The United States has spent nearly half a billion dollars and five years developing Afghanistan’s oil, gas and minerals industries — and has little to show for it, a government watchdog reported today.
President Obama says during a joint news conferee with Afghanistan's President that the U.S. will keep its 9,800 U.S. troops—half of which it had planned to remove in coming months—stationed in Afghanistan through 2015.
Bill Clinton spoke at a steak fry in Iowa Tuesday to campaign for Senator Tom Harkin, and covered wide ground, from previous elections to Haiti to the Affordable Care Act. Always fantastic to see Clinton's famous charisma in action.
Thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and spun America into a renewed decade of war, President Obama reflects on the time that has passed and the future generation growing up in the shadow of the day that changed America forever.
Twitter and some other social media outlets are trying to block the spread of gruesome images of the beheading of journalist James Foley by Islamic State militants, while a movement to deny his killers publicity is also gaining momentum. In a Tweet, CEO Dick Costolo said his company "is actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery," and he gave a link to a New York Times story about Foley's killing.
The kidnapping and brutal murders of three Israeli teenagers — the instigating event of this latest cycle of violence between Israel and Palestine — was immediately pinned on Hamas. New information now suggests that while it may have been a rogue cell of Hamas members, the troublesome political organization's leadership probably wasn't responsible for the heinous crime.
The prospect of the U.S. military returning to the fight in Iraq has turned congressional hawks into doves. Lawmakers who eagerly voted to authorize military force 12 years ago to oust Saddam Hussein and destroy weapons of mass destruction that were never found now harbor doubts that air strikes will turn back insurgents threatening Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government and Baghdad. Fears of Mideast quagmire and weariness after a decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan loom large for even those who talk tough on national security. More than 6,000 Americans died in those wars, which cost a trillion dollars.
A recent surveycompared what Americans wanted to do about the situation in Ukraine with their ability to locate Ukraine on a map. Only one in six placed Ukraine properly in southeastern Europe. Respondents put Ukraine all over Africa and Asia, even in Canada and in the U.S. The average answer was about 1800 miles off. Partisan voters on both sides did poorly compared to independents. The survey’s authors concluded, “The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.”
NATO releases a statement and video (on the flip) denouncing Russia's military action in the Ukraine. The Secretary General recalls previous treaties, as well as international law, in the organization's efforts to bring a peaceful resolution to the area's tensions.
