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BY: Amy Teibel | The Independent
There is no chance of an early solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and people must "learn to live with it", the Israeli Foreign Minister warned yesterday.
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BY: SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and WALTER GIBBS | International Herald Tribune
President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The Nobel Committee announced it has awarded the annual prize to the president “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
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BY: Tim Reid | The London Times
President Obama is prepared to accept some Taleban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future and is unlikely to favour a large influx of new American troops being demanded by his ground commander, a senior official said last night.
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BY: Ben Arnoldy | The Christian Science Monitor
A long-dormant nationalism movement among ethnic Pashtuns shows signs of reawakening as Pakistan – at United States urging – has boosted military activity in their region and as political efforts for autonomy have stalled.
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BY: Sudarsan Raghavan | The Washington Post
Four months after President Obama delivered an address from Cairo in which he voiced American commitment to human rights and the rule of law, concern is mounting among Egypt's pro-reform activists that the United States is abandoning its long-standing efforts to bring democratic reforms to the Arab world's most populous nation.
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BY: Ira Chernus | Mother Jones
Despite an initial hopeful sit-down with Iranian negotiators, this won't be the October the White House wanted on the foreign policy front. By now, Barack Obama was supposed to have announced—with ruffles and flourishes—the beginning of Middle East peace talks, leading to a final status agreement by 2012. But something didn't happen.
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BY: Marc Santora | The New York Times
There is no more visible sign that America is putting the Iraq war behind it than the colossal operation to get its stuff out: 20,000 soldiers, nearly a sixth of the force here, assigned to a logistical effort aimed at dismantling some 300 bases and shipping out 1.5 million pieces of equipment, from tanks to coffee makers.
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BY: Ashish Kumar Sen | The Washington Times
Washington and its NATO allies are preparing for a second term for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and will not press for a runoff election despite evidence of widespread fraud in the Aug. 20 polls, a U.S. official and Afghan specialists say.
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BY: Joshua Partlow | The Washington Post
A car bomb exploded outside the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan's capital Thursday, killing at least 17 people and destroying offices and cars along a heavily fortified street that is also home to the country's Interior Ministry, officials said.
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BY: Michael Slackman | The New York Times
As Iran continues to manage the aftershocks of its contested presidential election, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has moved aggressively to tighten its grip on society, most recently with its takeover of a majority share in the nation’s telecommunications monopoly.
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BY: Daniel Ooko | The Media Line
In dozens of Kenyan madrasas and schools, a new front is opening. Though no borders are being fought over and though the combatants are unarmed, a government campaign is in conflict with Al-Shabab for control over some of its most important resource – its youth.
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BY: Rachel Donadio | The New York Times
A day after Italy’s Constitutional Court struck down a law granting him immunity from prosecution, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi defiantly called the ruling “absurd” and said his government would “forge ahead calmly.”
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BY: Thomas Seibert | The National
Just days before Turkey and neighbouring Armenia, long divided by a bitter dispute over the death of up to 1.5 million Armenians in Anatolia a century ago, are expected to sign agreements for a normalisation of relations, Turkey’s judiciary has dealt a blow to efforts to open a discussion about the massacres, critics say.
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The Economist
A referendum in a small island off the European mainland about an incomprehensible document sounds dull. Yet Ireland’s vote on October 2nd in favour of the Lisbon treaty marks a milestone for the European Union.
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BY: Soner Cagaptay | Huriyet Daily News
For more than three decades, Istanbul's unique geography has nurtured the emergence of a social class of billionaires benefiting from government contracts. As the world's only city divided between two continents, Istanbul has twice seen the construction of suspension bridges uniting the country across the Bosphorus Strait, which bifurcates the city.
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BY: Igor Torbakov | Eurasianet
Turkey’s efforts to reconcile with Armenia have attracted plenty of attention over the past six weeks. It’s less widely known that Ankara is simultaneously engaged in a delicate diplomatic move to forge closer ties with Abkhazia, one of Georgia’s renegade territories.
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BY: Prashanth Parameswaran | World Politics Review
Even as Jakarta's "law and order approach" to eradicating terrorism continues to net key terrorist operatives, it has come under increasing scrutiny for eroding the fabric of Indonesia's democracy and ignoring the root problem of ideological extremism.
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BY: Blaine Harden | The Washington Post
North Korea has massively increased its special operations forces, schooled them in the use of Iraqi-style roadside bombs and equipped them to sneak past the heavily fortified border that divides the two Koreas.
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BY: Feizal Samath | The National
While the ruling party is expected to win tomorrow’s key provincial election in the south, the opposition is hoping to reduce its margin of victory and prove that the president, Mahinda Rajapaska, is not invincible, ahead of presidential and parliamentary polls due in the next six months.
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BY: Aung Hla Tun | Reuters
Myanmar's ruling junta allowed detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to meet with Western diplomats on Friday, a week after she asked for talks about sanctions on the isolated country.