Chill hangs over Obama’s journey to summit in Russia
WASHINGTON — Just days before Vladimir Putin reassumed the presidency of Russia last year, President Barack Obama dispatched his national security adviser to Moscow. Obama had made considerable progress with Dmitry A. Medvedev, the caretaker president, and wanted to preserve the momentum.
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CBS and Time Warner Cable ended their protracted contract dispute Monday evening with the announcement of an agreement that restored CBS and its related channels, like Showtime, to millions of cable subscribers largely in three major cities, New York, Los Angeles and Dallas.
Syrians thrown off balance by hesitation in Washington
BEIRUT — Two days after President Barack Obama shocked Syrians by delaying expected American missile strikes, the country remains off balance, with the military still bracing, the rebels still hoping to capitalize on the confusion, civilians increasingly fleeing across the borders and everyone uncertain whether the attack has been called off for good.
McCain urges lawmakers to back Obama’s plan for Syria
WASHINGTON — The White House’s aggressive push for congressional approval of an attack on Syria appeared to have won the tentative support of one of President Barack Obama’s most hawkish Republican critics, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who said Monday that he supported a “limited” strike if the president did more to arm the Syrian opposition.
Debate revives Merkel’s rival as credible challenger
BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Social Democratic challenger, Peer Steinbrück, returned to the campaign trail on Monday, with neither triumphant after their sole television debate, a mostly decorous 90-minute exchange that restored Steinbrück as a credible candidate but yielded a rhetorical draw.
Brazil angered over report that NSA spied on president
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s government summoned the U.S. ambassador Monday to respond to new revelations of U.S. surveillance of President Dilma Rousseff and her top aides, complicating relations between the countries ahead of Rousseff’s state visit to Washington next month.
Leaked document outlines US spending on intelligence
The most detailed public disclosure of U.S. intelligence spending in history shows a surprisingly dominant role for the Central Intelligence Agency, a growing emphasis on both defensive and offensive cyberoperations and significant gaps in knowledge about targeted countries despite the sharp increase in spending after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
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WASHINGTON — All legally married same-sex couples will be recognized for federal tax purposes, regardless of whether the state where they live recognizes the marriage, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday.
Obama is willing to go it alone in Syria, aides say
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria, administration officials said Thursday, despite a stinging rejection of such action Thursday by America’s stalwart ally Britain and mounting questions from Congress.
US says it won’t sue to undo state marijuana laws
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Thursday that it would not sue to block laws legalizing marijuana in 20 states and the District of Columbia, a move that proponents hailed as an important step toward ending the prohibition of the drug.
Mixed feelings for Syrians as they await a US strike
BEIRUT — In a narrow alley in the old city of Damascus, a shopkeeper who opposes the Syrian government spent Thursday as usual, drinking coffee with the other merchants who keep him company in place of long-vanished tourists. But the calm on the cobblestone street, he said, could hardly mask the fear and ambivalence over an American military strike.
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WASHINGTON — The goal of the cruise missile strikes the United States is planning to carry out in Syria is to restore the smudged “red line” that President Barack Obama drew a year ago against the use of poison gas.
A humid end to summer
Summer is commonly regarded as beginning on Memorial Day weekend and ending on Labor Day weekend. While the astronomical summer runs from June 21 to Sept. 22, the warmest temperatures tend to lag the peak insolation; meteorological summer is therefore defined as June, July, and August. Therefore, defining Labor Day as the end of summer does have some merit.
Switzerland and US reach accord to curtail banking secrecy
Switzerland and the United States reached a watershed deal Thursday to punish Swiss banks that helped wealthy Americans stash money in hidden offshore accounts, closing the door on an era of bank secrecy and tax evasion.
Under Obama, little progress on high-level jobs for women
WASHINGTON — Behind the roiling conversation over whether President Barack Obama might make Janet L. Yellen the first female leader of the Federal Reserve is an uncomfortable reality for the White House: the administration has named no more women to high-level executive branch posts than the Clinton administration did almost two decades ago.
Iran’s pick for nuclear talks carries hope of eased tensions
TEHRAN, Iran — Until this summer, Mohammad Javad Zarif, one of Iran’s most accomplished diplomats, was an outcast, exiled from the government by ultraconservatives for working too closely with the West. Rather than presenting the Iranian case to the world, as he had done so effectively throughout a 35-year diplomatic career, he was spending his days teaching at the Foreign Ministry’s training center on a quiet, leafy campus in North Tehran.
Greece on track for more aid, German official says
BERLIN — With Greece and its continuing debt crisis an issue ahead of Germany’s national election next month, the highest-ranking German in the European Central Bank said Monday that Athens could be eligible for additional aid and debt relief next year if it continued to fulfill promises made for assistance it is already receiving.
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JINAN, China — Concluding a trial that has riveted China, Bo Xilai, the former elite Communist Party official, attacked elements of the prosecution’s case Monday and said his former top deputy and his wife, both of whom provided evidence against him, had a passionate relationship with each other.
Confident Syria used chemicals, US mulls action
WASHINGTON — Moving a step closer to possible U.S. military action in Syria, a senior Obama administration official said Sunday that there was “very little doubt” that President Bashar Assad’s military forces had used chemical weapons against civilians last week and that a Syrian promise to allow U.N. inspectors access to the site was “too late to be credible”.
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WASHINGTON — Unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Treasury Department said Monday that it expected to lose the ability to pay all of the government’s bills in mid-October.