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BY: Glenn Kessler | The Washington Post
Iran's formal notification Monday to a United Nations nuclear watchdog that it will begin producing higher-grade enriched uranium marks a new and potentially dangerous turn in Tehran's confrontation with the West over its nuclear ambitions.
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BY: Arash Aramesh | Diplomatic Courier
After four years of nuclear diplomacy, the Iranian government has so far missed deadlines to respond while stalling the talks yet again. However, whether there is or isn’t a nuclear deal, the international community must prepare to face the eventuality of a nuclear Iran.
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BY: Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah | The New York Times
The Pakistani military has retaken the key town of Damadola, in the Bajaur area of the tribal belt, where the army has been fighting Taliban militants for more than a year, military and local officials said Monday.
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BY: Steven Lee Myers | The New York Times
There was a hope, not long ago, that democracy would mean peace and stability for Nineveh, a place where cultures and armies have clashed since biblical times. Instead, democracy is hardening divisions — of people, of resources, of land — in ways that threaten the future of Iraq itself.
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BY: Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation
The election in Iraq is less than a month away -- that is, if indeed it is held as scheduled on March 7 -- and things are going from bad to worse.
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BY: Eli Lake | The Washington Times
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in Tehran that his country would stun the Western world on Thursday, the 31st anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution. Iran's defense minister announced on Monday that its forces had conducted successful tests on new armed unmanned aircraft and advanced air defenses.
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BY: Joshua Partlow | The Washington Post
For the Fifth Stryker Brigade Combat Team, deployed around the southern city of Kandahar, the mission is to preserve freedom of movement on the highways through southern Afghanistan. By doing so, they hope to fan to life the economic and political embers smoldering in roadside villages around Kandahar and restore credibility to the local government.
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BY: Bill Gertz | The Long War Journal
The declaration of jihad against Kenya came from Sheikh Hussein Abdi Gedi, the deputy leader of Shabaab in the strategic southern port city of Kismayo. During an interview on Al Andalus Radio, Shabaab's radio station, Gedi accused Kenya of arming and training Somali's disorganized military.
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BY: Anes Alic | ISN Security Watch
The real reason behind a recent large-scale operation to shut down a radical Wahhabi village in Bosnia has more to do with an ongoing terrorism investigation than official statements about ethnic intolerance and territorial integrity.
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BY: Armin Mahler, Christian Reiermann, Wolfgang Reuter and Hans-Jürgen Schlamp | Der Spiegel
The problems facing Greece are just the beginning. The countries belonging to Europe's common currency zone are drifting further and further apart with national bankruptcies a distinct possibility. Brussels is faced with a number of choices, none of them good.
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BY: Thomas Seibert | The National
The so-called Emasya Protocol, much criticised by the EU, had given the generals the right to intervene domestically without the permission of civilian authorities if they thought it necessary to do so. Now the protocol has been cancelled with the army’s agreement.
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BY: Valentina Pop | EU Observer
Moscow is "concerned" and expects "proper explanations" on US plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile defence systems in Romania, but it is still interested in contributing to a "common assessment" of threats with Europe and the US.
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BY: Clifford J. Levy | The New York Times
The apparent victory of Russia’s preferred candidate in the Ukrainian presidential race may be a relief to Vladimir V. Putin, who has long sought to discredit his neighbor’s raucous democracy and its drift to the West.
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BY: David L. Stern | Global Post
Viktor Yanukovych, the ursine eastern Ukrainian party boss who suffered a humiliating defeat five years ago, has triumphed in a presidential election on Sunday that was surprising not so much for its outcome as for its cleanliness.
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BY: Martin Fackler | The New York Times
They were Tokyo’s worst-kept diplomatic secrets: clandestine cold war era agreements with Washington that obligated Japan to shoulder the costs of United States bases and allow nuclear-armed American ships to sail into Japanese ports.
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BY: Barbara Demick | Los Angeles Times
Black Hawk Safety Net was shut down in November and its founders later arrested, state media report. The school took tuition from tens of thousands who wanted to learn 'successful attack tools.'
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BY: Pratap Chatterjee | Mother Jones
Forty years ago, the White House ordered a drone attack in Cambodia. Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today?
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BY: Jeremy Page | The London Times
The former Sri Lankan army chief hailed last year as a national hero for defeating the Tamil Tigers was in jail last night facing possible execution.
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BY: Eliot Brockner | World Politics Review
A significant amount of work lays ahead for Lobo's government, which is under pressure from many governments in the region -- as well as the Organization of American States -- to carry out a full-scale investigation into the events of last year, in order to make sure that a repeat scenario is avoided.
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BY: Sara Miller Llana | The Christian Science Monitor
Laura Chinchilla won the Costa Rica election Sunday. She'll be the country's first woman president, echoing a trend across Latin America where women are being voted into high-level political office in record numbers.