On Dec. 1, 1959, representatives from a dozen countries, including the U.S., Japan and the U.K. met in Washington to sign a treaty intended to keep the Cold War out of the coldest place on Earth. Fifty years later, the Antarctic Treaty is still in effect, making it one of the world's most successful international agreements, with its member nations still meeting once a year. The pact calls for keeping Antarctica a continent free of weapons and reserved for ...

Barack Obama arrived in Strasbourg on Friday for this weekend's NATO summit enthusing about the military organization, which he described at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy as "the most successful alliance in modern history." That it may have been. But Obama's praise contrasts starkly with the scathing assessment of the state of NATO, now 60 years old, by European military analysts, who say that the gap in military capability between the United ...

President Obama's trip to China yielded precious little Chinese cooperation on the Administration's key concerns, ranging from currency issues to Iran. That's a sign of the shifting balance of power between two countries that have been locked in an uneasy embrace for more than three decades. "I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues," said China's President Hu Jintao. "What is important is to respect and accommodate each ...

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 ...

While more police officers patrol Tokyo's subway and train stations in preparation for U.S. President Barack Obama's two-day trip to Japan this week, people in other parts of the country have already sent the American President a message. On Sunday, thousands of Japanese — with estimates ranging from 6,000 to 21,000 — gathered in the Okinawan city of Nago to demand that U.S. military personnel, who have been continuously stationed on the island since 1945, find a new ...

Yemen's President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, flew into the Gulf of Aden on Nov. 7 to celebrate the first exports of liquefied natural gas from a sprawling $4.5 billion plant — the biggest ever investment in his otherwise impoverished desert country. A brass band played and politicians applauded the gas tanker as it set sail for South Korea, but Saleh's attention was elsewhere — on the attacks that Saudi Arabia's military forces were waging against antigovernment Shi'ite rebels in the ...

Can anyone end the dispute between the nation's intelligence chiefs? The National Security Council tried and failed; National Security Adviser Jim Jones tried and failed. Now it looks as if Vice President Joe Biden's effort to referee the dispute between CIA Director Leon Panetta and his boss, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, has not completely resolved the differences either. At issue in the pair's long-running tension is the right to name the chief intelligence officer in any ...

Talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his election opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, have broken down, a Western source close to the Afghan leadership told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Friday.

Tony Blair's chances of becoming the European Union's first full-time president were in serious trouble late on Thursday as a Brussels summit opened with a chorus of criticism from his own supposed center-left allies.

Former French President Jacques Chirac must stand trial on corruption charges, French public radio reported Friday.