Venezuela is building unmanned drone aircraft as part of military cooperation with and other allies, President Hugo Chavez said, in a move likely to heighten U.S. anxiety over his socialist government's role in the region. Referring to a Spanish media report that U.S. prosecutors are investigating drone production in , Chavez said late on Wednesday: "Of course we're doing it, and we have the right to. We are a free and independent country." In a televised speech to military...

Osama bin Laden was trying to recruit a Mexican national with a valid passport to sneak into the US and cause mayhem, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. The paper, citing an anonymous former U.S. official, said the head of Al Qaeda was troubled by radical Islamic fundamentalists who had taken an oath of U.S. citizenship then tried to launch attacks on American soil. He believed doing so violated Islamic law. “Bin Laden wanted someone who had not pledged allegiance [to the U.S.]. He...

A former executive at a Canadian engineering firm who has been linked to a plot to smuggle Muammar Qaddafi’s son into Mexico has been arrested in Switzerland, officials said. Riadh Ben Aissa, a past executive vice president of engineering giant SNC-Lavalin’s construction arm, has been in custody in Switzerland since mid-April, the Swiss federal prosecutor’s office said late Sunday. “The state prosecutor’s office confirms the arrest of a Tunisian/Canadian...

Washington, DC-South Carolina Congressman Jeff Duncan’s legislation concerning the Iranian government’s activities in the Western Hemisphere took a major step towards becoming law on Wednesday, when it passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee with strong bipartisan support. The legislation, which currently has 73 cosponsors, will now move to the House floor for a vote. “Congress is recognizing the seriousness of the threat that Iran poses to both Americans here at...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez revealed Sunday that a new tumor recently removed from his pelvic region was of the same type of cancer as a baseball-sized growth extracted from that part of his body about eight months ago. In his first TV appearance in nine days, Chavez said the surgery and follow-up tests showed the tumor was "a recurrence of the initially diagnosed cancer." As he has done in recent weeks, Chavez defended Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, who has tried to...

The bill, titled "Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act” and approved on Thursday, had been sponsored by representatives of Republican and Democratic parties. According to the bill, Iran has increased the number of its embassies in Latin America from five in 2005 to 11 in 2012. If the whole Congress approves the bill, the State Department would have to inform it of Iran's activities in Latin America within 180 days. Iran has been seeking to expand relations with...

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday expressed concern about allegations that some Latin American drug trafficking organizations are linked with Hezbollah and Iran. "We are concerned about the activities of Iran and Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere," the top U.S. envoy told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs at a hearing. Washington brands Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group in Lebanon, as a terrorist organization, while Iran's disputed nuclear program is...

Argentina's President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, said her country intends to spearhead the increased involvement of Latin American states in the Mideast peace process. Kirchner announced the decision over the weekend at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, where she met an Israeli-Palestinian delegation of the Peace NGO Forum. The delegation included Dr. Ron Pundak, the former director of the Peres Peace Center, Dr. Meir Margalit, Jerusalem city council member (Meretz), Nancy Sadiq,...

The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, better known by its acronym "ALBA," strongly condemned the current violence in Syria on Sunday. But the ALBA group wasn't condemning the slaughter of civilians by the Assad dictatorship, but violence that it said was being committed by "irregular groups supported by foreign powers." The ALBA group, which consists of Latin America's far-left led countries Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua and a handful of Caribbean...

Iran's president on Tuesday lauded his country's newly launched Spanish-language satellite TV channel, saying it would deal a blow to "dominance seekers" - remarks that were an apparent jab at the U.S. and the West. The launch is Tehran's latest effort to reach out to friendly governments in Latin America and follows Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's four-nation tour of the region earlier in January, which included stops in Cuba and visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador. It also comes...