President Obama's plan to carry out a new round of nuclear-warhead cuts will be announced soon, U.S. officials say.
Two key national security nominations by President Obama are up for confirmation following Congress' recess this week: former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense, and John O. Brennan, the president's key counterterrorism adviser, to be the director of the CIA.
The optimism surrounding the Arab Spring is giving way to fears of the next revolution. Daily, people around the world watch the triumph of bringing down Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak descend into pitched battles between secular protesters and an increasingly alienated government run by elements of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The U.S. ambassador to Egypt was alarmed as she watched Egyptians mark the second anniversary of the ouster of an autocratic leader with riots in the streets against the new Islamist-led government.
Last week, 25 Republican senators wrote a letter to a former member of their caucus and the man President Obama wants to lead the Defense Department, demanding full disclosure of his financial dealings. To date, Sen. Chuck Hagel has demonstrated afresh his contempt for the legislature by declining to do so.
On her way out the door, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the unspeakable, literally. Until last month, when she repeatedly warned in congressional testimony concerning the Benghazi debacle that we confront a "global jihadist threat," the Obama administration did not allow the use of the words jihad and threat in the same sentence.
Thousands of protesters denouncing Egypt's Islamist president marched on his palace in Cairo on Friday, clashing with security forces firing tear gas and water cannons in the eighth day of the country's wave of political violence.
As Egypt continues its tumultuous transition to democracy two years after the Arab Spring swept strongman President Hosni Mubarak from power, Washington must weigh its next moves carefully.
Bin Laden, the al Qaeda terrorist leader, issued his "fatwa" only seven months before the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed on Aug. 7, 1998. The United States could have increased our security measures everywhere, yet Washington remained unprepared to avoid the disastrous destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
