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BY: Jeffrey Fleishman and Rahmin Mostaghim | Los Angeles Times
Intrigue over Iran's nuclear program deepened Wednesday when Tehran accused the U.S. of involvement in the disappearance of a nuclear scientist it claims vanished after leaving for a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in late May.
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BY: Phil Sands and Caryle Murphy | The National
The process of reconciliation between Syria and Saudi Arabia took another step forward yesterday with the arrival in Damascus of King Abdullah for talks with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.
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BY: Caryle Murphy | Global Post
The episode illustrates the very puritanical public attitude towards sex in Saudi Arabia, where people may be open about their sex life in private but never speak about it publicly.
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BY: Rachelle Kliger | The Media Line
Lebanon claims hundreds of tourists from the Gulf are entering its territory and remaining there in order to plan terror attacks, but some dismiss this as propaganda.
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BY: Ernesto Londono | The Washington Post
As U.S. troops have sharply disengaged from Baghdad in recent months, local representatives say they are feeling powerless and abandoned. The Iraqi government has taken no steps to hold elections for the councils, and the Baghdad provincial council is culling them of members it deems unqualified or unfit for service.
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BY: Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt | The New York Times
President Obama’s national security team is moving to reframe its war strategy by emphasizing the campaign against Al Qaeda in Pakistan while arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States, officials said Wednesday.
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BY: David Wood | Politics Daily
The Taliban's response to the Afghan war strategy proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal could be shocking and grim, with insurgents redoubling suicide attacks and ambushes against American troops, aircraft and road convoys, triumphantly setting up "liberated zones,'' and executing Afghan police and collaborators in areas abandoned by U.S. and allied forces. The first months of the new strategy, rather than feeling like a winning new campaign, could feel a lot like losing.
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BY: Mark Tannenbaum | Bloomberg News
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, in an e-mailed statement through a spokesman, Jomo Gbomo, rejected a government amnesty offer and said it wouldn’t send a representative to a meeting with the government scheduled for Oct. 9.
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BY: Risto Krajakov | World Politics Review
The doors to the European Union have reopened for Croatia after its new Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor reached a historic deal with her Slovenian counterpart, Borut Pahor, over the two countries' border dispute, in Ljubljana on Sept. 11.
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BY: Rachel Donadio | The New York Times
Italy’s highest court overturned a law on Wednesday granting Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi immunity from prosecution while in office, in a ruling that reopens corruption trials against him and worsens his already weakened political position.
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The Economist
It would be worrying enough if the European Union’s weakest economy defaults, devalues or implodes. But what scares outsiders more is the effect of Latvia’s latest wobble on other ex-communist economies, which until this week seemed to be surviving the financial crisis with less trouble than some had feared.
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BY: Vladimir Socor | Eurasia Daily Monitor
Moldova's new government of the Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has inherited a deeply frozen negotiation process on the Transnistria conflict. Russia, a direct participant in the conflict, with troops in place, continues successfully to evade responsibility by portraying it as an internal Moldovan conflict between the two banks of the Nistru, rather than an inter-state Russia-Moldova conflict.
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BY: Blaine Harden | The Washington Post
During three days of talks in Pyongyang that ended Tuesday, North Korea's leader and China's prime minister raised expectations that the North might return to nuclear disarmament talks that it abandoned in the spring.
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BY: Sara A. Carter | The Washington Times
Pakistan's foreign minister said a planned new offensive against militants in the lawless badlands on the Afghanistan border will be more ambitious than any other in his nation's history and that security forces intend to take the area, hold it and integrate its impoverished tribal population into mainstream society.
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The London Times
A large bomb exploded near the Indian embassy in the centre of the Afghan capital of Kabul earlier today, killing seven people and wounding 45.
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BY: Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers
Pakistan's army said Wednesday that it has "serious concern" over conditions attached to a $1.5 billion a year U.S. aid package that Congress approved last month, marking a serious rupture in relations with Washington just before a planned military operation against the Taliban and al Qaida.
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BY: Alex Renderos and Tracy Wilkinson | Los Angeles Times
Representatives of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the de facto leaders who deposed him in a coup in June came together Wednesday in an effort to end the political crisis that has divided and isolated the impoverished nation.
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BY: Sara Miller Llana | The Christian Science Monitor
In Mexico, traffickers have targeted the Catholic church with extortion and deadly threats.
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BY: Ellesse Sorbonne | Diplomatic Courier
British paper The Independent reported that Arab states in conjunction with China, Japan, Russia, and France have drafted a secret initiative to oust the U.S. dollar as the oil trade’s recognized currency.
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BY: Samuel Logan and John P. Sullivan | ISN Security Watch
As Mexico’s drug wars spread south beyond Guatemala and Honduras, normally peaceful countries have fallen under the crossfire.