Military Bases

Bush administration officials sought Thursday to defuse criticism over a proposed agreement with the Iraqi government, saying the U.S. would seek neither permanent bases in Iraq nor a commitment to a set number of American troops. In the agreement, being negotiated this year, the U.S. is seeking to maintain its current level of authority to conduct combat operations in Iraq, administration officials said. The United Nations mandate that governs U.S.

If there is a post-Cold War Berlin, it may well be this agricultural town straddling a river between Iran and Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that has become an important ally in Washington's declared war on Islamic extremism.

After crossing Africa from west to east and back, the central issues that followed President Bush on his tour all came together Wednesday in the white stucco Osu Castle here on the Atlantic shoreline. With gusto, the president declared "that's baloney" to the notion that the United States was preparing to establish military bases in Africa. "Or, as we say in Texas, that's bull," Bush said at a news conference with Ghanaian President John Kufuor.

Gus Giordano, a choreographer who popularized jazz dance around the world and earned it recognition as a legitimate art form, died Sunday in Chicago of pneumonia, according to a statement released by his family. The founder of the critically acclaimed Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, based in Evanston, Ill., Giordano published "The Anthology of American Jazz Dance" in 1975. In 1990, he organized the first Jazz Dance World Congress, which brings together jazz dance companies for a week of master classes and performances.

Poland and the United States struck a deal Thursday that will strengthen military ties and put an American missile interceptor base in Poland, a plan that has infuriated Moscow and sparked fears in Europe of a new arms race. Washington says the planned system, which is not yet operational, is needed to protect the U.S. and Europe from possible attacks by missile-armed "rogue states," such as Iran.

The Army's National Training Center at Ft. Irwin on Friday suspended its effort to move California desert tortoises off prospective combat training grounds and onto nearby public lands because the animals are being hit hard by coyotes. The first phase of the $8.7-million translocation effort began in March, when about 670 tortoises were airlifted by helicopter out of the southern portion of the desert base northeast of Barstow to new homes in drought-stricken western Mojave Desert areas.

One is a bankrupt convicted felon who spewed venomous hatred about the United States, hooked up an alleged terrorist cell with semiautomatic weapons and drove the surveillance car as they cased military bases. The other boasted of killing someone back home in Albania and vowed to kill others or blow himself up in a crowd of people now that he was in the United States. But Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli aren't members of the so-called "Ft.

The nation's terrifying nuclear past united with the peace and quiet of nature Saturday when the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy opened a new state park high above Encino and Brentwood to commemorate the Cold War. From 1956 to 1968--before perestroika or the dawn of Russian elections--a tiny knob of dirt 1,950 feet above the Pacific Ocean, between the San Fernando Valley and Brentwood, was the last line of defense to protect Los Angeles and its teeming aerospace factories from Soviet bombers.

The United States is battling a dangerous new front in its South American drug war -- just as a protege of anti-American leader Hugo Chavez comes to power in Ecuador vowing to shut down a U.S. base dedicated to narcotics surveillance. Officials have expressed growing concern that this Andean nation is being "Colombianized," illustrated by record cocaine seizures in the last two years, the destruction of a major cocaine-processing lab and a recent gangland-style killing. In recent months, U.S.

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan, killing 10 people and wounding 14, an Afghan official said. The bomber approached a group of Afghan men who were waiting outside the base in the city of Khowst before blowing himself up, said Jamal Arsalah, the governor of Khowst province. It was not immediately clear whether any Americans were among the casualties.