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out bottled water.
• "We're so grateful for these donations," said Ji Yanzi, who was loading cartons of bottled water on to a three-wheeled vehicle to take to her family of 10, including aging parents. "At this point, we don't have much except a tent we made ourselves and some food we were able to pull out from our apartment."
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Taliban take 9 hostages, including 8 Turks, after emergency helicopter landing in Afghanistan
• KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A Turkish civilian helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing in a Taliban-controlled area of eastern Afghanistan, and the insurgents took all nine people aboard the aircraft hostage, including eight Turks, officials said Monday.
• The transport helicopter landed in strong winds and heavy rain on Sunday in a village in the Azra district of Logar province, southeast of Kabul and 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Pakistan border, said district governor Hamidullah Hamid.
• Taliban fighters then captured all nine aboard the helicopter and took them from the area, Hamid told The Associated Press. He said most of the nine civilian hostages are Turks but that one is an Afghan translator.
• In Ankara, a spokesman at Turkey's Foreign Ministry told the AP that there were eight Turks aboard the helicopter but did not know if it also was carrying other civilians or what their nationalities were. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with ministry regulations, had no information about the condition of the civilians.
• Turkey's semi-official Anadolu news agency quoted Logar Deputy Police Chief Resishan Sadik Abdurrahminzey as saying that "a large number" of policemen were being sent to the region to rescue the hostages.
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Air traffic controllers furloughed as government cuts kick in; some flight delays show up
• Commercial airline flights moved smoothly throughout most of the country on Sunday, the first day air traffic controllers were subject to furloughs resulting from government spending cuts, though some delays appeared in the late evening in and around New York. And even though the nightmarish flight delays and cancellations that the airline industry predicted would result from the furloughs did not materialize yet, the real test will come Monday, when traffic ramps up.
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