The US military stands ready to strike Syria at once if president Barack Obama gives the order, the country’s defence secretary Chuck Hagel has said.

The US military has evacuated its non-essential government personnel from Yemen due to the high threat of attack by al Qaida which has caused temporary shutdowns of 19 American diplomatic posts across the Middle East and Africa

Egypt’s new government has imposed the toughest border restrictions on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip in years, sealing smuggling tunnels, blocking most passenger traffic and causing millions of pounds in economic losses.

A Chinese city near the border with North Korea has held an air raid drill amid tensions over Pyongyang’s latest threats, according to media reports.

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.

A suicide bomber on a bicycle struck outside the Afghan Defence Ministry today, killing at least nine Afghan civilians as US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel visited Kabul, officials said.

The top US commander in Afghanistan has been cleared of sending inappropriate emails to a woman linked to the sex scandal that forced David Petraeus to quit as CIA director.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has decided to cut short his first foreign visit since taking office to focus on the Algerian hostage crisis.

The Pentagon has said it will send Patriot air defence missiles and 400 troops to Turkey as part of a Nato force meant to protect Turkish territory from potential Syrian missile attack.

The US government is investigating whether the attack on the US Consulate in Libya in which America’s ambassador was gunned down was a planned terrorist strike to mark the anniversary of the September 11 2001 attacks rather than a spontaneous mob enraged over an anti-Islam YouTube video.

A former Navy SEAL’s insider account of the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden contains classified information, an official said today.

The publisher of an insider account of the US Navy SEAL raid that killed terror mastermind Osama bin Laden said it would begin public sales next week despite a Pentagon warning of possible legal action against the author and others.

The White House and the Pentagon voiced regrets today for newly published photographs that claim to show US troops posing with the bodies of dead insurgents in Afghanistan.

Another set of photographs apparently showing US troops posing with the bodies of dead insurgents in Afghanistan has been published.

The sex scandal involving US Secret Service agents and prostitutes in a hotel in Colombia involved at least 20 foreign women, congressional officials say.

Partial remains of several victims of the September 11 2001 attacks on the United States were incinerated by a military contractor and sent to a landfill site, a government report said.

The US has warned Iran it will not tolerate any disruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz after Iran threatened to choke off the vital Persian Gulf oil transport route if Washington imposes sanctions targeting its crude exports.

Pakistan’s army has rejected a US investigation into the Nato air strikes that killed 24 of its soldiers.

The US is abandoning plans to keep troops in Iraq past an end-of-year withdrawal deadline, it emerged today.

The Pentagon has says the military is adequately prepared for tomorrow’s official lifting of the legal ban on openly gay officers serving.

A Saudi tip about a possible al-Qaida effort to bring down airplanes was relayed to US authorities in early October, nearly three weeks before the group’s Yemen affiliate tried to ship mail bombs to the US in cargo planes, US intelligence officials said.

WIKILEAKS has released a CIA memo analysing the risks of terrorists operating from the United States.

Security services were warned of a terrorist bomb plot weeks before the failed Christmas Day airliner attack, it was claimed today.

AN Italian judge yesterday convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street, in a landmark case involving the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme in the war on terrorism.

A YEAR after the Bush administration abandoned its harshest interrogation methods, CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for six straight days with permission from government lawyers.

SLEEP deprivation, “insult slaps”, water dousing and “walling”, or slamming a detainee’s head against a wall, were techniques used by CIA interrogators to “break” high-value detainees, according to an agency memo.

US authorities have informed Germany that they will not extradite 13 suspected CIA agents sought in the alleged kidnapping of a German citizen.