WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States reversed policy on Wednesday and said it would back launching talks on a treaty to regulate arms sales as long as the talks operated by consensus, a stance critics said gave every nation a veto.
The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush’s administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as …

SEOUL, South Korea — North and South Korean naval vessels exchanged fire in disputed waters off the western coast of the Korean Peninsula on Tuesday, leaving one North Korean vessel engulfed in flames, South Korean officials said.
The two Koreas accused each other of violating territorial waters, provoking the fierce two-minute skirmish. It was the first border fighting in seven years between the countries, which technically remain at war after fighting in the 1950-3 Korean War ended in a truce rather than a permanent peace treaty.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — President Hugo Chavez ordered Venezuela’s military on Sunday to prepare for a possible armed conflict with Colombia, saying the country’s soldiers should be ready if the United States attempts to provoke a war between the South American neighbors.
“The best way to avoid war is preparing for it,” Chavez told military officers standing at attention during his weekly television and radio program.
Repeating an often-used military adage, he added, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
Chavez told his supporters that President Barack Obama holds sway over Colombia’s …

CIA director Leon Panetta got into hot water with Congress, after he revealed an agency program to hunt down and kill terrorists. A recent report from the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA didn’t go far enough (.pdf). Instead, it suggests the American government should set up something like a “National Manhunting Agency” to go after jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state.
America’s military, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies already devote thousands of people and billions of dollars to tracking down top terrorists and insurgents. …

MILAN — An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric here in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was tortured.
In rendering the verdict, the judge in the case, Oscar Magi, acquitted three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, saying they were covered by diplomatic immunity.
The Americans were all tried in absentia but were represented throughout the trial by defense attorneys, most of them court-appointed. The U.S. …

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to President Barack Obama, in part for his push to (someday, somehow) reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles to zero.
In announcing the prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Obama had “created a new climate in international politics…. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.”

As the world focused on President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a small group of determined scientists gathered in a Senate office building to present evidence backing their claim that climate change is caused not by man but by nature, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but the hope for a greener planet.
John Kwapisz, organizer and moderator at the panel discussion, recalled Obama’s speech at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pa., last month as a way of illustrating the dramatic tone used by those who embrace global warming as …

Mystery surrounds the fate of a missing Iranian scientist who is reported to have been involved in Tehran’s controversial nuclear programme.  Shahram Amiri disappeared in June in Saudi Arabia while on a pilgrimage.  Iran on Wednesday accused the US of involvement in his disappearance, but did not confirm media reports that Mr Amiri was indeed a nuclear scientist.  In response, a US state department spokesman said Washington had no information about the case.  “We have found documents that prove US interference in the disappearance of the Iranian pilgrim Shahram Amiri …

Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.
The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.
But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United …