
OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: US Vice President Joe Biden began a visit to Israel and the West Bank , assuring Israelis in a newspaper interview that Washington would close ranks with them against any threat from a nuclear-armed Iran.
Biden, the most senior US official to visit Israel since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, is widely [...]
March 9, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The 36-year-old California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon police drove cross-country and arrived outside the military headquarters armed with two semiautomatic weapons, authorities said Friday. Internet postings linked to the lone shoot
March 6, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The US military still plays too dominant a role in American foreign policy and Washington needs to place a higher priority on diplomacy and “soft power”, the top American military officer said on Wednesday.
The military is a vital tool of national power but “should never be the only tool”, Admiral Mike Mullen said in [...]

WASHINGTON: A 9/11 conspiracy theorist walked up to two policemen at the Pentagon yesterday, pulled out a handgun and opened fire at point-blank range.
The man, named as John Patrick Bedell, 36, injured the police officers near a busy commuter rail station on the site but was shot and died from his injuries hours later.
The Pentagon [...]
March 6, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: White House advisers are nearing a recommendation for President Barack Obama to choose a military trial for self-professed Sept. 11, 2001 attacks mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four of his alleged henchman, senior administration officials.
The review of where and how to hold a Sept. 11 trial is not over, so no recommendation is yet [...]
March 5, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama declared for the first time yesterday that he was prepared to steamroller his troubled health reform legislation through Congress with only Democratic support; a move Republicans denounced as the “nuclear option”.
Signalling that his patience had snapped after a year-long fight, Mr Obama laid the ground for Democrats in Congress to [...]
March 4, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The US government has decided to establish a Quick Reaction Force for the protection of its diplomatic missions in Pakistan.
The step has been taken in order to meet the increased terrorist threats to US personnel in Pakistan.
The Statesmen has learnt that the US Congress has been requested to allocate US$ 22.9 million for the [...]

SANTIAGO: The official death toll for Chile’s devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami jumped on Sunday to 708, President Michelle Bachelet told journalists here.
The toll is expected to rise, she said after a meeting with top emergency officials, as “there are a growing number of missing persons”.
At least 541 of the deaths were in the Maule [...]
February 27, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The Obama administration is sharply expanding American weapons sales to both India and Pakistan in a bid to forge “closer ties with each country”, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The newspaper noted that although the US had stayed out of the Indo-Pak rift, it was pursuing deals with both to strengthen its relationship [...]
February 26, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The NATO military alliance and Russia face a common threat emanating from the Pak-Afghan border and have agreed to make joint efforts to deal with it, says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In a speech at an international seminar in Washington on revising NATO’s mission for the 21st century, Secretary Clinton also urged Russia [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
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BOGOTA: A shouting match between Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has led to the creation of a new mechanism for airing issues between the hostile neighbours, officials said on Tuesday.
President Chavez nearly stormed out of a summit in Cancun, Mexico on Monday during a private meeting with heads of state after president Uribe [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK: The number of US soldiers who have died in the US ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq has reached 5,385 while US casualities in Afghanistan alone hit 1,000, according to an independent website, a grim milestone in the conflict launched more than eight years ago.
The icasualties.org website, which tracks military deaths in [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: At a closed briefing in 2003, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee raised no objection to a C.I.A. plan to destroy videotapes of brutal interrogations, according to secret documents released Monday.
The senator, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, also rejected a proposal to have his committee conduct its own assessment of the agency’s harsh [...]

WASHINGTON: The United States is not looking to re-open a key military base in Uzbekistan that was shut in 2005 in a diplomatic row, a US envoy said on Sunday as he ended a rapid tour of former Soviet Central Asia.
Uzbekistan, which shares a border with Afghanistan, evicted US troops from the Karshi-Khanabad base after [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
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The volatile Afghan province of Kandahar will be the next focus of the new, more sensitive approach to fighting the Taliban, the top US commander in the country has said.
US and British forces are implementing an Afghan-led strategy in an offensive launched ten days ago in neighbouring Helmand province, according to General Stanley McChrystal. He [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The arrest of the Taliban military chief in Karachi should be seen in the context of Pakistan’s overall commitment to fight religious extremists, the commander of the US Central Command said in an interview with NBC television on Sunday.
Gen David H. Petraeus, the head of the United States Central Command, said Sunday that the [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: The CIA wants Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar transferred to an American prison near Kabul for interrogation, US officials said.
The Taliban military chief, who was captured in Karachi earlier this month, is in Pakistan’s custody and is being interrogated mainly by ISI officials, but CIA representatives also have participated in some of these sessions.
Senior US [...]
February 21, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: Both India and Pakistan have shown political courage in deciding to hold their peace talks as scheduled despite a terrorist attack last week, which aimed at derailing the peace move, says the US State Department.
The foreign secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan are scheduled to be held in New Delhi on February 25.
But days [...]
February 20, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: Pakistan allowed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to set up a post in Karachi and the data collected by this post led to the arrest of a key Taliban commander and two ‘governors’, officials said.
Describing this as “a high-level of cooperation between the United States and Pakistan,” The Washington Post reported on Friday [...]
February 20, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama has reviewed the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan with his senior officials and diplomats as his administration continues a two-pronged offensive to subdue militants in that region.
The new approach includes a major military offensive in southern Afghanistan and a US-led process to encourage repentant Taliban activists to join the Afghan [...]
February 19, 2010 | Posted in
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