A major earthquake measuring about 6.0 rattled offices on Tuesday in the US capital Washington and led to panicked evacuations at the Indian embassy and in as far away as New York.
As the clamour in the United States Congress to cut off aid to Pakistan -- or at the very least suspend the massive American economic and military largesse to Islamabad --continued to grow to a crescendo, the top civilian and military leadership at the Pentagon warned against such punitive action, saying it would be counterproductive and inimical to US's security interests.
The United States and Pakistan are engaged in a billing dispute, with Washington rejecting over 40 per cent of the claims submitted by Islamabad as expenses to fight Al Qaeda and other terrorists along the Afghanistan border, according to a report.
The project nicknamed Falcon HTV-2 being developed by the Pentagon and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has the capability to reach anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes.
Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta will move to Pentagon to become new US Defence Secretary to replace Robert Gates while his top military commander in Afghanistan Gen David Petraeus is to takeover as the new CIA Director.
The US-Pak military ties are going through a 'very difficult time,' a top Pentagon official has conceded, but Washington is nowhere close to severing its ties with its longstanding ally.
The United States has asked China to "immediately" return its unmanned naval probe in international waters in the South China Sea which it alleged has been "unlawfully" seized by them.
With BRIC nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, calling for ceasefire in Libya, a top Pentagon official on Wednesday said that the onus for this lies with the Gaddafi forces, which needs to pull back its troops from cities and stop attacking civilians.
United States President-elect Donald Trump has formally nominated James Mattis, a retired 4-star Marine Corps general who has long voiced concerns about the threat posed by Iran, as the Defence Secretary to replace Ashton Carter.
Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks that released thousands of United States state department's secret documents on Sunday, is under the scanner of investigators who are trying to figure out whether or not he had violated criminal laws, and could even be charged under the Espionage Act.
United States President Barack Obama on Friday telephoned Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan to discuss the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan and killed over 360 people, as the Pentagon geared up for a possible relief and rescue operation in affected areas.
While Wikileaks did not say in its message what the third instalment of their release would cover. However, a Reuters despatch from Washington DC said that classified US diplomatic cables reporting corruption allegations against foreign governments and leaders are expected to feature in the official documents that Wikileaks plans to release.
Two United States troopers were killed in a shooting incident near Frankfurt International Airport on Wednesday, according to media reports.Some reports claimed that two others were seriously injured in the incident which reportedly took place on board a US military shuttle bus.The two troopers were members of US Air Force stationed at Lakenheath base in the United Kingdom, said the reports.
Nearly 200 fighters at an Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent terror training camp in the Af-Pak border region were killed in a recent attack by the US and Afghan commandos.
The US said that there has been no "significant impact" on its military to military relationship with Pakistan after Islamabad refused to release an American diplomat detained on possible murder charges.
The United States is open to Indian participation in its Joint Strike Fighter programme that would finally lead to its purchase of fifth generation F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter, a top Pentagon official has said.
Aziz Haniffa reports from Washington, DC on how the American Enterprise Institute, a leading neo-conservative DC think-tank, wants the US to boost its military relationship with India.
According to a New York Times report, senior American government officials said the discovery include huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium.
As Pakistan fumed over aerial attacks by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's forces inside its territory that killed nearly 50 militants, the Pentagon has asserted that armed forces have the right to self defence and the United States followed the appropriate protocol in the situation. "The armed forces have the right to self defence. They have been attacked and they respond and they notify the Pakistani government about it," said the Pentagon.
The United States air force nuclear command has been rocked by the worst cheating scandal in proficiency exam involving 34 officers at the inter-continental missile launch of the global strike command, the Pentagon has said.
"Our expectations are straight forward: Taliban and Haqqani leadership and attack planners should no longer be able to find safe haven or conduct operations from Pakistani soil," Pentagon Press Secretary Army Col Rob Manning told reporters during an off-camera news conference.
The Pentagon leadership has strongly denied reports that it has pressurised Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani to extend the military's anti-Taliban operations into North Waziristan, in the wake of the botched Times Square bombing attempt by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, who received terror training in that region.
China is pursuing a major military build up in a "secretive manner" developing survivable nuclear delivery system, a 1,500-km range anti-ship missile to hit aircraft carriers and has the most active land based ballistic and cruise missile programme in the world, Pentagon has said.
"He (Zawahiri) and his organisation still threaten us. As we did both seek to capture and kill and succeed in killing bin Laden, we certainly do or will do the same thing with Zawahiri," Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told media persons at a Pentagon news conference.
Amidst growing demand from United States lawmakers about becoming tough with Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden in the country, a top Pentagon official on Wednesday warned that walking away from Islamabad at this point of time could backfire.
The 'doomsday plane' was mobilised in the tumultuous hours after planes crashed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania on 9/11.
"Given the continuing challenges posed by Pakistan's ambiguous policy toward terrorism in the region, the Obama administration must consider carefully whether its current Pakistan policy is providing sufficient dividends or whether it needs to be recalibrated in ways that convince the Pakistanis to shift their strategy toward the Taliban in more fundamental ways," noted South Asian expert, Lisa Curtis, of the Heritage Foundation said.
Former Telecom Minister A Raja, at the centre of the 2G spectrum allocation scam, has earned the dubious distinction of figuring in the list of Time Magazine's "an ignominious club of privileged leaders who stepped too far".
The latest WikiLeaks submission reveals a number of dubious attacks by Apache helicopters and raise the question of whether US pilots committed war crimes.
Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has released nearly 400,000 secret American documents on Iraq war, calling it the "largest classified military leak in history", despite Pentagon's warning that it could endanger informants and reveal war strategy.
Any form of entanglement with India or the US on the strategic plane will be anathema to Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa rulers, observes Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
United States elite Navy SEALs team used top secret, never-before-seen stealth helicopters to swoop down on an unsuspecting Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad safe haven and shoot him dead.
'Analysts see BECA as a 'force multiplier' for India.' 'But China too is known to have such capabilities.' 'The military gap with China will continue to remain a fact of life, BECA notwithstanding,' argues Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar
US military is looking at options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan if a successful terrorist strike on US soil is traced back to the country, senior Pentagon officials were quoted as saying on Saturday.
Days after the WikiLeaks went onto release more than 92,000 classified documents pertaining to the war against terrorism, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that thousands of such classified papers are missing from the department of defence.
According to the Washington Post, American military officials say the intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as Prompt Global Strike weapons, are a necessary new form of deterrence against terrorist networks and other adversaries.
The US president and his advisers in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon cannot claim that they too were unaware of the shocking facts in the leaked documents, says B Raman
Expressing alarm over rapid Chinese military build up which they say threatens to challenge US freedom of action in space, cyberspace, at sea and in the air, influential US lawmakers want Pentagon to file a report to the US Congress on Beijing's growing military might.
The Obama Administration has indicated that it apparently has no problem with India training Afghan security forces but that is a sovereign decision to be taken by the government in Kabul, Washington is aware that such training of Afghans by India is already taking place.
In the story, one top McChrystal adviser refers to Vice President Biden as 'Bite Me'. A McChrystal adviser says that in his first meeting with the general, President Obama 'clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his f---ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.'
