The newspaper said the State Department began operating some drones in Iraq last year on a trial basis and stepped up their use after the last US troops left the country in December.

The US government plans to take bids for the management of drone operations in Iraq over the next five years, the report said.

The State Department drones carry no weapons and are meant to provide data and images of possible hazards, like public protests or roadblocks, to security forces on the ground, the paper noted. They are much smaller than armed drones.

But the US government needs formal approval from Iraq to use such aircraft there, the paper noted, citing unnamed Iraqi officials.

Such approval may be hard to get given the political tensions between the two countries, The Times said.

A senior American official said negotiations were under way to obtain authorization for the drone operations, but Ali al-Mosawi, a top adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki; Iraqs national security adviser, Falih al-Fayadh; and the acting minister of interior, Adnan al-Asadi, all said in interviews that they had not been consulted by the Americans, the report said.

World leaders will gather in South Korea in March for a summit that will seek to restore confidence in the nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The disaster triggered by a tsunami has damaged confidence in nuclear energy, leading to the shutdown of most of Japan’s 54 commercial reactors and Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022.

But Hahn, the spokesman for the summit, said the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl had come amid a “nuclear renaissance” in the form of growing demand for the kind of reliable and renewable energy that nuclear reactors provide.

The 50 world leaders who are expected to meet in Seoul will discuss “more reinforced measures … to give confidence” to the nuclear industry, he said.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered explosions and fires after an earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled its cooling systems on March 11 last year, releasing radiation into the environment.

Tens of thousands of residents around the site in northeastern Japan were forced to evacuate their homes, and some parts of the exclusion zone are expected to be uninhabitable for decades.

Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program and North Korea’s atomic bombs are being handled through other diplomatic forums and representatives of those countries will not attend the summit.

North Korea plans a massive military parade including missiles and other weaponry to mark major anniversaries early this year after its leader’s death.

A large number of army, naval and air force troops have been practising for months at Mirim air base near the capital Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unidentified Seoul official.

“The practice was under way even before the death of Kim Jong-Il,” Yonhap quoted the official as saying. The leader died on December 17 and was succeeded by his youngest son Jong-Un in the country’s second dynastic power transfer.

Major weaponry including new tanks and armored vehicles as well as short- and mid-range missiles have been deployed, the official said.

The event will likely be the largest military parade ever held in the country if all weaponry that has been deployed for practice sessions actually takes part, JoongAng Ilbo newspaper quoted an official as saying.

JoongAng Ilbo said it was assumed the parade would be held to mark Kim Jong-Il’s birthday on February 16, but Yonhap said it was likelier to go ahead in April.

The impoverished but heavily-armed state with 1.2 million troops has regularly staged large parades featuring thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and major weaponry to mark major anniversaries.

“Iraqiya decided its deputies would return for parliament meetings,” Maysoon al-Damluji told a news conference after a gathering of Iraqiya leaders and MPs.

The session was attended by Iraqiya leaders including former premier Iyad Allawi, Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak, parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, and the finance minister, Rafa al-Essawi.

The decision has not, however, been taken to end a boycott of cabinet sessions by Iraqiya ministers, according to Duri, who said “that will be the next step.”

A row erupted over a month ago between the Shiite-led government and the Iraqiya bloc as authorities charged Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni and Iraqiya member, with running a death squad.

Iraqiya began a boycott of parliament and cabinet to protest what it charged was Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s centralisation of power, and it has since called for Maliki to respect a power-sharing deal or quit.

Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Hashemi while Maliki, a Shiite, has said his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlak should be sacked after the latter said the premier was “worse than Saddam Hussein”.

Hashemi, who denies the charges, has since been holed up in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq and Kurdish officials have so far declined to hand him over to Baghdad.

Philippine activists picketed the US embassy and burned a cardboard American flag and mock stealth bomber, vowing to launch a campaign opposing a plan to allow more US troops in the country.

About 50 members of the leftist New Nationalist Alliance (Bayan) also held a huge effigy of Uncle Sam with another of Philippine President Benigno Aquino labeled as his “dog”, as riot police prevented them approaching the mission.

“If we allow more US troops to enter our country, the entire archipelago will be transformed into one military outpost for US hegemonic interests,” Bayan said in a statement distributed at the rally.

Philippine officials have welcomed plans for a greater presence from the military of its former colonial ruler, seeing it as a counterbalance to recent Chinese aggressiveness in the South China Sea.

China and the Philippines have territorial disputes over the South China Sea and Manila has accused Beijing of using intimidation to press its claims.

US and Philippine officials say they are not interested in new US bases but merely in more joint exercises and more US troops rotating through the country.

International affairs specialist Rene de Castro said the Philippine government would have to carefully explain its decision to overcome such anti-American sentiment.

Citing unspecified procurement documents, the newspaper said the Navy is converting an aging warship it had planned to decommission into a makeshift staging base for the commandos in response to requests from the US Central Command.

Unofficially dubbed a “mothership,” the floating base could accommodate smaller high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEALs, the report said.

Special operations forces are a key part of President Barack Obama’s strategy to make the military leaner and more agile as the Pentagon confronts at least $487 billion in spending cuts over the next decade, the paper noted.

Mike Kafka, a spokesman for the Navy Fleet Forces Command, declined to elaborate on the floating bases purpose or to say where, exactly, it will be deployed in the Middle East, The Post said.

Other Navy officials acknowledged that they were moving with unusual haste to complete the conversion and send the mothership to the region by early summer, the report said.

Navy documents indicate that it could be headed to the Persian Gulf, where Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, The Post noted.

The US military has concluded that its largest conventional bomb is not capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities suspected to be used for building nuclear weapons.

But initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, would not be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them, the paper noted.

In a report issued in November, the International Atomic Energy Agency said intelligence from more than 10 countries and its own sources “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.”

It detailed 12 suspicious areas such as testing explosives in a steel container at a military base and studies on Shahab-3 ballistic missile warheads that the IAEA said were “highly relevant to a nuclear weapon program.”

Iran, which has come under unprecedented international pressure since the publication of the report, with Washington and the EU targeting its oil sector and central bank, rejected the dossier as based on forgeries.

Meanwhile, doubts about its bomb’s effectiveness prompted the Pentagon this month to secretly submit a request to Congress for funding to enhance the bomb’s ability to penetrate deeper into rock, concrete and steel before exploding, The Journal noted.

He succeeded in keeping Petain under control but Renthe-Fink’s real claim to fame lies in a memorandum he drafted in August 1943 for Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on the idea of a united Europe.

It was to be a confederacy under German leadership “based on free cooperation among independent nations.” He proposed a customs-free economic union with a single central bank and eventually a common currency. There was to be a common transport plan to build an integrated system of railroads, river and air transport and autobahns, and a special plan for agriculture.

German armies were reeling in retreat on the Eastern front, never went anywhere while Hitler remained in power. But as a prototype for today’s European Union it looks uncannily accurate, with one exception, Britain, whom he described as “the continent’s ancient enemy.”

The harsh reality is that Germany will be less and less able to do so in the future. The Germans know that they have one of the lowest birthrates in Europe. They remain today the country with the largest population in Europe but within 25 years they will be outnumbered by both the French and the British who have Europe’s highest birthrates and will this in the future have Europe’s main potential labor force.

Iran’s new uranium enrichment plant buried under a mountain outside the holy city of Qom could become the crucial factor in determining whether the United States launches a barrage of military strikes on the Islamic Republic..

The Iranians had been saying for months they planned to move their uranium-enrichment equipment to Fordow from the main enrichment plant at Natanz, in west-central Iran, to dramatically boost capacity.

The existence of Fordow, which the Iranians carved out of a mountainside over four years, was first disclosed by U.S. President Barack Obama in September 2009. Iran later acknowledged it was building the facility but claimed it was for peaceful purposes, as it claims its entire nuclear program to be. But Tehran has never explained why it sought to keep the Qom plant secret.

One reason the Fordow start-up rang alarms bells in the West is that it came hard on the heels of a warning from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, that there was evidence Iran had been working on developing a nuclear warhead for its intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

The concentration of centrifuges in the Fordow bunkers is a timeline “most relevant to military action,” observed Mark Fitzpatrick, director of non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading London think tank.

Israel, which has repeatedly threatened to launch pre-emptive attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, would likely want to carry out such a strike itself but it doesn’t have bunker-busting bombs powerful enough to do the job.

Lee has put north-south relations “at their lowest ebb, placing peace and security in northeast Asia at serious peril and creating a stumbling block in the process of denuclearization.”

The DPI report — another in a line of similar reports from the DPI criticizing South Korea and Lee — also blames the United States for destabilizing inter-Korean relations by embarking on military maneuvers at a time of heightened tension.

The Lee government “doggedly refused” to allow an inspection group from North Korea’s National Defense Commission to investigate the sinking, Pyongyang claims.

It was against this backdrop that the United State staged military drills with South Korea, games North Korea alleged included forces capable of being turned into an invasion force.

Lee remains “obsessed with the pipe dream of achieving unification through absorption.” He also “pushed the peninsula into a touch-and-go situation where the North and the South fired shells at each other for the first time since war that broke out in 1950.”

North Korea’s shelling was believed to have been a response to South Korean military exercises in the politically sensitive sea area. Yeonpyeong Island is less than 8 miles from the North Korean mainland.