Washington: President Barack Obama outlined plans on Thursday to limit the use of US drone strikes against extremists abroad and took steps aimed at breaking a deadlock on closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison.
In a major foreign policy speech after two weeks of fending off domestic scandals, Obama limited the scope of what his predecessor, George W Bush, had called a global war on terror after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
"Our nation is still threatened by terrorists," Obama said at Washington's National Defense University. "We must recognize however, that the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11."
Faced with criticism about the morality of using unmanned aerial vehicles to wage war in distant lands, Obama said the United States will only use drone strikes when a threat is imminent, a nuanced change from the previous policy of launching strikes against a significant threat....
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02:46 AM, May 24, 2013
Dubai: A major 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Iran near the border with Pakistan on Tuesday and tremors were felt in India and Gulf states. The US Geological Survey said the quake hit at 10:44 GMT at a depth of 15.2 km (9.4 miles). The epicenter was in southeast Iran in an area of mountains and desert. It was located 201 km (125 miles) southeast of the Iranian city of Zahedan...
05:19 PM, Apr 16, 2013
Tehran: A 6.1 magnitude earthquake killed at least 37 and injured hundreds more in a sparsely populated area in southern Iran on Wednesday, Iranian officials said, adding that it did not damage a nuclear plant in the region. The report said the earthquake struck the town of Kaki some 96 kilometres southeast of Bushehr, a town on the Persian Gulf that is home of Iran's first nuclear power plant, built...
10:10 AM, Apr 10, 2013
Tehran: At least 32 people were killed and 850 injured when an earthquake, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, hit Iran's Bushehr province on Tuesday. According to Iran's Seismological Centre, the city was later hit by 13 aftershocks. The temblor, having its epicentre at a depth of 12 km, struck Kaki city of the province in the afternoon, Xinhua reported. Bushehr province's governor Fereidoon Hassanvand said some 700 buildings were...
02:40 AM, Apr 10, 2013
Bushehr (Iran): An earthquake measuring magnitude 6.3 struck on Tuesday 89 km (55 miles) southeast of the city of Bushehr in Iran, where the country's only nuclear power station is located, the US Geological Survey (USGS) reported. The Iranian Seismological Centre at the University of Tehran reported a quake of 6.1 magnitude whose epicenter was Kaki, around 60 miles south of Bushehr, a port city on the Gulf. Witnesses felt...
06:35 PM, Apr 09, 2013
Bushnell's book "Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent," doesn't provide intimate details about what Jobs was like after he dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., and went to work as a technician in 1974 at Atari in Los Gatos, California. ...
01:05 PM, Mar 28, 2013
Sunday, March 17, marks 10 years since the beginning of the Iraq war, during which the NATO forces overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein after a brutal conflict. ...
08:22 AM, Mar 17, 2013
A hacker apparently accessed private photos and emails sent between members of the Bush family, including both former presidents, and a spokesman for George HW Bush said a criminal investigation is underway. ...
11:01 PM, Feb 08, 2013
CIA Director-designate John Brennan strongly defended anti-terror attacks by unmanned drones on February 7 under close questioning at a protest-disrupted confirmation hearing. On a second controversial topic, he said that after reading a classified intelligence report on harsh interrogation techniques, he does not know if waterboarding has yielded useful information. ...
12:05 PM, Feb 08, 2013
It's a clash of the titans at the box-office this Friday as 'Vishwaroop', the Hindi version of Kamal Haasan's controversial Tamil film 'Vishwaroopam', hits the Indian screens along with Deepa Mehta's 'Midnight's Children', based on Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning controversial novel of the same name. ...
10:09 AM, Jan 29, 2013
Former US President George HW Bush, who has been hospitalized in Houston since November, may be released from the facility in the coming days, a family spokesman said on Sunday. "We are hopeful that the president can be discharged this coming week, but we're still taking everything one day at a time," spokesman Jim McGrath said in an email. ...
10:20 AM, Jan 14, 2013
The demonisation of the financial industry is not limited to the US. It's a global phenomenon. In the US, the need to bail out the banking industry was a very difficult political decision for Democrats in particular. The entire country was suffering in the recession. ...
04:10 PM, Jan 03, 2013
The US Congress has approved a five year extension of sweeping Surveillance laws to allow American spy agencies to wire-tap suspicious foreign citizens without warrants. The classified George Bush era Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was approved Friday by the Senate by a 73-23 vote after lawmakers shot down attempts to add oversight and transparency safeguard clauses. ...
03:22 PM, Dec 29, 2012
Truth is, retired Gen H Norman Schwarzkopf didn't care much for his popular "Stormin' Norman" nickname. The seemingly no-nonsense Desert Storm commander's reputed temper with aides and subordinates supposedly earned him that rough-and-ready moniker. But others around the general, who died Thursday in Tampa, Fla, at age 78 of complications from pneumonia, knew him as a friendly, talkative and even jovial figure who preferred the somewhat milder sobriquet given by...
03:38 PM, Dec 28, 2012
President Barack Obama and lawmakers are launching a last-chance round of budget talks days before a New Year's deadline to reach a deal or watch the economy go off a "fiscal cliff." Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will meet congressional leaders from both parties at the White House on December 28 at 3 pm EST to try to revive negotiations to avoid tax hikes and spending cuts - together...
12:02 PM, Dec 28, 2012
Former President George HW Bush has been admitted to the intensive care unit at a Houston hospital "following a series of setbacks including a persistent fever," but he is alert and talking to medical staff, his spokesman said on December 26. Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston, said in a brief email that Bush was admitted to the ICU at Methodist Hospital on December 23. He said doctors are cautiously...
01:47 PM, Dec 27, 2012
United Nations: Six Indian peacekeepers and a local interpreter, serving with the United Nations mission in strife-torn Congo, were wounded when their patrol was ambushed in what is being termed as a "targetted and deliberate" attack. The six peacekeepers were part of the Indian contingent serving with the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO). They were ambushed along with their interpreter while returning from a patrol...
09:56 AM, Oct 19, 2012
New York: Months before the 9/11 attacks, former US president George Bush had received multiple briefings by intelligence agencies warning of an "imminent" attack on US soil by al Qaeda but he did not take prompt action that could have prevented the tragedy, an op-ed in 'The New York Times' said on Wednesday. Former reporter for the news daily Kurt Eichenwald said Bush had begun to get "direct warnings" about...
10:18 AM, Sep 12, 2012
Miami: He's the non-candidate they never stop talking about. Ever since Jeb Bush left the Florida governor's mansion in 2007 with favourable ratings after two terms, speculation has swirled about his political future. The chatter has only gotten louder this year amid the Republican Party's "veepstakes" - despite Bush's repeated insistence that he is not in the running. Bush appeared to put the issue to rest in a recent series...
10:31 PM, Jun 23, 2012
