The United States and Israel raised hopes Thursday for a restart of the Middle East peace process, despite little tangible progress so far from U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry's 2-month-old effort to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
The United States and several key allies sought Wednesday a strategy to end Syria's civil war, their united efforts unable at the moment to stem the Assad regime's military gains and Washington still unwilling to join those providing the rebels with lethal military aid.
Former IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman's testimony that he deliberately kept himself in the dark about the tax service's brewing scandal runs counter to the responsibilities of agency heads regardless of whether they are political appointees, some government analysts said.
Lawmakers are seeking to prohibit the United States from removing missile defense equipment from East Asia, even if the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea is eliminated.
The U.S. ambassador to India is urging business executives to press politicians to lift trade barriers and encourage foreign investment to raise the country out of the grinding poverty that infects most of its 1.2 billion people.
The Obama administration responded cautiously to the very public detention, then release by Russian authorities, of an American diplomat accused of spying in Moscow, saying that the U.S. remains committed to close relations with Russia and downplaying the possibility of retaliation against Russian intelligence agents in the U.S.
In a letter written Friday and released to the public Monday, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed concern to Secretary of State John F. Kerry over "harassment and abuse" that Chinese authorities are believed to be inflicting on family members to Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese activist living in the United States.
As he struggles to find momentum in his second term, President Obama is setting a dubious record for the slowest pace in assembling a new Cabinet.
Parents whose spouses flee overseas with their children called Thursday for the federal government to put sanctions on countries that don't help get those children returned, saying it should be considered a human-trafficking issue, not merely a family dispute.
