Egypt’s leaders find themselves uncomfortably wedged between international and local politics whenever discussion turns to the country’s humiliating military defeat by Israel in 1967. It’s typically an opportunity for students, leftist intellectuals and Islamists to rage against the Camp David peace accords with Israel, which they say ties their hands in the face of the [...]

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More than 12,800km from Beijing, Chinese workers are putting the finishing touches to stadiums for a sport they’ve never played.
Living in temporary plastic huts and taking a single day off each month, about 1,000 employees of state-owned Chinese companies have sweated away the past year on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Antigua and Grenada [...]

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Rising powers China and India set to fuel intense energy fight.
MUMBAI, INDIA — Energy security has become the primary and most immediate strategic concern of Asia’s two rising giants, India and China.
In my book war at the Top of the World (third, updated edition out later this month), I cited a little-noticed CIA study estimating [...]

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CHANGSHA, China — The beautician from Chairman Mao’s hometown looks at herself in the mirror and bursts into tears of joy. Forty pounds lighter, jaw slimmer, eyes and nose refined, breasts lifted, 30-year-old Chen Jing has just been through an extreme makeover for a Chinese reality show called “Lovely Cinderella.”
It’s a sharp insight into [...]

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Next Friday is Red Nose Day in Britain. Perhaps it should also be Red Face Day in Ghana. Let me explain why.
So what went wrong? The answer is more or less the same answer you would give for any sub-Saharan African country since 1957. Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence, was in many ways [...]

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BEIJING — It’s a Chinese form of “truthiness” that might make Stephen Colbert proud.
China’s Southern Metropolis Weekly magazine recently reported this shocking news: The central government created universal health care for the country’s 1.3 billion people, wiped out bribery and reduced the country’s wide income gap.
Migrant workers in the southern city of Guangzhou, notorious for [...]

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Indian officials in Delhi and the business community here in Bombay/Mumbai are deeply worried China may soon have secured all available remaining oil supplies not already controlled by the United States. They are clamouring for action to secure energy supplies for India to assure its continued economic growth and expanding military power.
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BRUSSELS, March 8 (Itar-Tass) - Poland is seeking a European Union pipeline bypassing Russia through Central Asia to the eastern border of the EU.
Warsaw also wants EU issuing funds for this project known as Nobuko, a EU representative told ITAR-TASS.
According to information available here, Poland is going to obtain from Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan [...]

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