AFGHANISTAN

Pakistan said on Monday it was taking steps to keep a U.S. consulate worker, imprisoned in a local jail for shooting two Pakistanis, safe from harm in a case that has unleashed a diplomatic storm.

Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) raised a cudgel against Anonymous, claiming that its website is under threat from the outfit known for taking down sites with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Iraqi authorities have arrested a high-ranking police official in connection with the purchase of a bomb detector that the British government says does not work, officials said on Thursday.

What is happening in the Middle East is a major historical critical juncture, said Dilshod A. Achilov, a professor of political science at East Tennessee State University.

Three items totaling about $2.4 trillion combine for nearly two thirds of President Barack Obama's proposed $3.7 trillion 2012 fiscal year budget.

An American jailed for shooting two Pakistanis is shielded by diplomatic immunity, a Pakistani official said Wednesday, but local courts are likely have the final say in a case that has ignited a bruising row between two strategic allies.

Daniel Patrick Boyd, a U.S. citizen and resident of North Carolina, has pleaded guilty in a federal court to charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim, and injure persons in a foreign country, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said.

Lara Logan, CBS chief foreign affairs correspondent, was sexually assaulted and beaten in Egypt the network said in a statement.

An influential Pakistani Islamist party accused the United States on Tuesday of riding roughshod in the case of a U.S. consular employee held over the killing of two Pakistanis and said it would hold protests if he is freed.

President Barack Obama on Monday proposed spending almost $110 billion on Afghanistan, signaling little let-up in the U.S. war drive despite demands for tougher spending controls at home.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates played down the accuracy of troop figures outlined in a budget request unveiled on Monday, saying the pace of the upcoming drawdown in Afghanistan was still unclear.

A suicide bomber killed at least two people in an assault on a downtown Kabul hotel Monday, the second attack in the capital in less than three weeks, Afghan and Western officials said.

There have been forty-three Afghanistan coalition military fatalities from the start of 2011 to February 12, according to tracker iCasualites.org.

While Republican leaders promised to pursue even bigger federal budget cuts on Thursday, an initial proposal from Wednesday shows job training programs, a fund to upgrade federal buildings and the Environmental Protection Agency will see some of the biggest reductions.

Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old abused Afghan woman was punished brutally for fleeing her husband’s house – her ears and nose were cut off. The rescue by American soldiers took her to the cover of the Aug. 9 issue of TIME magazine last year, which has won the 54th annual World Press Photo Contest and has been chosen World Press Photo of the Year 2010.

India and Pakistan said on Thursday they would resume formal peace talks but issues such as militancy and the disputed Kashmir region are likely to slow any progress towards defusing tensions.

A 12-year-old boy in a school uniform blew himself up at a Pakistani army recruitment centre on Thursday, killing 31 cadets, officials said, in an attack that challenges government assertions that it has weakened militants.

A mind-numbing total of 739 children died in conflict-related security incidents in Afghanistan in 2010, rights watchdog Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) said in its annual report on Wednesday.

US top military officials on Tuesday unveiled the National Military Strategy, the first revision since 2004 and calls for redefining leadership in a changing world.

More than 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were unemployed in January, far higher than the national jobless rate and the highest since the government began collecting data on veterans in 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday.

Afghanistan's central bank expects an Islamic banking law to be enacted by September, drawing billions in deposits from citizens wary of the conventional banking system, a senior official said.