Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Friday called for more oil drilling in the United States (US) and questioned American aid to Pakistan as he took his young campaign to his home state of Georgia. Gingrich, who was speaker of the US House of Representatives during the 1990s, declared himself a candidate in the 2012 presidential election on Wednesday in what many analysts said would be an uphill battle to win the presidency.
In a speech to members of the Georgia Republican Party, Gingrich said after the killing of Osama bin Laden there by US special forces in the May 2 raid, the US needed to reassess the billions of dollars in aid it gave to Pakistan. Authorities now were trying to piece together how the al Qaeda leader came to live in the northern Pakistan garrison town of Abbottabad for apparently years before his death.
