U.S. Postal Service Plans Dramatic Service Cuts

United States, Post Office

IOWA CITY, Iowa — The U.S. Postal Service's plan to close 252 mail processing facilities and cut 28,000 jobs by the end of next year may help the agency curb its mounting financial problems, but it faces big practical obstacles.

Deciding which plants to close will be difficult and face opposition from community leaders. Actually closing all of them could take a few years, and most workers will stay employed under union rules. The bulk of the job cuts will actually come from attrition and retirements, not layoffs, while the remaining work force is shuffled into new locations and positions.

What's about to unfold in cities from Reno, Nev., to Chicago will illustrate the complexity of cutting a work force protected by strong union contracts and shrinking operations dependent on intricate logistics.

"The downsizing or the demise of the postal service, it's going to be a mess and it's going to be a mess for a long time," said John Zodrow, a retired Denver attorney and former Postal Service arbitrator who wrote a book about its labor relations. "It's a huge undertaking."

The proposed closures are among several moves aimed at helping the agency avert bankruptcy and adjust to declining mail volume as customers migrate to the Internet to communicate and pay bills. Delivery changes announced Monday would virtually eliminate the chance for stamped letters to arrive the next day for the first time in 40 years and pave the way for closing more than half of the 461 plants where the mail gets processed and sorted.

Postal officials say they can save up to $3 billion by 2015 by following through with the cuts – getting rid of buildings, running equipment more efficiently, operating fewer mail trucks and cutting employees.

The postal service's manager of collective bargaining said Monday that the agency foresaw the "potential for significant attrition" given that more than 20 percent of postal workers were eligible for early retirement. Managers and non-career employees could be laid off while no decisions have been made on how any early retirement incentives will be offered, said the official, Kevin Rachel.

For most workers and communities, the uncertainty is terrible but the economic impact might not be as catastrophic as feared. Most workers in the facilities are represented by the American Postal Workers Union, which reached a four-year contract in May guaranteeing that its 220,000 clerks and maintenance employees cannot be laid off or transferred more than 50 miles away.

Employees in plants that are closed will have to decide whether to relocate to the places where work is consolidated, which will need to rapidly expand in size. If they stay behind, they will fight for remaining jobs in the area and will likely have to switch duties. Many post offices, for instance, have deliberately left open retail clerk and letter-carrying jobs.

"It's, `grab a job before there are no more jobs left to be grabbed.' It's the proverbial musical chairs," Zodrow said.

Zodrow said the turbulence could motivate more workers to take early retirement, which he warned would be a mistake for some. Postal workers do not have skills that transfer well to the private sector and are making more than they would elsewhere, he said.

The outcome of negotiations between the postal service and unions representing mail handlers and letter carriers, which both have deadlines of next week, could be crucial in determining how cost-cutting plans are carried out. Mail handlers, who are represented by a union of 47,000 members, are bargaining about job protections and reassignment rules.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University, said she wonders whether the postal service will get as many retirements as it is counting on. "Nobody in this economy is retiring unless they are really ready. There has to be some incentive," she said.

The agency first has to decide which plants to close.

While they have had a list of 252 prospective targets since September, postal officials say final decisions will not be made until they assess the potential savings, the impact on mail delivery and whether other plants in the area could handle the volume.

There will be intense local opposition. The city council in Reno, Nev., passed a resolution Wednesday protesting any plans to close its processing facility and move 177 jobs to West Sacramento, Calif., one of the proposals under review. Members of Congress in Iowa, Illinois and elsewhere are already going to bat for local plants. Businesses that rely on speedy mail delivery are fighting, too.

Once a closing decision is made, it could take a year or longer to wind down operations and transition work elsewhere, postal service spokesman Richard Watkins said in a phone interview from Kansas City.

The closing of the mail processing center in Sioux, City, Iowa, in October illustrates what may be awaiting other postal workers.

Some mail handlers and clerks moved 90 miles north to the facility in Sioux Falls, S.D., where their operations were transferred. Some union employees filled vacant positions for letter carriers in Sioux City and are now walking routes. Others have been performing temporary assignments while they wait for permanent jobs.

"I can't imagine what the hell they are going to do with all these employees," said Scott Tott, the president of the American Postal Workers Union chapter in Sioux City, who lost his job sorting pallets of magazines but still shows up to work every day. "This is a nightmare."

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Iran releases video of downed U.S. spy drone–looking intact

Downed U.S. spy plane

Iran's Press TV on Thursday broadcast an extended video tour of the U.S. spy drone that went down in the country--and it indeed appeared to look mostly intact.

American officials have acknowledged that an unmanned U.S. reconnaissance plane was lost on a mission late last week, but have insisted that there is no evidence the drone was downed by hostile acts by Iran. Rather, they said, the drone likely went down because of a malfunction, and they implied the advanced stealth reconnaissance plane would likely have fallen from such a high altitude--the RQ-170 Sentinel can fly as high as 50,000 feet--that it wouldn't be in good shape.

But Iranian military officials have claimed since Sunday that they brought down an American spy drone that was little damaged. And now they have provided the first visual images of what looks to be a drone that at least outwardly appears to be in decent condition, in what is surely another humiliating poke in the eye for U.S. national security agencies.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the released images Thursday, a Defense Department spokesman told Yahoo News. But military analysts said it appeared to them to be the American drone in question.

"I have been doing this for thirty years, and it sure looks like" a stealthy U.S. drone to me," Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute and consultant to the RQ-170's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, told Yahoo News in a telephone interview Thursday. "I think we are going to face the high likelihood that Iran has an intact version of one of our most important intelligence gathering tools."

Still, Thompson went on, the intelligence "windfall" to Iran from obtaining the advanced U.S. stealthy drone may be mitigated.

"I don't think the Iranians get as much out of it as they might hope," he said. "It probably came into their hands as a result of a technical malfunction. What that means is they still don't have a real defense against the U.S. flying other vehicles that have similar capabilities, without much fear of interception."

Analysts also noted that the video of the drone released by Iran did not show the drone's underside. "Pretty intact," the Center for Strategic and International Studies' James Lewis said by email. "Interesting that they covered the underside."

The New York Times reported Thursday that--unsurprisingly--the RQ-170 was lost while making the latest foray over Iran during an extended CIA surveillance effort of Iran's nuclear and ballistic weapons program.

"The overflights by the bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, built by Lockheed Martin and first glimpsed on an airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2009, are part of an increasingly aggressive intelligence collection program aimed at Iran, current and former officials say," the Times' Scott Shane and David Sanger wrote. "The urgency of the effort has been underscored by a recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."

Iran in turn has complained that the drone overflights represent an act of aggression and violation of its sovereignty, and summoned the Swiss envoy--who represents U.S. interests in Iran--on Thursday to lodge a protest.

However, while the images of the U.S. drone surely allowed Iran to score another public relations blow against Washington, Iran may find it tough to generate much in the way of international sympathy for being the target of U.S. surveillance.

Last week, Iranian hardliners ransacked the British embassy in Tehran, prompting the United Kingdom to recall its diplomatic staff from Tehran and order Iran's embassy in London closed. Last month, the UN atomic watchdog agency issued a report raising concerns about research Iran is suspected by some nations to have conducted before 2003 on military aspects of its nuclear program. Iran has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes. In October, the United States accused elements of Iran's Qods force of plotting to assassinate the Saudi envoy to the United States. The United Nations General Assembly voted last month in favor of a resolution condemning the Iranian plot.

Amid its growing international isolation, Iran, unsurprisingly, seemed intent to play up the drone incident for all it could.

"China, Russia want to inspect downed U.S. drone," proclaimed a headline from Iran's Mehr news agency Thursday.

The RQ-170 Sentinel, however, reportedly did not use the latest U.S. surveillance technology on board, in part because as a single-engine aircraft, it was thought more likely to occasionally go down.

"The basic principles of stealthy aircraft are fairly well known," Thompson said. "In terms of [the drone's] on-board electronics and information systems, it is fairly routine in combat to require authentication codes to make them hard to unlock."

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Iran claims to have brought down U.S. spy drone

UAV

U.S.-led forces say UAV went missing in western Afghanistan

The United States on Sunday appeared to give credence to Iranian state media reports that Iran had come into possession of a downed U.S. surveillance drone.

The American-led International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan issued a brief statement Sunday saying that an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance aircraft had gone missing while on a mission in western Afghanistan late last week.

"The UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] to which the Iranians are referring may be a U.S. unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan last week," the ISAF public affairs office said in the statement sent to Yahoo News and other media outlets Sunday, in response to queries on the Iranian reports. "The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status."

The semi-official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported Sunday that Iran's armed forces had brought down a U.S. spy drone in the east of the country.

Citing an "informed military official" the IRNA report "noted that the unmanned craft is of the type 'RQ170,' which was slightly damaged [and] is currently in the hands of the Iranian forces."

While the IRNA headline described the U.S. spy drone as having been "shot down," an Iranian military official quoted on Iranian state television claimed that an Iranian military cyber-warfare unit "managed to take over controls of the drone and bring it down," the Washington Post's Thomas Erdbrink noted. That latter account would seem to be more in line with the description given by ISAF of the spy drone operators having "lost control" of it in western Afghanistan last week.

American officials disputed that the drone had been shot down. One unidentified U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal the drone may have been suffering mechanical difficulties.

However, there have been previous reported incidents that have highlighted vulnerabilities in the security of U.S. drone information systems.

The United States Air Force acknowledged in October that a computer virus had infected the computer system at Creech Air Force base in Nevada that is used to remotely operate Predator and Reaper drones. In 2009, an Iraqi insurgent hacked into a U.S. drone down-link, which is not usually encrypted, cyber security expert James Lewis, a former Reagan administration official with the Center for Strategic and Institutional Studies, told Yahoo News last month.

"Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations," the Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman, Yochi Dreazen and August Cole reported in December 2009.

"Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems," the Journal report said. "Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter."

The unarmed stealth drone Iran claims to have brought down, the RQ-170 Sentinel, is manufactured by Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Program, based in Palmdale, California.

Until 2009, the U.S. Air Force would say little about the model, despite reported sightings of it on the tarmac at Kandahar International Airport, Afghanistan since 2007.  A December 2009 photo of the RQ-170 posted on aviation websites, however, prompted the Air Force to at least acknowledge the plane's existence, Military Times' Michael Hoffman reported in 2009:

"For two years, the RQ-170 has been the Air Force's Bigfoot," Hoffman wrote. "Photos and drawings of the stealthy UAV, also called the 'Beast of Kandahar,' have surfaced, producing shrugs and no-comments from service officials. In early December, a clear photograph of the jet's left side appeared on aviation Web sites, perhaps prompting the Air Force to 'fess up."

However, Air Force officials have not explained what the stealth aircraft is doing in Afghanistan given the fact that the Taliban has no air force or radar, Hoffman noted.

"Experts such as Phil Finnegan, a UAV analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm, suggest the stealth capabilities are being used to fly in nearby countries," Hoffman wrote. "Neighboring Iran has an air force and air defense system that would require stealth technology to penetrate."

The RQ-170 was also reportedly used in U.S. surveillance surrounding the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan last May.

The RQ-170 reportedly does not use the most sophisticated U.S. military technology because as a single engine UAV, it was judged to have a higher likelihood of occasionally going down.

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Wall St. rallies on central banks' help for Europe

Central Bank

(Reuters) - Stocks surged on Wednesday after major central banks agreed to make cheaper dollar loans for struggling European banks to prevent the euro-zone debt woes from turning into a full-blown credit crisis.

The Dow posted its best day since March 2009 after the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and other major central banks stepped in to head off escalating funding pressures that threaten the key arteries of the world's financial system.

The S&P 500 scored its best daily percentage gain since August.

The central banks' liquidity move touched off a buying frenzy in financial shares. The S&P financial sector index gained 6.6 percent, with Bank of America the most actively traded stock. The stock jumped 7.3 percent to $5.44 on more than 420 million shares traded.

The drama in Europe kept the U.S. stock market on a roller-coaster ride throughout the month. For November, the S&P ended down just 0.5 percent, but the month was marked by sharp daily swings.

"You don't have to fix everything, you have to be on a path towards fixing things," said Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup in New York.

"Markets will reward you for the efforts you are making as long as you are moving in the right direction. It's the carrot and the stick; you get rewarded when you do the right thing, and you get punished when you do the wrong thing."

The Dow Jones industrial average shot up 490.05 points, or 4.24 percent, to end at 12,045.68. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index jumped 51.77 points, or 4.33 percent, to 1,246.96. The Nasdaq Composite Index soared 104.83 points, or 4.17 percent, to close at 2,620.34.

The Dow scored its largest daily gain -- in terms of points and percentage -- since March 23, 2009.

The S&P 500 posted its best daily percentage advance since August 11.

For the month, the Dow gained 0.8 percent, while the Nasdaq slid 2.4 percent.

Other economically sensitive sectors, including energy, materials and industrials, also were strong performers for the day.

Copper and oil futures rose sharply, while the S&P materials sector index jumped 5.9 percent.

The central banks' actions were intended to ensure that European banks, facing a credit crunch, have enough funding amid the euro zone's worsening sovereign debt crisis.

The moves followed an unexpected cut in bank reserve requirements in China, intended to boost an economy running at its weakest pace since 2009.

Among the banks, shares of JPMorgan Chase & Co gained 8.4 percent to $30.97, its biggest daily percentage gain since May 2009.

The gains in financial shares came despite Standard & Poor's move to cut the credit ratings of 15 big banks, mostly in Europe and the United States, late on Tuesday.

Further encouraging investors, the latest U.S. data suggested the U.S. economy was moving more solidly toward recovery. The U.S. private sector added the most jobs in nearly a year in November, while business activity in the U.S. Midwest grew faster than expected in November.

The day's volume was high, with nearly 10 billion shares changing hands during the day on U.S. exchanges compared with the daily average of 7.96 billion shares.

Advancers beat decliners on the NYSE by nearly 7 to 1 and on the Nasdaq, by about 5 to 1.

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Egypt: American Tear Gas, Policy Loom Over Tahrir Square

Cairo, Egypt

CAIRO -- At the foot of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, just a few feet from the resounding crowds in Tahrir Square, a group of people gathered around a man holding four canisters above his head.

"Tear gas! Rubber bullets! Nerve gas!" he cried out, displaying the spent metal canisters.

"Where are they from, America?" people asked, already knowing the answer.

"Yes, America," the man replied furiously. The crowd murmured with unsurprised disdain. Like many gas canisters in Tahrir, one of his was marked with blue letters that read "Made in USA" and bore the name of the company that produced it: Combined Tactical Systems, in Jamestown, PA.

For days, similar scenes have played out across Tahrir. Tear gas has become a persistent companion in the square, a troublesome cousin who crashes on the couch and fails to leave. Wafting in from the clashes up the street -- except in a few rare instances where it has been fired directly onto the square -- the gas lingers in the air, causing, from afar, noses to run and a sour taste in the mouth.

But the added indignation of an American connection -- on the street, protesters insist it is more like collusion -- is a potent blow.

"You know where this is from," another man, standing next to a field clinic across the street, said with a glare Wednesday, as he held up a thick metal canister shaped like a short bottle of spray paint.

"This is from America. America sent it to bomb Egypt."

Nearby, an 18-year-old in a red soccer jersey sat slumped on the sidewalk in the clinic, pawing at his eyes and moaning. He had been pulled from the fray a few minutes earlier, where the gas was much more intense. The burning sensation had briefly rendered him unable to speak. Now and then, a nurse came by and poured a homemade solution -- a mixture of antacid, topical anesthetic, and saline -- from a reused bottle of Dasani water over his face.

"It feels like my eyes are burning," the boy, who said he was from Giza, cried out after he had finally composed himself. "I can't open my eyes, I can't breathe. The gas they're using, it's different from before. I don't know where they got it from, but it's really different -- and it takes a lot longer to heal."

All day Wednesday, as the fighting around the square reached its 100th hour, people with severe cases of gas exposure -- not to mention rubber-bullet wounds -- came streaming into field clinics and dozens of first aid stations scattered near the combat zone.

At the corner of Tahrir Street and Yousef el Guindi Street, not far from the front lines, a young man wearing a white lab coat spattered with blood struggled to find a moment of peace to explain what he'd seen these past few days.

"I'm so tired," he said, with a weary smile. Suddenly, a motorbike careened up to the curb, ferrying a boy in a black sweatsuit. The fighters around Tahrir have established a makeshift ambulance system for the combat zone, with pairs of men on motorbikes who race in and out of the fight, and deliver the injured -- upright, and sandwiched between them -- to the nearest doctor.

The boy tumbled onto the rug that demarcated the first aid station.

"Hold on," the doctor said as he raced over to his new patient, grabbing him by the shoulders. "Stay awake! Stay with me," he yelled. The patient only had a rubber bullet wound on his leg, but he was young, perhaps just 15 years old, and he wailed in pain. The doctor and his two nurses sprayed him with an antibiotic foam, and sent him down toward the larger field clinics in the square.

"That was one of the easiest cases I've had yet," the doctor said when he came back. He introduced himself as Ali Sharif, and said that he was actually just a third-year medical student. He is 19 years old.

Another motorbike pulled up, this one ferrying a balding, middle-aged man in a tracksuit who had clearly succumbed to tear gas inhalation. The man was red in the face and his body sat rigidly between two people riding the motorcycle-ambulance; when it stopped, he nearly keeled over. Sharif huddled over him, urging him to cough, while the man spit up phlegm onto the sidewalk. Sharif signaled for another motorcycle, waiting nearby, to shepherd the man to a better-equipped clinic.

"That man has a heart condition, so I told him I couldn't treat him here," Sharif said when he stood back up. "Ninety percent of the cases we see of people injured are from tear gas, just normal cases. But since last night, a lot of what they've used is some other kind of gas, it's much stronger. When we start first aid the patients seem normal, but then after a while they start screaming and they lose control over their bodies, and start shaking."

Sharif is one of many around Tahrir who insist that the security forces have recently begun using a more potent form of the gas -- CR, rather than the typical CS -- or perhaps even nerve agents. (He says he has a canister of "nerve gas" that was made in China at his home.)

Unlike CS, which is commonly used by police and military forces around the world, CR has been connected with fatalities in the past, and evidence exists it may be a carcinogen. The United States military has ceased using CR out of health concerns.

So far, however, conclusive evidence about the use of other gases has proven nearly impossible to find.

"So far we have only seen [canisters] with CS on them," said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a political and security reform researcher for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which has spent the past two days seeking evidence of other forms of gas being used.

The Guardian recently reported that many sources have complained that protesters are suffering from effects more commonly associated with powerful gases like CR, but the paper was unable to confirm the existence of canisters with those letters on them. In several hours looking around Tahrir, The Huffington Post only came across canisters marked CS, as well as a few that were unmarked. Heba Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who has also been investigating the reports, said that the unmarked canisters are likely Egyptian-made.

Instead, it seemed more likely to observers and human rights investigators that most of the severe cases of tear gas exposure come from the tendency of riot police to fire four or five rounds of gas at a time, and from the fact that most of the skirmishes are taking place in narrow, confined alleyways.

"What we can say beyond doubt is that it's definitely excessive use of tear gas and that's probably behind a lot of the problems it's causing," Ennarah said. "It can be used for crowd dispersal, but they seem to be using it as a kind of punishment."

The U.S. State Department denied on Tuesday that the gas was purchased with American "security assistance funds," but did acknowledge that direct sales between the government and American companies have been authorized in the past.

The use of American-made tear gas has only compounded the sense among many of Tahrir's most ardent protesters that the U.S. plays a malicious role in Egyptian politics, seeking to reinforce the status quo -- in this case, the military, which they have good relations with -- rather that supporting the aspirations of demonstrators.

Over the past several days, Tahrir and its surrounding areas have become an increasingly unwelcome place to foreigners, with many foreign reporters describing xenophobic exchanges, and being subjected to random credential checks. Direct attacks on foreign journalists by the crowd have remained at a minimum.

From the start, the U.S. State Department has delivered tempered remarks on the contest between demonstrators and riot police, initially calling for restraint from "all involved," and urging "everybody" to focus on the nation's first democratic parliamentary elections, which are still scheduled to begin on Monday.

The U.S. government faces a particularly difficult challenge in Egypt because it has long backed the forces of stability -- first Hosni Mubarak, now the military regime -- as a bulwark against the rise of militant Islam. Now, the parliamentary elections which begin on Monday are expected to deliver a majority to the conservative Muslim Brotherhood, something the U.S. does not appear to mind so long as a friendly military government is there as a steward.

On Tuesday, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland directed her message more sharply to the Egyptian government, saying, "We condemn the excessive force used by the police."

But she also backed the speech of Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the current leader of the military regime ruling the nation, who addressed the nation Tuesday night and pledged to complete the transfer of power to civilian hands by mid 2012. (When the speech concluded, security forces once again barraged Tahrir with tear gas.)

For those like Ali Sharif, standing at his corner medical station, the struggle is far from over.

"I've been here nonstop since Saturday, except for only four hours of sleep," he said. "Sometimes I wish they would all just go home, so that I could too."

Sharif laughed. In fact, he doesn't want the struggle to end -- "I'm doing this for Egypt," he said -- but he does sometimes find himself yelling at the young fighters who keep making their way back to his station to find another use for their time.

"I tell them I'm getting tired of seeing them," Sharif said. "But they never listen to me. They all go back."

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Obama tells Asia U.S. "here to stay" as Pacific power

Barack Obama, U.S. President

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that the U.S. military would expand its role in the Asia-Pacific region, despite budget cuts, declaring America was "here to stay" as a Pacific power which would help shape the region's future.

China has voiced misgivings about Obama's announcement of fresh troop deployments to Australia and has longstanding fears that its growing power could be hobbled by U.S. influence. But Beijing has also stressed that conflict is in nobody's interest.

Obama addressed the Chinese unease, pledging to seek greater cooperation with Beijing.

The U.S. military, turning its focus away from Iraq and Afghanistan, would be more broadly distributed in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, more flexible and help build regional capacity, Obama told the Australian parliament.

"As we end today's wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia Pacific a top priority," Obama said in a major speech on Washington's vision for the Asia-Pacific region.

"As a result, reductions in U.S. defense spending will not -I repeat, will not - come at the expense of the Asia Pacific."

Obama was clear in acknowledging China's discomfort at what it sees as attempts by Washington to encircle it.

"We'll seek more opportunities for cooperation with Beijing, including greater communication between our militaries to promote understanding and avoid miscalculation," he said.

Nervous about China's growing clout, U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea have sought assurances from the United States that it would be a strong counterweight in the region.

A first step in extending the U.S. military reach into Southeast Asia will see U.S. marines, naval ships and aircraft deployed to northern Australia from 2012.

China has questioned the new U.S. deployment, raising doubts whether strengthening such alliances helped the region pull together at a time of economic gloom.

Obama said the United States would seek to work with China to ensure economic prosperity and security in the region, but would speak candidly about issues such as human rights in China and raise security issue like the South China Sea.

China claims the South China Sea, a vital shipping route rich in oil, minerals and fishery resources. But Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei hold rivals claims to at least parts of the sea, sparking maritime stand-offs.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointedly visited the Philippines on Wednesday, saying that no claimant should resort to intimidation to push its cause.

Obama also referred in his address to reforms undertaken by Myanmar's new civilian leaders, including the release of political prisoners. But he said they had to do more on human rights in order to secure better relations with Washington.

Rory Medcalf, security analyst at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, said Obama's speech marked a hardening of policy toward China, though he noted that the president was still reaching out to Beijing.

"I think we are seeing a firm stance from Obama. He spent the first year of his presidency trying very hard to engage with China, perhaps even to accommodate China," said Medcalf.

"I think he feels that he was rebuffed and that he was in effect taken advantage by China. So, there is a fundamental reorienting of American policy on display here."

U.S. SEEKS MORE FLEXIBLE FORCES IN ASIA

The winding down of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has opened the door to greater U.S. attention to simmering tension over the South China Sea, a shipping lane for more than $5 trillion in annual trade that the United States wants to keep open.

Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Wednesday agreed to have 2,500 U.S. Marines operate out of a de facto base in the northern port of Darwin by 2016.

The United States has military bases and large forces in Japan and South Korea, but its presence in Southeast Asia was dramatically reduced in the early 1990s with the closure of bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay in the Philippines.

Deploying U.S. Marines, ships and aircraft in Darwin, only 820 km (500 miles) from Indonesia, will allow the United States to quickly reach into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to ensure secure major trade sea-lanes.

Obama cited increased U.S. naval ship visits and training in the Philippines and Singapore, working with Indonesia to fight piracy, partnering Thailand for disaster relief, and significantly, acknowledged India's role in region security.

Washington welcomed "India as it 'looks east' and plays a larger role as an Asian power.

"We'll have new opportunities to train with other allies and partners, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean," he said.

Medcalf said: "It will be a landmark speech of Obama's presidency. It states unequivocally that the U.S. is squarely focusing its strategic attention on Asia. Its defining that Asia as including the Indian Ocean and India."

In a note to his domestic audience, Obama said the increased focus on Asia-Pacific was essential for America's economic future.

"As the world's fastest-growing region-and home to more than half the global economy-the Asia Pacific is critical to achieving my highest priority: creating jobs and opportunity for the American people," he said.

Obama will fly to Bali late on Thursday, where he will seek to underscore a focus on Asia by becoming the first U.S. president to participate in the security East Asia Summit.

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Hugo Chavez: the U.S. and the EU "infiltrate terrorists" in Syria

Hugo Chavez

AFP - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Sunday slammed the attitude in the Syrian crisis of the United States and the European Union, which he said "redouble their offensive against Syria" and "infiltrate terrorists" there. Chavez made the remarks during a speech to several thousand supporters gathered in central Caracas. Was the first time taking part in such a public gathering since he was treated for cancer. "The United States and its European allies redouble their offensive against Syria, infiltrate terrorists to generate violence, blood and death, as they have done in Libya earlier this year," he told Mr. Chavez, leader of the radical left in Latin America.

"A bombs, they managed not only to overthrow the Libyan government, but also to destroy this country and assassinate Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (...) and now they are Syria," said the Venezuelan president. Chavez, who was a strong support of Colonel Gaddafi, has strongly condemned from the beginning the military operation in western Libya. He described as "killing" the death of Colonel Gaddafi, who died in suspicious circumstances after being captured by rebels after an air strike against its NATO convoy. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad is facing since mid-March to suppress an uprising that hard. According to the UN, the repression has more than 3,500 dead.

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