A protest staged by thousands of rural workers in central China ended in violent clashes last week, reports say.
Several people were injured as up to 20,000 people clashed with 1,000 police in Hunan province on Friday, a local official told Reuters news agency.
The Boxun Chinese news website said the clash was sparked by rising public [...]

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Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Nato’s secretary-general, does not hesitate when asked whether his alliance will come under threat of missile attack.
“There is every reason to believe that, given the North Korean missile tests and the Iranian capability and what the Iranians are saying,” he tells the Financial Times.
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LONDON [MENL] — Iran could assemble its first nuclear bomb within six months, a report said.
The London-based Oxford Research Group asserted that Iran could launch a crash program to produce its first crude nuclear weapon by late 2007. The ORG report said Teheran could begin such a program should the United States launch air [...]

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DRESDEN, Germany (Reuters) - U.S. plans to build a high-tech missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic are dangerous and absurd, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said on Sunday.
“The missile defence system planned by the United States and which is to be installed in eastern Europe is politically extremely dangerous,” Schroeder said in a [...]

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The Iranians have defaulted on their payments to the Russians. The Russians have stopped construction on the Iranian nuclear plant in Busher. Who’s the winner and who is the loser in this scenario - think like a fox, not like a crow.
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Most Taiwanese believe that only people in Taiwan should be given the privilege of determining the fate of Taiwan and its people.
From the end of the 1500s until 1895, Chinese who needed to get out of Fujan Province, the neighboring province, drifted to Taiwan. Some came to fish its waters and sailed back and forth, [...]

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“An Israeli military operation against Iran would hurt Israel’s long-term interests. It would be detrimental to Israel’s overall security and the political and economic consequences would be dire and far-reaching,” the report warns.
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During the Cold War, the occasional Soviet defector — some government official or military officer — excited little interest from us. Some did provide useful intelligence but mostly they merely proved what we already knew, that there was dissent within the eroding Soviet state. Since 9/11 we have captured or killed many terrorist leaders, but [...]

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Faced with North Korea’s nukes and China’s burgeoning defense budget, neighboring nations are buying more advanced fighters, upgrades for C4ISR systems, and radars and air defense missiles for ballistic missile defense programs.
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Anyone seeking a reminder of the People’s Liberation Army’s influence on Chinese politics need only look at the swaths of green-and-blue uniforms amid the sea of delegates to the national legislature.
With a spectacular test of an anti-satellite weapon, the roll-out of a sophisticated jet fighter and talk of building an aircraft carrier, the Chinese military [...]

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Who lost Russia? As the world’s biggest country backslides ever more quickly into authoritarianism, the answer you hear increasingly is: the United States.
Curiously, you hear it both from Russians, who simultaneously deny that anything bad has happened and blame America for it; and from Americans, who assume that a few tweaks of policy could have [...]

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March 12 (Bloomberg) — Last July, as North Korea prepared for ballistic missile tests, Admiral William Fallon picked up the telephone to warn his Chinese military counterparts of the U.S.’s deep concern, and urge them to weigh in against the launches.
There was just one problem: The commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, [...]

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