Syria has given up less than five percent of its chemical weapons arsenal and will miss next week’s deadline to send all toxic agents abroad for destruction, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. The deliveries, in two shipments this month, to the northern Syrian port of Latakia totaled 4.1 percent of the roughly 1,300 metric tons of toxi…
President Obama faced mounting bipartisan pressure on Friday to drop his resistance to an Iran sanctions bill after Tehran announced a new generation of equipment to enrich uranium — a move the Israelis claimed was further proof the regime seeks nuclear weapons.
One of the president’s top Democratic allies is leading the charge for Congress to pass…
Thieves have made off with a truck in Mexico carrying a dangerous radioactive material used in medical treatments, the United Nations nuclear watchdog said on Wednesday. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear body, did not give details on how much of the radioactive source, cobalt-60, was in the truck at the time. Cobalt-6…
Russia offered on Thursday to provide troops to guard facilities where Syria’s chemical weapons would be destroyed, as U.N. inspectors prepared to continue their probe on the use of such agents in the country’s civil war. Also Thursday, a mortar shell slammed into the Iraqi consulate building in central Damascus, killing one person and wounding three, Syr…
An explosion rocked a base shared by Polish and Afghan forces in a restive eastern Afghan province on Wednesday and a gun battle was under way, a Reuters witness said. The Taliban claimed responsibility. Thick black smoke was rising from the base in the provincial capital of Ghazni in the attack soon after 4 p.m. (1130 GMT) and NATO helicopters were hov…
This morning, a U.N. chemical weapons inspection team woke up in the five-star Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Damascus. No more than a 15-minute drive away, in the capital’s eastern suburbs, there were rumblings that the worst chemical weapons attack in decades was underway. The information coming out of the Ghouta region, where the rebels enjoy signif…
A team of United Nations chemical weapons experts arrived in Damascus on Sunday to investigate the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. President Bashar al-Assad’s government and the rebels fighting him have accused each other of using chemical weapons, a step which the United States had said would cross a “red line” in a conflict whi…
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon praised Panama on Wednesday for seizing a North Korean ship carrying arms from Cuba, adding that the U.N. sanctions committee would take up the issue promptly. “The Secretary-General commends the action taken by Panama in full conformity with its obligations under the relevant Security Council resolutions,” Ban’s press…
Russia is ready to replace peacekeepers from Austria in the Golan Heights , President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, after Vienna said it would recall its troops from a U.N. monitoring force due to worsening fighting in Syria .
Austria, whose peacekeepers account for about 380 of the 1,000-strong U.N. force observing a four-decade-old ceasefire bet…
North Korea vowed on Thursday to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States, amplifying its threatening rhetoric hours ahead of a vote by U.N.diplomats on whether to level new sanctions against Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test.An unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for “a p…