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BY: Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers
Pakistan's powerful spy chief, who's important to the domestic campaign against Islamic extremists and his country's co-operation with the U.S.-led coalition in neighboring Afghanistan, will remain in office for another year, the government announced Wednesday.
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BY: Ethan Bronner | The New York Times
Palestinian leaders meeting with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. here on Wednesday harshly condemned Israel’s decision, announced a day earlier, to add 1,600 housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem, but they gave no indication that they would stay away from the approaching indirect peace negotiations with the Israelis.
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BY: Karin Laub | Associated Press
An open diplomatic row during the visit of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has shined a spotlight on the U.S. failure to rein in Israeli settlement ambitions and deepened Palestinian suspicions that the United States is too weak to broker a deal.
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BY: Nicholas Blanford | The Christian Science Monitor
The most powerful politicians in Lebanon resumed discussions on national defense, with questions of how to rein in Shiite political party Hezbollah's powerful military wing on the table.
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BY: Ernesto Londoño | The Washington Post
U.S. officials have hailed the vote as a milestone event that proceeded with little disruption, and they disputed election-day media reports of widespread violence.
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BY: Tom Engelhardt | Mother Jones
In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better. In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.
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BY: Elisabeth Bumiller | The New York Times
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the royal family of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that the United States wanted to help build up the kingdom’s military defenses against the growing threat of Iran, but also needed its help in pressing for new United Nations sanctions on Tehran.
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BY: Sudarsan Raghavan | The Washington Post
The U.S. special envoy to Sudan warned Wednesday that efforts to bring peace to the country's troubled Darfur region could become less of a priority for the Obama administration if a full-fledged peace agreement is not reached before Sudanese elections scheduled for mid-April.
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BY: Daniel Howden | The Independent
Fears that sectarian violence could spread across Nigeria increased yesterday after it emerged that militia leaders from Jos, where at least 200 people were massacred on Sunday, had been attempting to buy arms in the restive Niger Delta just prior to the attack.
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BY: Andrew rEttman | EU Observer
Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have warned that member states could disengage from EU foreign policy unless they get a fair share of power in its new diplomatic corps.
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BY: Emil Danielyan | Eurasia Daily Monitor
The dramatic development, condemned by Ankara and welcomed in Yerevan is widely seen in Armenia as heralding a last-ditched attempt by Washington to salvage the Turkish-Armenian normalization agreements signed in October under American mediation.
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BY: Matthew Derrick | Caucasian Review of International Affairs
Kazan today, with its skyline graced in tandem by the minarets of the grand Kul Sharif Mosque and the signature onion domes of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, positions itself as a model of inter-confessional harmony in a world where religious difference frequently is associated with internecine strife.
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BY: Daniel McDowell | World Politics Review
As president of the G-20 this year, South Korea seemingly has an appetite for tackling the global economy's biggest problems. And few challenges loom larger than the significant global imbalances that helped pave the way for the recent international financial crisis. The Koreans have been busy promoting an apparently novel solution to this very problem: an international currency swap regime.
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BY: Adam Rose | Time
Hong Kong's mini-constitution under China promises eventual democracy for the SAR, but little progress has been made over the past decade, despite mounting pressure from a loose coalition of pro-democratic parties known as the pan-democrats.
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BY: Jane Macartney | The London Times
Hundreds of Tibetans are being rounded up and detained in Lhasa and armed paramilitary groups are patrolling the streets in advance of the anniversary of fatal riots in 2008.
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BY: Animesh Roul | ISN Security Watch
Now that a tenuous peace has returned to Bangladesh’s tribal Chittagong Hill Tracts region following clashes between tribes and settlers in violence that some say was encouraged by the military, all eyes are now on how Dhaka will respond.
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BY: Feizal Samath | The National
The Sri Lankan president’s decision to shift foreign policy “eastward” after persistent and damaging human-rights abuse allegations from the West was confirmed last week when China emerged as the island’s biggest financial donor in 2009.
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BY: Alexei Barrionuevo | The New York Times
Chile’s powerful earthquake buried people and homes in a broad section of the coastal south, but it may also have given the country’s new right-wing coalition government a chance to entomb the ghosts of the former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
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BY: Nicholas Kralev | The Washington Times
The State Department plans to create seven new senior positions to ensure that a public-diplomacy perspective is always "incorporated" in policymaking around the world, as well as to respond quickly to negative coverage of the United States in foreign media.
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BY: Lesley Clark | McClatchy Newspapers
Haitian President Rene Preval emerged from a round of talks at the White House and Congressl on Wednesday optimistic that President Barack Obama and lawmakers are receptive to helping the shattered country with direct aid to the government.