In her first visit to the Philippines as US secretary of state, she also highlighted the US military’s role in relief work after devastating typhoons.

About 600 US troops are in the country providing training and intelligence for the Philippine army fighting the separatist rebels.

She also visited a badly damaged high school and pledged $5m (£3m) in aid.

“I would just reiterate that the United States stands ready to assist our friends in the Philippines who are seeking to counter terrorism and the threat of extremism and we will be willing to support them in any way that is appropriate that they request,” Mrs Clinton said after meeting Philippine President Gloria Arroyo and Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo at the beginning of her two-day visit.

“We were very pleased that we can respond quickly with our military assets,” she said, referring to joint US-Philippine rescue work during widespread floods caused by several back-to-back typhoons.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8356092.stm

The two-day visit comes as US Special Forces advisers are in the southern Philippines to train and equip Filipino soldiers in combatting the Abu Sayyaf group that is blamed for the Southeast Asian nation’s worst terrorist attacks.

Clinton is likely to hear “strong support” from President Gloria Arroyo and her defence officials for the Visiting Forces Agreement, a 1999 treaty which governs the deployment of US troops in the Philippines, Arroyo’s aides said.

On the eve of Clinton’s visit, Philippines police broke up a protest by 70 left-leaning students in Manila who demanded the pullout of the US military advisers, saying they are an affront to the nation’s sovereignty.

http://www.mysinchew.com/node/31352

A plane carrying Clinton and her aides took off from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington at about 00:15 am (0515 GMT).

The chief US diplomat was to give a speech in Berlin on Sunday before joining German Chancelor Angela Merkel and other world leaders in celebrations on Monday to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

-AFP

Repeated meetings with Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab officials with Obama’s special envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, haven’t cleared several obstacles to resuming talks, Clinton told the president, according to an administration official who provided a summary of the White House session.

The Palestinians need to do more to stop incitement and prevent terror, and Israel, while it has expressed a willingness to curtail settlement activity, needs to do more to improve the lives of the Palestinians, the official said Clinton told Obama.

Clinton was at the White House to give Obama a progress report that he requested after the president brought Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas together in New York Sept. 22.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aSy6NI0n.AM8

“The U.S. will gradually strengthen its efforts to make a world without nuclear weapons while strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime and removing latent threats posed by nuclear terrorism,” she said.

“Regardless of its effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, the U.S. will strengthen its attempt to defend the homeland and keep its security promises to alliances. It should be remembered by all enemies.”

http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=060000&biid=2009102230548

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Clinton ordered an investigation on Tuesday into the Animal House revels of private guards at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan – including booze, hookers and other “deviant behavior.”

“These are very serious allegations, and we are treating them that way,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said of photo and e-mail evidence of the “climate of fear and coercion” at the living quarters of ArmorGroup guards.

The investigation by the State Department’s inspector general follows a shocking report to Clinton by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight detailing a “Lord of the Flies environment” at the Camp Sullivan compound a few miles from the embassy in Kabul. Prostitutes allegedly were brought in for birthday parties, drunken guards engaged in brawls and boozy lawn parties turned into naked affairs where guests urinated on one another, according to photos and videos obtained by the nonprofit group.

Clinton has “zero tolerance” for the behavior described and has directed a “review of the whole system” for farming out security to private contractors that may have threatened the safety of embassy personnel, Kelly said.

Earlier, hearings in June by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), head of the subcommittee on contractor oversight, questioned whether the contract with ArmorGroup, now owned by Wackenhut Services Inc., should be renewed.

In a separate letter to Clinton, McCaskill said the Project on Government Oversight report “calls into question the ability of the contractor to provide sufficient security for the embassy.”

Wackenhut did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2009/09/02/2009-09-02_afghan_embassy_patrol_in_deviant_parties_report.html#ixzz0PxYFGmOk

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, women’s rights and safety activists in Congo and Uganda reflect on the hope she leaves behind in one of the world’s worst rape zones.

KAMPALA, Uganda (WOMENSENEWS)–Sarah Assimwe, 13, is far from her family’s former home in Bunia, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now she lives here in Kampala with her mother, as members of the city’s urban refugee population.

Assimwe is being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s been seven years since she crossed the Congolese border, but memories of her father’s death often cross her mind in painful flashbacks.

“The memories come three times a day,” she said, at Butabika Hospital, a mental-health facility here supported by the World Bank and the Ugandan Ministry of Health. “They frighten me very much.”

When Assimwe was 6, Congolese rebels attacked her family’s neighborhood in Bunia and burned houses there to the ground. When rebels entered her own home, Assimwe watched them kill her father and brother with machetes and rape her mother before going on to slaughter her neighbors.

Assimwe’s mother, Jacqueline Kabonesa, carried her daughter on her back as they fled to Uganda, which borders eastern Congo.

Assimwe may not have known about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to her native country.

But the kinds of suffering she has endured have a lot to do with Clinton’s August 11 mission to Goma, a city in the eastern Congo at the epicenter of a massive epidemic of rape. The sexual violence that Assimwe’s mother once endured there is suffered by hundreds of women and men on a daily basis.

More than 4,000 rapes have been reported in the eastern Congo this year; few assailants, usually soldiers or members of militias, have been convicted.

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/4115/context/archive