WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans pulled out of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Joe Biden with a flourish on Thursday, blaming Democrats for demanding tax increases as part of a deal rather than accepting more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicare and other government programs.
NEW YORK — Together and apart, the lives of Gabrielle Giffords and husband-astronaut Mark Kelly have been extraordinary. She the congresswoman from Arizona who has miraculously survived being shot in the head. He the commander of the space shuttle Endeavour, exchanging wedding rings with his wife before his final mission in space. Now, he is retiring to be with her full time and the two are collaborating on a memoir that will tell a story, their story, that Kelly says the public hardly knows.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama defended his endorsement of Israel’s 1967 boundaries as the basis for a future Palestine, telling America’s pro-Israel lobby Sunday that his views reflected longstanding U.S. policy that needed to be stated clearly.
Isoruku Yamamoto was 59 years old when he died in April of 1943. For the previous four years he had served as commander in chief of the combined fleet of Japan. In that capacity he had developed a plan to make a pre-emptive strike on the United States to draw down American naval power. He planned and led the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 in which 2,402 men were killed– the worst attack ever on American soil by a foreign force. Americans rallied to a common cause, rebuilt and fought back.
WASHINGTON — In a major national security reshuffle, President Barack Obama is sending CIA Director Leon Panetta to the Pentagon to replace Robert Gates, a widely praised Bush holdover, and replacing Panetta at the spy agency with Gen. David Petraeus, the high-profile commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Obama’s changes, expected to be announced at the White House on Thursday, also will include a new ambassador and war commander in Afghanistan. However, they don’t signal any major adjustment in the president’s Afghan strategy or the fight against violent extremism. The moves cement a planned drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in July and allow Obama to replace Gates, a Republican, with a Democrat with partisan credentials. That appointment also diminishes speculation that Petraeus might become a Republican presidential challenger in 2012.