US President Barack Obama has announced a $3bn (£1.9bn) plan to boost food security and farm productivity in Africa, US officials say. They say the initiative is aimed at alleviating shortages as world food supplies are being stretched by rising demand in Asia’s emerging markets. Food security is also on the agenda of this weekend’s [...]

Yesterday, the president announced that the U.S. signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan, committing the United States to the country for a long time to come. The agreement addressed the transition to Afghan-led security forces by 2014. Human and monetary costs to the U.S. will continue to skyrocket. via Rep. Dennis Kucinich: We Are [...]

On a surprise visit to Afghanistan, President Obama marked the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Osama bin Laden and announced the signing of a long-term strategic partnership with the Afghan government. In a speech to the U.S. public, Obama said the agreement heralds “a future in which the war ends, and a new chapter [...]

MAHMUD RAQI, Afghanistan — The office of Kapisa’s governor sits high on a hilltop overlooking the provincial capital, Mahmud Raqi. It has a beautiful view of the river below and the mountains, trees and fields that stretch into the distance. Beneath the tranquil surface, however, lies a grim truth. Just outside town roadside bombs are [...]

WASHINGTON — Even in the era of unbridled campaign contributions, Irving Moskowitz’s $1 million donation in February to American Crossroads, the Karl Rove-linked super PAC, is eye-catching. A retired physician who made a fortune purchasing hospitals and running bingo and casino operations in the economically depressed California town of Hawaiian Gardens, Moskowitz is well-known to [...]

WASHINGTON — President Obama knows the Global Nuclear Summit, now meeting for the second time in Korea, is not specifically designed to tackle the world’s most dire nuclear flash points — North Korea and Iran (see GSN, March 21). The summit’s direct focus, and where it has achieved measurable success, is in reducing or securing [...]

The United States intends to seek additional reductions to its nuclear arsenal in exchange for potential comparable curbs by Russia, President Obama said on Monday (see GSN, Feb. 16). “We can already say with confidence that we have more nuclear weapons than we need,” Reuters quoted Obama as saying in South Korea on Monday, hours [...]

As President Obama heads to Oklahoma today to announce the fast-tracking of the southern portion of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas, we speak with 350.org’s Bill McKibben. The pipeline approval comes two months after Obama rejected a proposal for the 1,300-mile Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta tar sands oil fields [...]

The two most recent American wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have failed or are disastrously failing. The United States is being pressed to launch two new wars. There is little public support for any of the four. The government of Israel, the American domestic pressure group which it sponsors, AIPAC, and numbers of prominent American [...]

US President Barack Obama has dismissed calls from a senior Republican senator to start bombing Syria, saying that President Assad will leave anyway. He also called for a sober approach to dealing with Tehran’s nuclear program. ­Talking at a “Super Tuesday” press conference in the White House, Obama has basically acknowledged that not every issue [...]