Top Afghan Taliban leader arrested from Nowshera

WASHINGTON: Police in Nowshera arrested Maulvi Kabir, one of the top 10 most-wanted Taliban leaders and a former governor of Afghanistan’s Nangahar province, Fox News reported on its website on Sunday.

The channel, citing two unnamed senior US officials, said that police captured Kabir in Nowshera, NWFP.

The capture is a “significant detention”, a senior US military official in Afghanistan told Fox News.

Information leading to Kabir’s capture was obtained from Mullah Baradar, the Taliban’s second in command, whose arrest was announced on February 18 following a joint US-Pakistani operation, according to Fox.

Baradar’s capture has resulted in the arrests of several Taliban leaders – who the US officials told Fox were “shadow governors” that operated from Pakistan’s frontier and tribal regions.

The Pentagon announced that two other Taliban officials were arrested days after Baradar’s arrest. They have been identified as Mullah Abdul Salam, based in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, and Mullah Mir Muhammad, based in Baghlan province, The New York Times reported, citing Afghan officials. afp

Top Afghan Taliban leader arrested from Nowshera

Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home — one block can power the average European home. At least that’s the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that’s been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell. Bloom’s design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green “ink” on one side and a black “ink” on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities — a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks.

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