Author: Jennifer Loven

  WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama sacked his loose-lipped Afghanistan commander Wednesday, a seismic shift for the military order in wartime, and chose the familiar, admired — and tightly disciplined — Gen. David Petraeus to replace him. Petraeus, architect of the Iraq war turnaround, was once again to take hands-on leadership of a troubled war…

  WASHINGTON — A furious President Barack Obama weighed whether to fire his Afghan war commander at a perilous time in the conflict as he summoned Gen. Stanley McChrystal to Washington to explain disparaging comments about his political masters. McChrystal’s complaints about his commander in chief and Obama’s aides put his job in jeopardy. Obama…

GRAND ISLE, La. — Kneeling to pick up tar balls on an oil-fouled beach and listening to “heartbreaking stories” of loss, President Barack Obama personally confronted the spreading damage wrought by the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico — and the bitter anger that’s rising onshore. “What can he really do?” said Billy Ward,…

PRAGUE — The nuclear weapons cuts President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed Thursday would shrink the Cold War superpowers’ arsenals to the lowest point since the frightening arms race of the 1960s. But they won’t touch the “loose nukes” and suitcase bombs seen as the real menace in today’s age of terrorism.…

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is taking the first major step in his push toward a nuclear-free world, returning to Prague to sign the kind of arms-reduction treaty with Russia unseen for nearly two decades. The deal goes beyond modest arsenal reductions, offering Obama a chance to repair soured relations with Moscow and pursue more…