News stories by Jim Lobe, page 4

WASHINGTON, Jul 14 (IPS) - While Republicans and other right-wingers claim that President Barack Obama has inflicted unprecedented damage on Washington's global reputation, a major new global survey suggests that the image of the U.S. remains generally positive.

WASHINGTON, Jul 08 (IPS) - Monday's expulsion order by Bahrain against a visiting senior U.S. official has set back tentative hopes for internal reforms that could reconcile the kingdom's Sunni-led government with its majority Shia community and drawn a sharp protest from Washington.

WASHINGTON, Jun 28 (IPS) - This month's stunning campaign by Sunni insurgents led by the radical Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL) against the mainly Shi'a government of Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki is stoking a growing debate here about the hierarchy of threats facing the United States in the Middle East and beyond.

WASHINGTON, Jun 26 (IPS) - U.S. Big Business is going all out to protect a favoured government agency, the 80-year-old Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), from a full-fledged assault by the populist "Tea Party" wing of the Republican Party.

WASHINGTON, Jun 21 (IPS) - Despite their ubiquity on television talk shows and newspaper op-ed pages, neo-conservatives and other hawks who propelled the U.S. into war in Iraq 11 years ago are falling short in their efforts to persuade the public and Congress that Washington needs to return.

WASHINGTON, Jun 03 (IPS) - In contrast to some of their leaders, people across the Arab world prefer President Barack Obama's efforts to reduce Washington's military footprint in the Middle East to the approach favoured by neo-conservatives and other U.S. hawks, according to the latest in a series of surveys of Arab public opinion released here Tuesday.

WASHINGTON, May 28 (IPS) - U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday stressed multilateralism over militarism in what was billed as a major foreign policy address and a rebuttal to an ever-louder chorus of criticism, mostly by Republicans and neo-conservatives, that his tenure has been marked by weakness and retreat.

WASHINGTON, May 28 (IPS) - U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday his intention to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

WASHINGTON, May 22 (IPS) - Pending legislation calling for U.S. President Barack Obama to impose sanctions against key Venezuelan officials is unlikely to defuse the ongoing crisis there and could prove counter-productive, according to both the administration and independent experts here.

WASHINGTON, May 20 (IPS) - Delegates to this week's annual meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva should agree on an ambitious agenda to sharply cut the rate of newborn deaths and stillbirths over the next two decades, according to maternal and infant health experts.