The Trump administration has proposed spending $18bn over 10 years to significantly extend the border wall with Mexico, providing one of its most detailed blueprints of how the president hopes to carry out a signature campaign pledge.

The Policing Authority is legally prevented from finding out if a senior officer it is considering for promotion is implicated in a whistleblower investigation being conducted by Gsoc, writes Security Correspondent Cormac O’Keeffe   

JOHN Mindermann is part of an unusual fraternity. A former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), now 80 and retired in his hometown, San Francisco, he is among the relative handful of law-enforcement officials who have investigated a sitting president of the US.

The Policing Authority has drawn up a panel of 15 senior officers for promotion to the rank of chief superintendent after the biggest ever independent selection process for An Garda Síochána.

A businessman who was indicted by US authorities in connection to the Fifa corruption case has turned himself in to Italian police.

The United States and Cuba are trying to eliminate obstacles to normal ties as the highest-level US delegation to the communist island in three decades holds a second day of talks with Cuban officials.

LIBYA’S new regime fighters retreated yesterday under fire from Muammar Gaddafi diehards in his hometown Sirte as their leaders backtracked on an announcement that they had captured one of his sons.

MADDI, owned by Jack Manning from Limerick and driven by his son John Jnr, took the featured Murphy's Stout Sulky Grand Prix at a sun soaked Ballabuidhe yesterday.

The national security adviser for the White House said the material seized from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan amounts to the largest cache of intelligence ever gathered from any single terrorist.

President Barack Obama today condemned as “offensive” and “hateful” the suggestion of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the September 11 attacks might have been orchestrated by the US government.

POLICE found an “amateurish” but potentially powerful bomb that apparently began to detonate but did not explode in a smoking sport utility vehicle in Times Square, authorities said yesterday.

AMERICA’S national security adviser James Jones said yesterday that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden still spends some time inside Afghanistan.

Five British soldiers have been killed by a rogue Afghan policeman, British and Afghan officials said today.

Israeli authorities broke up a series of Palestinian cultural events as part of a crackdown in Jerusalem, disrupting a children’s march and bursting balloons at a school celebration.

Mayor Ray Nagin gave New Orleans residents the go-ahead to return to the US city today, but with several warnings – many homes were without electricity or working toilets and a dusk-to-dawn curfew is still in effect.

The US is poised today to impose additional sanctions against Burma's military rulers after they issued a veiled threat to suppress pro-democracy demonstrations.

The Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba and move terror suspects from there to military prisons on US soil, it emerged last night..

US SENATE Republican Leader Bill Frist yesterday called for the Bush administration to stop a deal permitting a United Arab Emirates company to take over six American seaports, upping the ante on a fight that several congressmen, governors and mayors are waging with the White House.

China today said it supported a Russian proposal to allow Iran to enrich its uranium in Russia.

FEDERAL authorities began counting down to Hurricane Rita's arrival with last-minute promises to deliver fuel to hundreds of thousands of evacuees fleeing the shifting storm that covered half of the Gulf of Mexico.

Some immigrants used false documents to enter the United States, others let their legal visas expire once in the country. And at least 21 foreign nationals became naturalised US citizens before being charged or convicted as terrorists.

The orange alert instituted two weeks ago for US mass transit systems is likely to be prolonged after the latest terrorist attacks in London.

A top Iraqi security official said today the government has arrested two close associates of terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi just days before historic elections that Zarqawi’s group has pledged to disrupt.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr accepted a peace plan yesterday to end the fighting in Najaf that would disarm his militia and remove them from their hideout in a holy shrine.

Pakistan has captured two high-ranking al-Qaida terrorists, including one with a multi-million dollar US bounty on his head, in a sweep that has netted a number of other terror suspects, officials said today.

Foreigners entering US airports and seaports from all but 28 nations will have their fingerprints scanned and photographs taken this week, in a tough new drive to tighten border security.

US and Egyptian mediators intensified efforts to persuade militant Palestinians to agree to suspend attacks against Israelis in a bid to salvage a US-backed peace plan threatening to collapse under the weight of renewed violence.

President Jacques Chirac said tonight France would oppose any effort to draft a new UN resolution to explicitly authorise war against Iraq at this time.

AMERICA'S Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said yesterday there was nothing new in a statement attributed to al-Qaida that threatens new attacks in New York and Washington unless America stops supporting Israel and converts to Islam.

Tens of thousands of letters mailed around the US could have picked up trace amounts of anthrax while passing through a contaminated postal centre, the nation’s top anthrax investigator has said.