American Security Council Foundation (ASCF)

Even before the top two nuclear negotiators from Iran and six world powers sat down to a rare shared dinner in Istanbul tonight, events showed how far apart they are as they wrestle over how to limit Iran’s nuclear program. 

The first face-to-face contact in six weeks since both sides talked intensely in the Kazakh city of Almaty, appear to have yielded little of the rethink that both sides demanded of each other, when their only point of agreement was that they remained “far apart” on key issues.

President Barack Obama moved late Wednesday to head off further potential political damage from the controversy over his administration's response to last year's terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya.

The White House released 100 pages of emails detailing intense debate among administration officials and the CIA about how to word public "talking points" after the attack in Benghazi.

Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the attack.

 

President Barack Obama says Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has asked for and received the resignation of the acting director of the Internal Revenue Service.  The tax collecting agency was found to have been improperly targeting conservative groups.

The president spoke Wednesday after meeting with Lew and his top deputy to review a report from the Treasury Department inspector general.  The report found that the IRS singled out for scrutiny conservative groups which were seeking tax-exempt status.
 

The U.S. Navy made aviation history on Tuesday by launching an unmanned jet off an aircraft carrier for the first time, taking an important step toward expanded use of drones by the American military with an eye on possible rivals like China and Iran.
 
The bat-winged X-47B stealth drone roared off the USS George H.W. Bush near the coast of Virginia and flew a series of pre-programmed maneuvers around the ship before veering away toward a Naval air station in Maryland where it was scheduled to land.
 

Federal investigators have learned that the main suspect in last month’s Boston Marathon bombing met with an exiled former Chechen resistance fighter in Manchester, New Hampshire less than a month before carrying out the attack that killed three and wounded more than 260.
 
Police in Manchester confirmed to VOA that FBI agents have searched the home of the former Chechen resistance figure, Musa Khadjimuradov, and examined the hard drives of his computers. Khadjimuradov confirmed to VOA that FBI agents came to his home on Tuesday with search warrants and also took a sample of his DNA and impressions of his fingerprints.  
 
 

In recent weeks, President Obama has worked assiduously to redefine and thereby back away from his earlier statements that Syria's Assad regime would face grave consequences if it used chemical weapons. The president's emphatic pronouncements, starting last August, that any such actions would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer” had turned from news-getting one-liners into a major public-relations problem for his administration.

Then, on May 5, The New York Times' lead article reported the spectacle of unnamed administration officials leaking that the president's comments were “unscripted.” One anonymous source said “the idea was to put a chill into the Assad regime without actually trapping the president into any predetermined action.”