SEOUL, Dec. 15 (Yonhap) — The long-standing alliance between South Korea and the U.S. faced a host of challenges in recent years as the former demanded greater independence from the latter and the two sides had to hammer out a vision for a new partnership.
In 2006, Seoul and Washington managed to lay the groundwork for [...]

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BRASILIA, Brazil: Brazil is close to buying more Russian military equipment, including helicopters, Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said Thursday.
Amorim met Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for talks ranging from the Middle East conflict to increasing bilateral trade, now at around US$4 billion (€3 billion) a year.
Amorim said the two nations plan to raise [...]

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“I shall be an autocrat, that’s my trade.” Thus quipped the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, who stamped Russian authority onto the international stage, seizing vast swathes of territory and establishing Russia as a formidable power in the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears that Vladimir Putin has taken her example to heart.
Buoyed [...]

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WASHINGTON: With hindsight, we may see 2006 as the end of Pax Americana. Ever since World war II, the United States has used its military and economic superiority to promote a stable world order that has, on the whole, kept the peace and spread prosperity.
But the United States increasingly lacks both the power and the [...]

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Russia is in effect muscling in on the highly promising but very expensive natural gas field Shell Oil and its Japanese partners Mitsui & Company and Mitsubishi Corporation have developed off Sakhalin Island, east of Siberia and north of Japan. Much of the construction work is done, but further work has been delayed by administrative [...]

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The Iraq Study Group (ISG) has issued its long-awaited — and by
now, much-criticized — report to the White House, and has met with a lukewarm reception. President George W. Bush is now seeking input from a cadre of other agencies and officials as he attempts to formulate a new Iraq strategy, which will be announced [...]

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