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some say they simply do not have the desired result. Gregory Johnsen of Princeton University is an expert on Yemen and he told me that the rain of drone attacks has strengthened the hand of terrorists there. "Look at Yemen on Christmas Day 2009, the day the so-called underwear bomber attempted to bring down a flight over Detroit. "On that day al-Qaeda numbered about 200 to 300 individuals and they controlled no territory. Now today, two-and-a-half years later, despite all the drone strikes al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has tripled in size, it's now around 1,000 members and it controls significant territory. "The more the US bombs, the more they grow."

The president may think very carefully before he approves individual killings, but in the end, as a strategy, drone attacks have too many attractions compared to doing nothing or sending in the troops.

The future will see fewer counter-insurgency battles in distant lands. It will focus much more on the capacity of America's air and naval forces to balance a competitor like China or face down an antagonist like Iran. And it will scale back America's much-heralded ability to fight two wars at once.

The president said the new strategy would end "long-term, nation-building with large military footprints". The Pentagon would instead pursue a national security strategy based on "smaller conventional ground forces".

Mr Panetta said on Thursday the review would make the US military "more agile, more flexible, ready to deploy quickly".

"We'll be strengthening our presence in the Asia-Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of this critical region."

Xinhua said the US role could be good for China in helping to secure the "peaceful environment" it needed to continue its economic development.

But it added: "While boosting its military presence in the Asia-Pacific, the United States should abstain from flexing its muscles, as this won't help solve regional disputes. "If the United States indiscreetly applies militarism in the region, it will be like a bull in a china shop, and endanger peace instead of enhancing regional stability."

In a reference to Russia's ambitions in the Arctic, where Moscow plans to expand its claims, Putin said the navy would protect Moscow's interests in the icy North."Obviously, the navy is an instrument to protect national economic interests, including in such regions as Arctic where some of the world's richest biological resources, mineral resources are concentrated," he said.

Moscow has planned to submit a claim this year to redraw the map of the Arctic and give itself a bigger swath of the territory, which could hold huge deposits of oil, gas and mineral wealth.Russia, Norway, the United States, Canada and Denmark are at odds over how to divide up the Arctic seabed, thought to hold 90 billion barrels of oil and 30 percent of the world's untapped gas resources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Officials from the G20 nations, whose leaders are meeting in Mexico next week, said that central banks were ready to take steps to stabilize financial markets - if needed - by providing liquidity and prevent any credit squeeze after Sunday's election. Canada is "ready to act" if the situation takes a serious turn for the worse of there is "an external shock," Andrew MacDougall, a spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said on Thursday.

Greek banking stocks soared more than 20 percent on Thursday amid market talk that secret opinion polls were showing that a government favourable to the international bailout agreement was likely to emerge after the June 17 election.

Central bankers are ready to ensure enough cash is flowing through the financial system if severe market strains emerge after the elections in Greece, which coincide with votes in Egypt and France, G20 officials said."The central banks are preparing for coordinated action to provide liquidity," said a senior G20 aide familiar with discussions among international financial diplomats.

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the US and Israeli intelligence agencies "pertaining to the protection of US persons", repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights.But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive "raw Sigint" – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: "Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content."According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. "NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection"

Mossad agents have been caught with foreign passports before, triggering diplomatic rows. In 1997, two Mossad agents using forged Canadian passports were arrested in Amman after trying to assassinate Khalid Meshal, a Hamas official who is now the movement's leader, by spraying poison into his ear.

Two suspected Mossad agents were jailed for six months in 2004 in New Zealand for trying to falsely obtain a New Zealand passport . They were caught when an immigration official noticed a passport applicant was speaking with an American or Canadian accent.Helen Clark, the then New Zealand prime minister, criticised Israel for behaving in a way "unacceptable internationally by any country".