Mexico has made headway in its struggle against the country’s powerful drug cartels, but the crackdown has led to more violence as criminal gangs battle for diminishing profits, the United States said on Friday.
The State Department’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report also said Afghanistan slashed opium poppy cultivation by 19 percent in 2008 after two years of record highs.
But drug trafficking and poppy cultivation continued to fuel insurgencies in Afghanistan’s less secure southern areas, it said.

MANILA, Philippines—The Filipino engineer held captive by Abu Sayyaf bandits in the mountains of Indanan, Sulu, along with her two colleagues in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has pleaded for help to end their suffering.
Mary Jean Lacaba was allowed by her captors to speak on the phone with this reporter on the afternoon of Feb. 25. Her voice was low and trembling, and she spoke in short sentences, in a mix of Filipino and English.
Lacaba relayed the same message over and over again, directed at the government …

President Obama announced today his plans for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. He did it from North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, where thousands of Marines are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. (You can read his speech here.)
This is as much a message to Americans as it is Europeans: We have a new priority.
“America can no longer afford to see Iraq in isolation from other priorities: we face the challenge of refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan; of relieving the burden on our military; and of rebuilding our struggling economy and these are …

Iranian and Russian engineers carried out a test-run of Iran’s first nuclear power plant Wednesday, a major step toward starting up a facility that the U.S. once hoped to prevent because of fears over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Washington worried Iran would turn spent fuel from the plant’s reactor into plutonium, which could then be used to build a nuclear warhead, and U.S. officials pressured Moscow for years to stop helping Iran build the electricity-generating facility.

The U.S. Justice Department has announced the arrests of 755 people on drug charges in a crackdown on the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel that began in 2007.
The department says the suspects were detained in a 21-month multi-agency investigation called “Operation Xcellerator.”
Forty eight of the arrests were made Wednesday in the U.S. states of California, Minnesota and Maryland.
The Justice Department says the operation led to the seizure of more than $59 million and more than 20 tons of drugs, including about 12,500 kilograms of cocaine and 7,000 kilograms of marijuana.

Four soldiers with U.S.-led coalition forces and an Afghan civilian working for them were killed in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb, the U.S. military said.
It said the coalition troops were on a patrol with Afghan security forces, but did not give any further details.
Some 38,000 U.S. troops are currently serving in Afghanistan alongside another 30,000 from 40 other mostly NATO nations.

North Korea has announced that it is preparing to launch a rocket carrying a communications satellite.
It did not give a date for the launch, but said it would mark a great step forward for the communist state.
Correspondents say the statement is Pyongyang’s clearest reference yet to what neighbours believe may be the imminent test of a long-range missile.
When it tested the Taepodong-1 missile in 1998, it claimed to have put a satellite in orbit.
In July 2006 it test-fired the three-stage long-range Taepodong-2, but the missile blew up shortly after launch.

Sri Lanka’s military said Tuesday it was trying to establish how the Tamil Tigers managed to buy light planes abroad, smuggle them onto the island and establish a rebel air force.
The probe follows the latest Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) air assault against the capital using two of their Czech-made aircraft.
The military shot down one aircraft just before it reached the intended target at the main airbase, while the second plane crashed into a tax building here on Friday night and exploded in a ball of fire.
“At this stage …