An anti-immigrant politician is making a meteoric rise with his call on the Dutch - once one of the most tolerant nations in the world - to stop Islam taking over Europe.
Geert Wilders, the 43-year-old leader of the Freedom Party, is convinced that governments are being forced to accommodate a ‘tsunami of Islamisation’ that is [...]

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Israeli Middle East intelligence spokesmen believe that Iran is transferring a new type of rocket to Hizballah that is more accurate, deadly and capable of hitting southern Israel from Lebanon.
Intelligence sources are concerned that Iran is entrenching itself in southern Lebanon with an improved weapon, according to a report in an Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahranot. [...]

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Most Westerners know comparatively little about Saudi Arabia and its House of Saud rulers. Yet Western powers — first Britain, then the United States — have been instrumental in elevating the House of Saud to the position it currently occupies and in maintaining its rule against all odds.
In return, the House of Saud has acted [...]

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Surprisingly, the New Delhi meting of foreign ministers of India, China and Russia did not draw a wider notice. It could be because a major focus of the three-way talks was trade and energy, not conflict resolution, though tricky issues like terrorism and West Asia were on their agenda. Undeniably, however, the trilateral cooperation has [...]

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The debate started earlier this week, when a kingpin of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party said the country could eventually become “a Chinese province.” In a speech in Japan’s third-largest city Nagoya Monday, the LDP’s policy research council chairman Shoichi Nakagawa said that China’s military expenditure “is going up 15 percent, 18 percent each [...]

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An Italian court announced this month that it is moving forward with the indictment and trial of 25 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric. These proceedings may well violate international law, but the case serves as a wake-up call to the United States. Overseas opponents of American foreign policy are increasingly turning [...]

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Certain ancient and medieval principles of warfare remain valid today. These principles and ideas can be ignored now only at substantial risk. Consider, especially, Sun Tzu. Chinese military thought originated amid Neolithic village conflicts almost 5,000 years ago. But it was Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” written in the fifth century, that synthesized a [...]

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Kofi Annan may have left the United Nations, but his legacy of America bashing lives on. More than a year before he stepped down as the international arbiter of right and wrong, Kofi Annan appropriated Rodney King’s plea of “can’t we all just get along,” and created a UN-sponsored initiative dubbed the “Alliance of Civilizations.” [...]

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The messages we send as the world’s sole superpower matter. Today, Iran’s leaders are testing us. They are testing us in Iraq, where Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) networks continue to fund both Sunni and Shi’ite insurgents. They are testing us at the International Atomic Energy Agency and at the United Nations, where they continue [...]

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In recent months, some U.S. analysts and policymakers have raised doubts about the quality and credibility of American intelligence on Iran. With few actual spies on the ground in Iran and no consular presence in Tehran, not to mention the United States’ limited intelligence gleaned from satellite imagery and data, some question the reliability of [...]

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Perhaps what you see is not necessarily what you get, and before we go off on another bout of conjecture as to what the Chinese are really spending on defense and what it all means, we should stop a moment and reflect. From RSIS.
Commentary by Richard A Bitzinger for RSIS (28/02/07)
Every March, as part of [...]

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China’s prime minister promised to maintain “socialism for 100 years” yesterday as the Communist Party tried to play down media discussion of political reform.
“We must keep a firm grasp on the basic principles of the Party in the initial stage of socialism, without wavering, for 100 years,” Wen Jiabao, said in an article reproduced in [...]

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February 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) — The new U.S. intelligence chief has not wasted any time letting the world know what he thinks about the state of affairs in Russia.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 27, little more than a week after being sworn in as director of national intelligence, Retired [...]

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“Iran which denies that a European Holocaust ever took place, is now planning to create a second Holocaust in Europe and in the US”
“Iran has no plans to land a man on the moon,” Col. Adam an Israeli security source told the INA. “The same technology is used to build intercontinental ballistic missiles. This Iran [...]

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So what else did anyone expect?
The Shanghai stock market blew up today, dropping almost 9%. That was the biggest drop in the Shanghai index in a decade and wiped out more than $100 billion in stock market capitalization.
No one should be surprised. And no one should think this has anything to do with a slowdown [...]

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North Korea is technically capable of building a long-range missile that can hit the United States despite a test failure last year, a senior US military intelligence official said Tuesday.
Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said North Korea has probably learned from the failure of its Taepodong-2 missile during a test [...]

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XIAMEN, China, Feb 28 (Reuters) - When Huang Xu was a young soldier in an artillery unit on the Chinese coast in the late 1980s, war with Taiwan always seemed imminent.
“We were on alert level one every day, and drilling for Taiwan (contingencies) all the time,” said the driver in the booming coastal city of [...]

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BEIJING: China’s Foreign Ministry called on Tokyo on Tuesday to be more open about its military development and the status of Taiwan in its plans following Japanese demands for more information on China’s arms buildup.
“It is very strange that Japan, with only one-twenty-fifth of China’s land and one-tenth of China’s population, possesses such a huge [...]

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On February 25, 2007, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney paid an unannounced visit to Pakistan. As various news agencies have reported, the main goal of Cheney’s visit was to press Islamabad to enhance its anti-terrorist activities. The Bush administration is concerned that President Pervez Musharraf’s government will prove unable to crack down decisively on al-Qaeda [...]

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BEIJING (Reuters) - China dismissed U.S. criticism of its military build-up on Tuesday, saying the world’s most populous country was an important force for world peace.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised concerns about China’s military build-up last week and said an anti-satellite test was not consistent with Beijing’s stated goal of a “peaceful rise”.
On January 11, [...]

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) energy club should become field for discussion and enforcement joint projects in energy and transit sector, participants of roundtable “Perspectives of formation of the SCO energy club” said in Tashkent.
Gulnara Karimova, director of Political Studies Centre, said the post-Soviet states started to play important role in global energy market.
She said [...]

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