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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accused Pakistan of abdicating to the Taleban by allowing them to control parts of the country. Mrs Clinton told a congressional panel the situation in Pakistan posed a "mortal threat" to world security.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accused Pakistan of abdicating to the Taleban by allowing them to control parts of the country.

Mrs Clinton told a congressional panel the situation in Pakistan posed a "mortal threat" to world security. She said extremists were being allowed to control territory such as the Swat Valley, in north-western Pakistan. She also called Pakistan's judicial system corrupt, adding that it has only limited power in the countryside.

The CIA's use of waterboarding to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects was approved by Condoleezza Rice as early as 2002, a senate report reveals.

Ms Rice, as national security adviser at the time, gave consent to the CIA's harsh interrogation programme, the Senate Intelligence Committee found.

The latest details were revealed in a timeline of the CIA's interrogation programme produced by the US Senate Intelligence Committee. It shows Ms Rice and other top Bush administration officials were first briefed about "alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding", in May 2002.

The Bush-era interrogation techniques that many view as torture may have yielded important information about terrorists, President Obama's national intelligence director said in an internal memo.

"High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country," Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said in a memo to personnel.

The memo, obtained by CNN late Tuesday, was sent around the time the administration released several memos from the previous administration detailing the use of terror interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning.

JPost.com » Israel » Article Apr 24, 2009 0:14&nbsp;|&nbsp;Updated Apr 24, 2009 13:54 'World leaders must drop their slogans' By DAVID HOROVITZ AND AMIR MIZROCH PrintSubscribe articleTitle = ' \'World leaders must drop their slogans\' '; showOdiogoReadNowButton ('1002,1003,1005,1004,1006,1484,1560,1561,1562,1563,1564,1565,1566',articleTitle,'0', 290, 55); E-mailToolbar + Recommend: What's this? showInitialOdiogoReadNowFrame ('1002,1003,1005,1004,1006,1484,1560,1561,1562,1563,1564,1565,1566', '0', 290, 0); Talkbacks for this article: 117 &nbsp; | &nbsp;Avg. rating 4.61 out of 5</s

The international community has to "stop speaking in slogans" if it really wants to help the new Israeli government work toward a solution to the Palestinian conflict and help bring stability to the Middle East, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, in his first interview with an Israeli newspaper since taking the job.

"Over the last two weeks I've had many conversations with my colleagues around the world," he said. "Just today, I saw the political adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Chinese foreign minister and the Czech prime minister. And everybody, you know, speaks with you like you're in a campaign: Occupation, settlements, settlers..." Slogans like these, and others Lieberman cited, such as "land for peace" and "two-state solution," were both overly simplistic and ignored the root causes of the ongoing conflict, he said.

A ceremony is being held in Basra to mark the official end of the six-year British military presence in Iraq. UK combat operations will finish when 20 Armoured Brigade hand over to a US brigade at a "flagdown ceremony".

The end of combat operations comes a month ahead of schedule.

Mr Brown, who held talks with Iraqi counterpart Nouri al-Maliki at Downing Street, said: "Today Iraq is a success story. We owe much of that to the efforts of British troops. Our mission has not always been an easy one, many have said that we would fail. "Britain can be proud of our legacy that we leave there."

One of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the United States Senate defected to the Democrats yesterday, dealing a massive blow to the Republican party's ability to impede Barack Obama's legislative agenda, and opening the way for dramatic action on climate change, healthcare reform and other issues.

The defection by Arlen Specter, a veteran Pennsylvania Republican, puts the majority Democratic party closer to the 60 votes needed to pass most substantive legislation. All that remains for the party to achieve that margin, and the ability to ride roughshod over the Republicans, is the final confirmation in Minnesota of Al Franken's victory in a long-disputed Senate election.

the Republican party's conservative base has consolidated its hold, driving moderate voices from the party and pushing centrist voters toward the Democrats. In November, the Democrats won the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1994. "I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," said Specter, 79.

Construction has begun on approximately 60 new homes in a Jewish settlement in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, the Israeli campaign group Peace Now says. The work, in East Talpiot settlement, is aimed at creating a belt around East Jerusalem that would sever it from the rest of the West Bank, the group says.

Settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law. Israel disputes this and also argues that East Jerusalem is not subject to its pledge to freeze settlement work. Israel's claim is based on its annexation of East Jerusalem, unrecognised by the international community, which it captured along with the West Bank and other Arab territory in the 1967 war.

Israelis view settlements such as East Talpiot as neighbourhoods of Jerusalem. Such areas tend to be well integrated into the city's infrastructure.

The ICRC, which conducted the first independent interviews of CIA detainees in 2006, said the prisoners were told they would not be killed during interrogations, though one was warned that he would be brought to "the verge of death and back again," according to a confidential ICRC report leaked to the New York Review of Books last month.

"The interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics," the ICRC report concluded.

An Aug. 1, 2002, memo said the CIA relied on its "on-site psychologists" for help in designing an interrogation program for Abu Zubaida and ultimately came up with a list of 10 methods drawn from a U.S. military training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. That program, used to help prepare pilots to endure torture in the event they are captured, is loosely based on techniques that were used by the Communist Chinese to torture American prisoners of war.

US President Barack Obama says CIA agents who used harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects during the Bush era will not be prosecuted.

Mr Obama banned the use of methods such as sleep deprivation and simulated drowning in his first week in office. He has now released four memos detailing techniques the CIA was able to use under the Bush administration.

Amnesty International said the Department of Justice appeared to be offering a "get-out-of-jail-free card" to individuals who were involved in acts of torture.

US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke is holding talks in India on regional security issues. Mr Holbrooke and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Delhi after talks with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad.

Mr Holbrooke, along with Adm Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, have met Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon.

Analysts say India is uneasy with Mr Obama's strategy in Pakistan and Afghanistan and say it does not address New Delhi's concerns over what it calls Pakistan's backing of militants. There are concerns that the US is "tilting towards" Pakistan, an old ally, rather than India which has moved closer to the US in recent years. "The US is more receptive to Pakistan's concerns, which is worrying India," analyst Bharat Karnad told Reuters news agency.

Perhaps trying not to overload a Pakistani government that has shown itself to be overwhelmed by daily political and terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama made only oblique mention of a concern voiced frequently inside the White House: That Al Qaeda and other terrorists view Pakistan’s arsenal of 60 to 100 weapons as the ultimate goal of a campaign to destabilize that government.

In London last week, Mr. Obama raised the imminent test with President Hu Jintao of China, whom the United States has relied on to influence the North. A senior administration official, briefing reporters, said he believed the Chinese had expressed concerns to the North, urging it to halt the flight.

If so, Beijing was ignored — as it was twice in 2006, when it told the North not to conduct missile tests and then its nuclear test. That suggests, one of Mr. Obama’s aides said Sunday, “that either the Chinese aren’t trying very hard, or the North Koreans aren’t listening very well.”

Barack Obama has outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons in a major speech in Europe. The US president called for a global summit on nuclear security and the forging of new partnerships to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. He said he hoped to negotiate a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

Speaking to a 20,000-strong crowd in front of Prague's historic castle, Mr Obama said the US had a moral responsibility to act in ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

"The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War," he said.

A new law signed by President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan requires Shiite women to ask their husband's permission before leaving the home and forces them to have sexual intercourse. The West is outraged, and German politicians are mulling restrictions in development aid

The Afghan constitution provides for Shiites, which represent between 10 and 20 percent of the population, to pass their own family law based on their legal traditions. But the new law is particularly restrictive. Article 132, for example, mandates that "the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband." Furthermore, if her husband is not travelling or sick, the wife is required to have sex with him at least every fourth night. The only exception is if the wife herself is ill.

Already, Karzai was under attack in the West for the advances currently being made by both al-Qaida and the Taliban in the country. In response, Kabul has long been quick to point out the progress that has been made -- often emphasizing new schools for girls and the fact that women have been elected into parliament. The new law now makes such claims of improvement seem absurd.

In France and Germany on Friday, US President Barack Obama said he wanted to renew the trans-Atlantic partnership. Part of that alliance, though, involves more European troops for Afghanistan, he said. Unexpectedly, Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons.

"In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world." He went on to say that "there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

The US president was coming from the G-20 summit, held on Wednesday and Thursday in London. At that meeting, the world's richest nations agreed to make $1 trillion available to the developing world through the World Bank and the International Monetary fund in addition to tripling the money available to the IMF.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he would be willing to accept prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which U.S. President Barack Obama has said he will close, the Venezuelan government said Thursday.

Chavez also said he hopes the United States will give Cuba back the land on which the naval base is located, the government said in a news release.

"We would not have any problem receiving a human being," the government release quoted Chavez as saying in an interview Wednesday with Al Jazeera TV.

Despite his hard-line and inflammatory rhetoric, however, Lieberman may be a pragmatist. Unlike many on Israel's right — including Netanyahu — Lieberman supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a Ha'aretz interview after taking office, Lieberman said Israel should abide by the 2002 Roadmap, which calls for a Palestinian state.

The Roadmap obliges the Palestinians to stop violence and dismantle the capabilities of terror organizations, and reform their political institutions, before any movement toward the creation of a Palestinian state. But, in the same phase, it obliges Israel to freeze settlement construction and dismantle all settlement outposts built since March 2001.

Lieberman appears to recognize those obligations, and in the Ha'aretz interview, he mocked Olmert and his team as hypocrites who advocated peace but did little to achieve it. "How many outposts did Olmert, Barak and Livni evacuate?" he said.

ran is reportedly increasing its military aid to both Hezbollah and Hamas, according to Israeli intelligence sources. Meanwhile, Tehran is suspected of interfering in the reconciliation talks between the rival Palestinian factions.

A 20-page dossier compiled by the Israeli intelligence agencies, which has been seen by SPIEGEL, reports that Iran "has strengthened its operative help to Palestinian terror groups." The military aid is said to take the form of supplies of weapons, ammunitions and money, as well as the education and training of fighters.

The weapons are reported to include mortar shells and anti-tank missiles such as RAAD missiles, which are manufactured in Iran. They are said to be transported by land, sea and air. According to the report, Teheran has sent agents to establish posts along the smuggling routes to guarantee a smooth delivery.

Pakistan is "battling for its own survival", its president, Asif Ali Zardari, has told visiting US special envoy for Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke.

Mr Zardari said Pakistan needed "unconditional support" to fight terrorism and extremism.

Mr Holbrooke, the joint US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Islamabad after talks with Afghan leaders in Kabul.