amid rising global tensions, “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation”, he added.

His remarks came at the opening of a conference for countries signed up to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The 1968 deal was introduced after the Cuban missile crisis, an event often portrayed as the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. The treaty was designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, and to pursue the ultimate goal of complete nuclear disarmament.

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And he warned that those international tensions were “reaching new highs” – pointing specifically to the invasion of Ukraine, tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East as examples.

Russia was widely accused of escalating tensions when days after his invasion of Ukraine in February, President Vladimir Putin put Russia’s substantial nuclear forces on high alert.

He also threatened anyone standing in Russia’s way with consequences “you have never seen in your history”. Russia’s nuclear strategy includes the use of nuclear weapons if the state’s existence is under threat.

On Monday, Mr Putin wrote to the same non-proliferation conference Mr Guterres opened, declaring that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed”.

But Russia still found itself criticised at the NPT conference.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned what he called Russia’s sabre-rattling – and pointed out that Ukraine had handed over its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in 1994, after receiving assurances of its future security from Russia and others.

“What message does this send to any country around the world that may think that it needs to have nuclear weapons – to protect, to defend, to deter aggression against its sovereignty and independence?” he asked. “The worst possible message”.

Today, some 13,000 nuclear weapons are thought to remain in service in the arsenals of the nine nuclear-armed states – far lower than the estimated 60,000 stockpiled during the peak of the mid-1980s.

Read from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-62381425