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President Barack Obama will release a comprehensive new US Africa strategy Thursday, seeking to boost trade, strengthen peace and security and bolster democratic institutions. The blueprint will notably seek to encourage the "stunning" potential of economic growth to lift millions out of poverty in a continent more often associated with famine, poverty and strife, a senior US official told AFP. The plan will be unveiled nearly three years after Obama, the son of a Kenyan father, laid out his priorities for the often crisis-scarred continent in Ghana, on the sole trip of his presidency so far to sub-Saharan Africa. Obama...

As you'll recall, I was very skeptical this morning of initial US government assertions that there was "no intelligence" indicating the deadly Benghazi raid was premeditated or planned in advance.  White House Press Secretary Jay Carney repeated this heavily-parsed denial at his briefing today (note that he appears to be reading a verbatim statement), only to give a markedly different answer just 45 minutes later:   Carney Contradicts On Whether There Was Advance Warning Of Embassy AttacksABC's Jake Tapper notes that the Defense Secretary briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee on the attack, telling Senators that the US Government believes...

The United States intelligence community does not believe the core of al Qaeda was behind this week's attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN Thursday. The official said the picture is becoming clearer within the intelligence community as to what group or groups were responsible for the attack. Given what officials know about al Qaeda in Libya, U.S. intelligence believes it is very unlikely that core al Qaeda was behind the attack. But the official said the intelligence does not rule out that the attack was perpetrated by al Qaeda sympathizers.