Report: Terror attacks up in Pakistan, Afghanistan

Terror attacks have spiked dramatically in Afghanistan and Pakistan as extremists in both countries strengthen their power and expand operations, according to a State Department report released Thursday. But the State Department annual terrorism report notes an overall decline in attacks worldwide and fewer attacks in Iraq. The attacks worldwide have decreased by 20 percent, with 30 percent fewer fatalities, said Russell Travers of the National Counterterrorism Center

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Analysis: What’s ahead for Obama in the next 100 days

After passing the 100 days benchmark, President Obama pushes on with a daunting task ahead of him: Tackling foreign and domestic issues while dealing with a Republican Party opposed to nearly all his major economic initiatives.

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Obama invites Mideast leaders for talks on ‘comprehensive peace’

President Obama is launching an effort "to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East," his spokesman said Tuesday. Obama has invited key regional leaders to Washington in the coming weeks for consultations on the peace process, Robert Gibbs said. Obama wants to meet separately with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Gibbs told reporters

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Why Obama Needs to Reveal Even More on Torture

So far, so good: The Administration was absolutely right to declassify the Department of Justice-CIA interrogation memos. The argument that the letters compromise national security does not hold water. As noted in the memos, the interrogations techniques are taken from the military’s escape and evasion training manuals, known as SERE — which in turn were taken from Chinese abusive interrogations used on our troops during the Korean War.

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Iran sentences U.S. journalist to 8 years

A U.S. journalist in Iran was sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage, her father, lawyer and news reports said Saturday — a sentence that prompted denunciation from the United States. Iranian media, including an Iranian judiciary source quoted Saturday by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, confirmed the sentence of Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old Iranian-American from North Dakota.

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Iraqi shoe-thrower’s jail sentence reduced by a third

Iraq’s federal appeals court has reduced the sentence for the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at then-President Bush at a news conference in December, his lawyer told CNN on Tuesday. Muntadhar al-Zaidi will serve one year in jail instead of three, the attorney said.

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