Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator picked by President Barack Obama as his new Secretary of Defence, had a rocky audition on Capitol Hill today as he sought to fend off criticism of his past positions on such hot-zone topics as relations with Israel and Iran and the war in Iraq.

President optimistic of progress as Republicans soften line

The US military will formally end its ban on women serving in front-line combat roles, officials said yesterday, in a move that could open thousands of fighting jobs to female service members for the first time.

Global Outlook The defence group BAE is among the biggest British spenders on Washington lobbying, splurging $3.5m in 2012. Over the past five years, it's spent some $24m, according to OpenSecrets. That's twice as much as even Barclays did during the aftermath of the banking crisis. Rolls-Royce, another big supplier to the US military, spent $7.3m over that period.

The politician and religious leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who died in Islamabad on 6 January at the age of 74 following a heart attack, was an advocate of Islamic democracy who transformed the right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami party into a populist outfit. He was a strong critic of the US's counter-terrorism policies, and was widely known for his opposition to the involvement of the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

Nominees for posts of Defence Secretary and head of CIA can expect rough ride from senators

President Barack Obama yesterday pressed the House of Representatives to vote in favour of a Senate-backed deal that would avert the swingeing spending cuts and soaring tax rates of America's "fiscal cliff".

Could Ben Affleck be swapping the Hollywood Hills for Capitol Hill?

The favourite to be Obama's Defence Secretary?

Only hours after President Barack Obama chided his nation at an inter-faith memorial service in Newtown, Connecticut, for not doing enough to protect its children from violence, a small but swelling chorus broke out in Washington offering him support for new curbs on gun ownership.

As President Obama prepared to speak at a vigil in Newtown last night, there were growing calls for him to make good on his promise of "meaningful action" on gun control.

President Obama promises to use “whatever power” his office holds to prevent “more tragedies likes this.”

Unusually for this column, we'll not begin with a profile of the author, for reasons that will become apparent. Rather, let's start with the books themselves – three crime novels set in the early 1950s starring war veteran (at 28) Peter Cutler Sargent II, now a womanising PR guru. In the first, Death in the Fifth Position, he's hired to work for a dance company when their prima ballerina does a dive from the rafters on opening night. Someone cut her cable, and soon the sleuth finds himself in a nest of thespian vipers trading razor-sharp quips as the bodies pile up.

When Sergei Magnitsky lay close to death in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009, his worsening illness left untreated and exacerbated by beatings, few people heard his cries of pain. A man who had uncovered something dangerous, he was left to meet a horrible end, and none of the people who let it happen imagined that years later his demise would become an international cause célèbre and one of the most poignant reminders of the dangers of doing business in post-Communist Russia.