IRAQ

President Barack Obama on Monday proposed spending almost $110 billion on Afghanistan, signaling little let-up in the U.S. war drive despite demands for tougher spending controls at home.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates played down the accuracy of troop figures outlined in a budget request unveiled on Monday, saying the pace of the upcoming drawdown in Afghanistan was still unclear.

President Barack Obama proposed a budget on Monday that would cut the U.S. deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years, setting the stage for a bitter fight with Republicans who vow even tougher spending controls.

Donald Trump Vs Sarah Palin in the race for Republican Presidential Candidates 2012 as anti-Obama the billionaire gave another sign at the CPAC that he would run for the White House.

Arabs celebrated the fall of President Hosni Mubarak on Friday, praising the determination of Egypt's protesters and hoping their demands for change would echo through the Middle East.

While Republican leaders promised to pursue even bigger federal budget cuts on Thursday, an initial proposal from Wednesday shows job training programs, a fund to upgrade federal buildings and the Environmental Protection Agency will see some of the biggest reductions.

The European Union’s (EU) energy commissioner has said that the EU’s new partnerships with Central Asian nations do not pose a threat to Russia’s gas sales to Europe.

As both inside and outside pressure mounted on him, Egypt President Hosni Mubarak has apparently fled the country on Friday morning

Egyptians counted the economic cost of more than two weeks of turmoil on Wednesday as protesters on Cairo's Tahrir Square looked ahead to their next big push to oust President Hosni Mubarak later in the week.

The following declassified document includes a September 5, 2002 report from the J2 intelligence group serving the U.S. Department of Defense. The main document concerns what the U.S. knew and didn't know about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.

Six months ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States had little hard evidence and relied heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment in assessing what it knew about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, according to declassified U.S. intellilgence report.

More than 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were unemployed in January, far higher than the national jobless rate and the highest since the government began collecting data on veterans in 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday.

Two Americans held in Iran for the last 18 months on suspicion of espionage pleaded not guilty in court on Sunday on the first day of their closed-door trial, state television reported.

Astonished by the uprising in Egypt, Western countries anxious to be on the right side of history have started to reassess ties to army-backed Arab strongmen stubbornly opposed to democracy.

The political unrest in the Arab countries may have even touched the most dangerous country in the Muslim world, war-ravaged Iraq. According to state media, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has said he will not seek a third term in office after his current one expires in 2014.

Three bombs killed at least six people and wounded 12 more in the Iraq's western city of Ramadi, a local government official said Thursday.

Here is a collection of reaction to the latest escalation of civil unrest and violence in Egypt from around the world:

- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange threatened to sue Britain's Guardian newspaper for allegedly giving his website's cache of classified U.S. cables to the New York Times, according to two new books.

The message on the wall is clear: Let Mubarak go and he may go sooner than later. It may be too early but inevitable to visualize a future scenario in Egypt.

Quoting observers of the Nobel Prize, an international news agency has reported that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may be one among the nominations this year.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he enjoys making banks squirm thinking they might be the next targets of his website which has published U.S. diplomatic and military secrets.