The News

cnn.com — A new government report paints an alarming picture of an unstable future for international relations defined by waning American influence, a fragmentation of political power and intensifying struggles for increasingly scarce natural resources. The report, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," was drafted by the National Intelligence Council to better inform U.S. policymakers — starting with the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama — about the factors most likely to shape major international trends and conflicts through the year 2025. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor, the United States' relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained," says the report, which is the fourth in a series from the Intelligence Council.

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iht.com — More than 10,000 supporters of the radical anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr gathered in Baghdad's Firdos Square to protest the Iraqi government plan to sign a security agreement which would maintain American troops in the country for up to three years. With powerful symbolism, demonstrators hanged an effigy of President George W. Bush from the plinth that once supported the statue of Saddam Hussein that was toppled after Baghdad to U.S. troops on April 9, 2003.

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usatoday.com — The Homeland Security Department has done a poor job overseeing the purchase of billions of dollars of equipment and technology since the agency was created five years ago, according to a federal report scheduled for release today. Senior department officials have "not provided the oversight needed" to ensure that purchases "with important national security objectives" function properly and stay on budget, according to Congress' Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO report is the latest to raise questions about the Homeland Security Department, which Congress has criticized for gaps in aviation security, a faltering response to Hurricane Katrina and slow progress in securing land borders.

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— The Pentagon spent about $600 million on more than 1,200 Iraq reconstruction contracts that were eventually canceled, nearly half of them for mismanagement or shoddy construction, government investigators say. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that 42% of canceled contracts were terminated because the contractor either failed to deliver or performed poorly. The rest were canceled for the "convenience of the government," usually for security problems, lack of funding or changing requirements, an inspector general report says. The report, which analyzed contracts since 2003, detailed seven projects in which the U.S. paid total of $172.2 million for work that was substandard, unfinished or never built.

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washingtonpost.com — The next secretary of state not only will face the challenge of repairing the nation's tattered image and grappling with an array of global crises and hot spots, but also must solve a problem closer to home: reforming an under-resourced State Department to handle its growing duties, such as rebuilding war-torn societies, coping with worldwide pandemics and working with other countries to curb global warming. "In the last eight years, we have significantly reinvented and transformed every national security agency except the Department of State," said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Our core Foreign Service officers and aid officers are not large enough to play the role that's been cast for them, nor do we have the training establishment to prepare them for their roles."

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guardian.co.uk — The U.S. and Iraq will formally commit to a pact that withdraws all American forces from the country within three years, and pulls all combat troops out of most provinces by mid-2009, the Iraqi cabinet announced. The deal for the first time prescribes a timeline for an American departure from Iraq, which the U.S. president-elect, Barack Obama, had foreshadowed as top of his foreign policy agenda when he takes office on January 20. In a development that caught coalition officials by surprise, Iraq's cabinet yesterday ended one year of protracted negotiations by agreeing to a series of US amendments to draft documents. All but one cabinet minister present at the meeting committed to the agreement.

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