With barely more than a month under her belt as a professional politician, Yingluck Shinawatra stood poised Monday to become Thailand's first woman prime minister after her Pheu Thai party scored a resounding victory in Sunday's national elections. Riding a well-oiled political machine and benefiting from the popularity of her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed as prime minister in a 2006 military coup, Yingluck and her party won an apparent majority in parliament according to unofficial ...

Tahrir Square on Wednesday, a day after another round of clashes between police and protesters, resembled its old war-zone self. Crowds of Egyptians trampled over the broken shards of glass and pavement that littered the street outside Cairo's interior ministry. Tear gas lingered in the air, as the remains of burning tires cooled near the lines of military police who had arrived when the regular police made their familiar exit. Traffic moved haltingly through the swarms of ...

Nixon launched it, Carter killed it and Reagan resurrected it. In its infancy, the Air Force's B-1 bomber was a quick and dirty military metaphor — Republicans wanted to buy weapons to defend the nation from the Soviet Union, and Democrats didn't. Now it could become a different kind of symbol: the Air Force is thinking of retiring its total 66-plane B-1 fleet to hit budget targets set by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Top Air Force officials ...

Call it the Goldilocks military plan: Not too much, not too little, not too unilateral, not too American. The operation against Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya mirrors the moderate temperament of its architect, Barack Obama. But will it work in the rough realities of international politics? That's the question that will be tested in the weeks ahead as high-tech images of cruise missiles hitting their targets give way to a mess on the ground in Libya. President Obama has launched an ...

"Where is NATO?" the rebel asks, with no small amount of frustration. It is just after midnight, Friday, June 17, and he is holed up in Dafniyah, a hamlet west of the revolutionary enclave of Misratah on the coast of western Libya. Like all the fighters in the dry fields outside the rebel city, Ashrf Ali, 30, had anticipated that the military alliance would launch a bombing campaign in the early hours of the morning last ...

The Syrian colonel sits cross-legged on a patch of moist soil. He's wearing a borrowed plaid shirt and pale green trousers and is surrounded by dozens of men who fled the besieged northern city of Jisr al-Shoughour to an orchard a few hundred meters from the Turkish border. He says his name is Hussein Harmoush and shows me a laminated military-ID card indicating his name and title. Everyone around calls him muqaddim — Arabic for his rank. A colonel with ...

More than once, the world has pledged never again: after the Holocaust in World War II, after Rwanda in 1994, then Bosnia, and then most recently after the slaughter in Darfur. So it is no surprise that when reports of alleged ethnic cleansing begin bleeding out, Western policy makers start to squirm. This raw nerve was on exhibit once again this past week, when on Wednesday President Obama devoted a special two minute radio address to an ...

The tip-off, says an American counterintelligence official, came from information collected over many months suggesting that the Warsaw Pact countries possessed "bits and pieces" of top-secret NATO wartime contingency plans. Investigators then discovered proof that Soviet planners had highly classified documents. Last week West German officials arrested retired U.S. Sergeant First Class Clyde Lee Conrad and charged him with being the linchpin in an "especially grave" Soviet intelligence penetration of Western defenses. Conrad, 41, formerly attached to the headquarters company ...

The streets of central Kabul's bustling open-air Mandavi market was cleared of shopkeepers and shoppers early this afternoon after Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a large police station on the area's main street. The three attackers killed five civilians, three policemen and an intelligence officer when they breached the gate of the compound and opened fire, the Interior Ministry confirmed in a statement, according to Afghan news sources agencies. The insurgents were killed when the police ...