America's secretary of state John Kerry has arrived in South Korea, as the region braces itself for a planned missile test by North Korea.

A US intelligence report says North Korea has advanced its nuclear know-how to the point that it could arm a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead.

THE WikiLeaks website is today expected to release what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret US documents in history – hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports compiled after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The WikiLeaks website appears close to releasing what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret US documents in history – hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports compiled after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

US president Barack Obama is today set to nominate James Clapper, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, to oversee the nation’s 16 spy agencies.

Iran could amass enough nuclear material to build a bomb in about a year and could eventually produce a missile powerful enough to reach the US, military and intelligence chiefs said.

US military officials are worried about the increasing use of chemical bombs in Iraq.

Sunnis and Shiites have traded bombings and mortar fire against mainly religious targets in Baghdad, killing at least 68 people after authorities lifted a curfew that had briefly calmed a series of sectarian reprisal attacks.

US National Intelligence Director John Negroponte takes centre stage today as he delivers his first annual assessment of national security threats to Congress.

European Union human rights chiefs and the Red Cross are to investigate claims that the CIA set up secret jails in eastern Europe and elsewhere to interrogate al-Qaida suspects.

Allegations that the CIA set up secret jails in eastern Europe and elsewhere to interrogate al Qaida suspects today triggered a flurry of denials from governments in the former Soviet bloc and prompted European Union officials, the continent’s top human rights organisation and the international Red Cross to investigate.

Fresh claims of a prisoner abuse cover-up in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay hit the US military today.

The United States intelligence community must be radically overhauled in the face of the ongoing terrorist threat, the September 11 Commission said.

Attacks on coalition troops in Iraq are being led by Saddam Hussein’s secret service, which spent months before the fall of Baghdad planning to resist the invaders, it was reported today.

The United States Embassy in Kenya will be closed for two days next week – and longer if necessary – following a Pentagon alert that the threat of a terrorist act in Kenya had increased significantly, embassy spokesman Tom Hart said in Nairobi today.

The Pentagon’s intelligence branch has issued a terrorism alert to all United States interests in Kenya and raised the threat level there to “high,” a defence official said in Washington today.

US military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on US President George Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found.

US president George W Bush again yesterday insisted Baghdad had a programme to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, seeking to rebut critics who say his administration’s credibility is at stake in the search for illicit arms.

AS the Bush administration was pushing last autumn for a war against Iraq because of alleged weapons of mass destruction, a defence department report said it did not have enough “reliable information” Iraq was amassing chemical weapons, a defence official said yesterday.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will arrive in London tomorrow for discussions on the next step in the global war against terror.

The Pentagon says al-Qaida would fragment if Osama bin Laden were killed.

A Pentagon intelligence analyst who attended war games conducted by the US Atlantic Command in 1996 was charged with spying for Cuba.