Tag: Evening Edition

In an interview with two US newspapers published Friday, Panetta said the Iraqis appeared to have made up their mind to extend the presence of American troops beyond the year-end withdrawal deadline.

“My view is that they finally did say, ‘Yes,'” Panetta told Stars and Stripes and the Military Times.

Stung by a second failed marriage and looking for a way to boost his flagging career, the singer-songwriter holed up at home on Long Island and was contemplating a new direction when a friend gave him a tape of South African “township jive”.

A smitten Simon ventured to South Africa to catch up with the musicians, spending weeks recording with them as a global movement gelled against the racial segregation system known as apartheid.

President Barack Obama’s stern message led a chorus of similar calls from Western powers in a sharp escalation of pressure for Assad to halt a bloody five-month crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising inspired by the Arab Spring.

“We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” Obama said.

Ten years later, analysts say, America has not fully recovered its standing as a steadfast defender of liberty and fierce protector of the rule of law, handing Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda at least a partial victory.

Critics accused president George W. Bush of riding roughshod over civil liberties, signing off on torture, extraordinary rendition and warrantless surveillance as he waged his “war on terror” no matter what the cost.

The horror unleashed in New York and Washington traumatized the public and sparked a “war on terror” that would stretch the legal system, send American soldiers to die in Muslim lands and eventually drain US global power.

In anguished days of mourning after September 11, the phrase “everything has changed” seemed on everyone’s lips as the country united, then went to war, starting with bin Laden’s Afghan lair.

The ex-Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize winner said on the eve of the failed plot’s 20th anniversary that Bush had relayed the message in a telephone conversation amid signs of Communist Party discontent with liberal reforms.

The revelation came in a wide-ranging newspaper interview in which the 80-year-old Gorbachev again lamented his inability to save the Soviet empire from disintegration and blasted his democratic rival Boris Yeltsin.

Obama and Saudi King Abdullah in a telephone call expressed their “shared, deep concerns about the Syrian government’s use of violence against its citizens,” the White House said.

“They agreed that the Syrian regime’s brutal campaign of violence against the Syrian people must end immediately.”

“We’ve reached a compromise with USAID through the United Nations” to allow the continuation of aid, which was suspended by Washington on Friday, the official of the Islamist movement controlling the Palestinian enclave told AFP.

Hamas, as a result of the agreement, renounces for a “three-month period” its demand to verify the accounts of NGOs financed by the US Agency for International Development in the Palestinian territories, he said.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Egypt, tensions between Washington and the country’s ruling generals were sparked on news that a notorious Egyptian intelligence apparatus is probing foreign funding of civil society groups.

“We deeply regret that USAID-funded partner organisations operating in Gaza are forced by Hamas?s actions to suspend their assistance work,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Slower exports helped expand the country’s foreign trade deficit to $53.1 billion, the widest shortfall in more than two and a half years, despite easing oil prices and government efforts to close the gap, the Commerce Department said.

The trade gap was much bigger than expected by most analysts, who penciled in an average estimate of $48.0 billion, on a seasonally adjusted basis.