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norman spector

Sergeant Anthony Sills comforts his wife as they wait outside the Fort Hood army base, near Killeen, Texas, the site of a mass shooting on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009.Jack Plunkett

On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart and UN Ambassador Susan Wright began by noting that details of the shooting at Fort Hood were still sketchy, before discussing the efforts President Barack Obama was making to deal with the post-traumatic stress of soldiers returning from war.

This morning, in their lead articles, both the New York Times and Washington Post take great care to stress that the motives of the alleged shooter were still unclear. In a companion piece, however, the Post began to fill out the details, explaining that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was concerned about being deployed abroad for the first time and that he wanted out of the military. It was unclear from the article, however, whether he was to be deployed to Iraq or to Afghanistan,.

This morning CBC reported that the Major "had indicated he didn't want to go to Iraq but was willing to serve in Afghanistan." However, The New York Times is now reporting on its website that Maj. Hasan was "facing deployment to Afghanistan."

The Independent reports on its front page this morning that "there is growing concern in London and in NATO governments about the time it is taking for the Obama administration to decide its strategy. 'It's make your mind up time,' one minister said. A Ministry of Defence source added: 'Without a decision there is a concern that the British public will lose faith'."

On its front page, The Los Angeles Times reports that President Obama's advisers "are trying to satisfy sharply divergent demands: assuring Americans that any military buildup will be limited while convincing Pakistan and other wary allies that the U.S. presence is substantial and not about to end." Yesterday's attack, which the paper describes as "one of the Army's worst single-day losses of life since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," has made the President's challenge all the more daunting.

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