Try asking Vladimir Putin.
MOSCOW– Until a week ago, Alexander Litvinenko, a former colonel in the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, was virtually unknown outside the murky world of Russian intelligence. With his death in London from a massive dose of the radioactive element polonium 210, however, his fate may lead to a fundamentally different [...]

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BAD NEUENAHR-AHRWEILER, Germany, Nov. 23 — At the end of a serpentine road here, flanked by pinot noir vineyards, an unmarked door is cut into a hillside. Behind it lies one of the most secret places in the former West Germany: a vast subterranean bunker to shelter the government in the event of a nuclear [...]

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Lebanon and Iraq show that some long-fought civil wars only have cease-fires.
IT WAS THREE YEARS AGO that a prescient Beirut journalist I know predicted that Iraq would end up as “Lebanon to the power of 10″ � meaning Lebanon during its 16-year civil war between 1975 and 1991. This year, his prophecy has been fulfilled [...]

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Sixty-seven years later it seems that once again Russia has yielded to the destructive ambitions of a tyrant and an anti-Semite. By refusing to support tough sanctions on Iran over its dangerous nuclear enrichment program, Russia is once again exposing the world to unimaginable carnage, certainly much worse than that of World war II. While [...]

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Russia and China have joined together in a strategic partnership aimed at countering the U.S. and Western “monopoly in world affairs,” as was made clear in a joint statement released by the Chinese and Russian presidents in July 2005. The long standing border disputes between the two countries were settled in agreements in 2005, and [...]

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Taiwan must upgrade its submarine warfare capabilities to prevent China from surrounding the island with its navy, a top Taiwanese defense official says.
Chen Yung-kang, director of the Defense Ministry’s Integrated Assessment Office, gave the evaluation as he discussed the navy’s planned purchase of eight submarines from the United States, The Taipei Times reported.
Link to [...]

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BHUBANESWAR (Reuters) - Two nuclear-capable ballistic missiles collided in mid-air off India’s eastern coast on Monday in a successful test of an interception programme, a top scientist said.
The collision of the two Prithvi-II missiles occurred over the Bay of Bengal.
Link to this article.

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RIYADH - When Haytham Zamzami began studying Chinese, the rising superpower had only just begun to register on the horizon for Saudi Arabia.
ME-China ties graphEight years later China is all the rage.
China’s insatiable demand for oil — and Saudi Arabia’s position as the world’s top exporter—have become the basis for a trade partnership that analysts [...]

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