President Bush's top defense advisers have recommended he maintain 15 combat brigades in Iraq until the end of the year contrary to expectations that the improved security in Iraq would allow for quicker cuts, officials said. ...more

September 5, 2008

Afghan officials said Thursday that a deadly U.S.-led special forces raid on a remote western village last week was based on misleading information provided by a rival clan. ...more

August 29, 2008

Georgia's president grudgingly signed a potential truce with Russia on Friday, even as he denounced the Russians as invading barbarians and accused the West of all but encouraging them to overrun his country. A stone-faced Condoleezza Rice, standing alongside, said Russian troops must withdraw immediately from their smaller neighbor. ...more

August 16, 2008

WASHINGTON - A $14,000 payment to John Edwards' mistress from the candidate's political action committee - after she stopped working for it - was made in exchange for 100 hours of unused videotape she shot producing short Web movies for which she already had been paid $100,000, an associate of Edwards told The Associated Press. ...more

August 15, 2008

Iraq and the United States are near an agreement on all American combat troops leaving Iraq by October 2010, with the last soldiers out three years after that, two Iraqi officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. U.S. officials, however, insisted no dates had been agreed. ...more

August 8, 2008

The evidence amassed by FBI investigators against Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week after learning that he was likely to be charged in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, was largely circumstantial, and a grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment, a person who has been briefed on the investigation said Sunday. ...more

August 4, 2008

DNA taken from the bodies of people killed in the 2001 anthrax attacks helped lead investigators to Bruce Ivins, who oversaw the highly specific type of toxin in an Army lab, a government scientist said Sunday. ...more

August 4, 2008

Germany's foreign minister urged Iran to stop playing for time and deliver a "clear answer" to initiatives offered by six world powers in the standoff over Tehran's nuclear ambitions in an interview released Saturday. ...more

August 3, 2008

Top Pentagon leaders are expected to recommend soon that Defense Secretary Robert Gates order hundreds of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the next month or so, according to a senior military official. ...more

July 24, 2008

Although the U.S. government was supposed to have final say on any plan to rescue three U.S. contractors held by guerrillas, it was kept in the dark by the Colombian military until a week before the July 2 operation to lessen the chances the Bush administration would veto the effort, said a top official close to the operation. ...more

July 14, 2008