U.S. President Barack Obama is in Afghanistan on an unannounced visit that is expected to last several hours. Mr. Obama landed at the Bagram military base north of Kabul Sunday and was flown by helicopter to the presidential palace for meetings with Afghan Preisent Hamid Karzai and other top officials.
He also planned to meet U.S. military officers and troops for a briefing on the offensive against Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan.
U.S. National Security Advisor James Jones told reporters that Mr. Obama is meeting with President Karzai to impress on him the need to "battle the things that have not been paid attention to almost since day one." General Jones did not elaborate, but U.S. officials have pushed for stronger Afghan government efforts against corruption and drugs, and to build credible government services.
Mounting anger at the Catholic Church’s failure to act on predatory priests in the US, Europe and Mexico has plunged the papacy into an institutional crisis described by an American Catholic newspaper last week as “the largest in centuries”.
Former pupils of a U.S. Catholic priest who molested up to 200 deaf schoolboys have spoken out about his offences after four decades of silence.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel's defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal.
More than seven years ago, a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison. Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.
When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security....When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.
The Pentagon was overwhelmed by the number of applicants, which had grown from an average of about 10,000 a month to 70,000 in January alone as the nation's economy continued to sputter. Money for the Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts program, known as MyCAA, was rapidly running out. Rather than ask Congress for more cash, Pentagon officials decided to close the program to new applicants and stop payments to those who were already enrolled.
Of all the illnesses people fear might be caused by toxic dust from the World Trade Center, nothing scares people like cancer. Hundreds of people are suing New York City over cancer diagnoses they received after working at ground zero.
Humans have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes on the planet that we may be ushering in a new period of geological history.Through pollution, population growth, urbanisation, travel, mining and use of fossil fuels we have altered the planet in ways which will be felt for millions of years, experts believe.
