Vietnam veteran dead

WASHINGTON: Robert S McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defense who was vilified for prosecuting the Vietnam War, then devoted himself to helping the world’s poorest nations, died Monday. He was 93. McNamara died at 0930 GMT at his home, said his wife Diana. For all his healing efforts, McNamara, who was ailing for a while, was fundamentally associated with the Vietnam War. — AP

4 NATO soldiers dead

MAZAR-I-SHARIF: Four NATO soldiers and two elderly Afghan men were killed in a bomb blast outside the northern town of Kunduz on Monday, police said. A senior Afghan intelligence official said the four were Americans but the US military and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would not comment on their nationalities. “I can confirm that four ISAF soldiers were killed,” an ISAF officer said on condition of anonymity. They died “due to an improvised bomb explosion in northern Afghanistan.” Their vehicles were hit by a blast as they crossed over a bridge while travelling by convoy in Kunduz province’s Khan Abad district, provincial intelligence Chief General Abdul Majid Azimi said. — AFP

Crash victim’s body?

NAIROBI: A Comoran official says a body has been found in the Indian Ocean but it is not related to the Yemenia Airways plane crash that killed 152 people last week. A search and rescue official says a body was found on Sunday off the island of Anjouan. But Ali Abou Abasse said if the body was from the plane crash currents would have carried it to a different location. A Yemeni official had suggested the body might be from the plane. A 12-year-old-girl was the sole survivor of the plane that crashed on Tuesday into the Indian Ocean as it tried to land in the Comoros. The French aviation agency BEA said the signal beacons from the plane’s two black boxes have been heard by a submarine. — AP

Bible’s digital reunion

LONDON: The British Library says the surviving pages of the world’s oldest Christian Bible have been reunited — digitally. The library says the early work known as the Codex Sinaiticus had been housed in four separate locations across the world for more than 150 years. It became available Monday for perusal on the Web at www.codexsinaiticus.org so scholars and others can get a closer look. The library says the work will allow scholars to further study the “unique treasure.” The project united organizations from Great Britain, Germany, Russia and Egypt. Each possessed parts of the 1,600-year-old manuscript. They worked together to publish new research into the history of the Codex and transcribed 650,000 words during a four-year period. — AP