Environmental groups had called on the Obama administration to restore wilderness protections. The US is to make millions of acres of public land eligible for wilderness protection, officials have said. The order reverses former President George W Bush’s policy forbidding the government from doing so. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday said the new policy would help to protect public... 

The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration, U.S. officials said. The administration has long signaled that the use of what the administration calls prolonged detention,... 

South Korean soldiers patrol near Dangjin, South Korea, on Tuesday. South Korea announced new land and sea military exercises on Wednesday, including its largest-ever live-fire drill near North Korea, just as tension on the peninsula was beginning to ease after Pyongyang’s attack on a southern island. The firing drills planned for Thursday near the Koreas’ heavily armed land border signaled... 

Alexander Lukashenko has ruled the country since 1994 and has been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”. A Belarusian human rights organization says seven of the candidates who ran against the country’s authoritarian leader face charges that could lead to 15 years in prison in the wake of post-election violence and massive arrests. Ales Belyatsky of the human rights center Vesna said the charges... 

UFO encounters became especially frequent in the middle of the 20th century, when it became impossible to disregard incidents of UFO sightings anymore. Special services started establishing special departments for air defense troops, secret laboratories were organized to study the phenomenon. It is not ruled out, that secret services have already had chances to study fragments of alien spaceships... 

Policemen arrest an activist from the Belarus youth organization Mlady Front (Young Front). Security forces in Belarus have detained over 600 people, including seven opposition candidates, after smashing a mass rally protesting fraud in the landslide re-election of president Alexander Lukashenko. Western governments have been quick to condemn the vote and the crackdown, with the United States saying... 

Tension flared between the US and Venezuela over Washington’s nominee for ambassador on Saturday. President Hugo Chavez warned the diplomat would be detained and put on the next flight home if he sets foot in the country. For months Mr Chavez warned that President Obama’s nominee, Larry Palmer, would not be welcome due to critical remarks he made about Venezuela’s government. During... 

Belarusians cast their vote in Minsk on Sunday. The race will determine the political fate of Alexander Lukashenka. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, once called “the last dictator in Europe” by a U.S. official, easily won re-election in voting Sunday, according to exit polls reported by several media outlets. Meanwhile, opposition candidates were protesting in the capital city... 

South Korean Ahyeon Middle School students take shelter from a simulated North Korea’s attack during a civil defense drill at a subway station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010. South Koreans stooped work, donned gas masks and headed to underground shelters Wednesday in the country’s biggest-ever civil evacuation drill staged amid tension over North Korea’s artillery... 

The bill includes about $5.4 billion for new labor, education and health spending. Defying the political odds, Senate Democrats rolled out a year-end, governmentwide spending bill Tuesday that cuts more than $26 billion from President Barack Obama’s 2011 requests even as it holds firm to thousands of the appropriations earmarks so adamantly opposed by critics of Congress. Filling more than 1,900... 

A federal judge ruled that a central plank of the health law-the requirement that most Americans carry insurance-violates the Constitution, dealing the biggest setback yet to the Obama administration's signature legislative accomplishment. A federal court ruled Monday that a key part of the health-care overhaul violates the Constitution, dealing the first legal setback to the Obama administration’s... 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel. German leader Angela Merkel on Wednesday brushed off reports in secret U.S. diplomatic cables that describe her as the “Teflon” chancellor as mere party chatter. Most of what is said about Germany in the leaked U.S. Embassy cables released by the WikiLeaks website “is part of every better party and therefore we weren’t all that excited,” Ms. Merkel told journalists. The... 

North Korea has warned that US-South Korean cooperation could bring a nuclear war to the region, as the South began artillery drills amid lingering tension nearly three weeks after the North’s deadly shelling of a South Korean island. The South’s naval live-fire drills are scheduled to run Monday through Friday at 27 sites. The regularly scheduled exercises are getting special attention... 

Russia delivered at least 1,800 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009, U.N. arms control data show, despite vigorous U.S. efforts to stop President Hugo Chavez’s stridently anti-American government from acquiring the weapons. The United States feared that the missiles could be funneled to Marxist guerrillas fighting Colombia’s pro-American government or Mexican drug... 

Update January 12, 2011: First WikiLeaks’ Cable Mentioning UFOs Released A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared for President Medvedev by Russian Space Forces (VKS) 45th Division of Space Control says that an upcoming WikiLeaks release of secret US cables details that the Americans have been “engaged” since 2004 in a “war” against UFO’s based on or near the Continent...