US Restarts Drone Attacks, Kills 4 in Pakistan Strike

The US' drone war in Pakistan is back on. The US launched its first strike last night since a November attack that killed 28 Pakistani soldiers and ratcheted the already fraught tensions between the two nations to a new high. The attack hit a North Waziristan home just before midnight, killing at least four, the AP reports. "It was an unusually big bang," one local college student says. "In the morning, we saw a modest mud house had been destroyed."

So far there's no indication if the US cleared the strike with Islamabad. Despite the long pause since the controversial attack, US officials tell Reuters that there was never a deliberate moratorium on drone strikes, instead implying that it had simply lacked sufficient intelligence to launch any. (More Pakistan stories.)