When the severed heads of seven French Trappist monks were found in a remote mountainous region of Algeria in May 1996, it was natural to assume the murders were the latest gruesome act by jihadists in their long-running and bloody campaign against the Algerian government. Thirteen years on, however, the victims' families, church officials and the French and Algerian publics have been shocked by the revelation that the monks may have been killed as the result of ...

With growing demands for President Obama to clarify the international mission in Libya and with many calling for the escalation of military force in support of those challenging Muammar Gaddafi's rule, it is crucial to identify and move to the next stage of the intervention in Libya. That stage should not be targeting Gaddafi, which would surely be viewed as tantamount to an attempt at foreign-imposed regime change. That would break the international coalition and congeal support for Gaddafi inside Libya. ...

Details of the gruesome crimes in Afghanistan that have resulted in 12 U.S. Army soldiers facing trial at a base near Seattle have been slowly making their way into the public domain. Dozens of photos to be introduced as evidence in the case allegedly show men from a self-styled "kill team" accused of murdering Afghan civilians for sport posing beside charred and mutilated bodies, from which fingers and a head were allegedly severed as trophies. One ...

The voice on the phone call emerged presumably from the highly-fortified bunker in the center of Tripoli. Recorded and then broadcast on Libyan state television, it railed about Hitler and Mussolini and against invaders and devils. For Muammar Gaddafi, it was not a long tirade but it was intense, a compressed version of his fury against colonialism and the great powers that dared to oppose him. It aired about 10 hours after allied aircraft caused an enormous ...

In March 1961, Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution was a three-alarm reminder that CIA-engineered coups weren't enough to keep communism out of the western hemisphere. Living standards had to be raised in Latin America, then as now the world's most inegalitarian region. So U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress to help America's distant neighbors get their societal acts together: democratize, build stronger economies, pull people out of poverty. The alliance delivered little of that, as ...

While much of the focus on Tuesday's unveiling of President Obama's revamped Afghanistan strategy will be on the number of U.S. troops he's expected to send, that decision is really a sideshow to the critical battle now under way on the ground. Far more important to prospects of victory in Afghanistan is jump-starting a moribund effort to woo nonideological Taliban fighters to switch sides in exchange for paying jobs. Pentagon officials are hoping to repeat the success of similar ...

If he holds his handy lead in the polls, Porfirio Lobo will be the next President of Honduras. Problem is, the last man elected to that office, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted last summer in a military coup. That makes it unlikely that any nation — except maybe the U.S. — will recognize Lobo if he wins the Nov. 29 election. But as he relaxes in his opulent house near Honduras' capital Tegucigalpa after a day of campaigning, Lobo ...

After more than five months of going it alone, Iran's opposition Green Movement is reaching out to the United States for help. Via public and private channels, the Obama Administration has received several appeals in recent weeks to take a stronger stand against human-rights abuses in Iran, avoid military action and impose more aggressive and rapid-fire sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards and its vast business interests. The opposition's outreach comes as the Administration weighs the next move ...

Among the many hands that Barack Obama will likely shake on his inaugural trip to Asia as U.S. President will be that of a soft-spoken general who happens to represent one of the world's most repressive regimes. Obama's planned joint appearance on Nov. 15 with Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein, at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations' confab on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore, will mark the first time since the era of Lyndon ...

The naming of an honorary economic advisor to a small Southeast Asian country doesn't usually make news. But Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's designation of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as his financial mentor on Wednesday has sparked an international ruckus, with both countries trading trans-border barbs and recalling their respective ambassadors. Confused Here's the background. After Thaksin was deposed in a 2006 bloodless military coup and sentenced in absentia to two years' imprisonment for a conflict of interest conviction — a verdict he ...