AT AGE 42, Niall Ferguson has become one of the world’s most famous and provocative historians, with high-profile posts ranging from Harvard to Oxford to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford, he is not only a prolific author of books, including Colossus (2004), an examination of American empire, and The [...]

read more....

March 16, 2007: Russian arms sales continue to climb, with at least $8 billion in sales expected this year. In 2005 Russian arms exporters had already booked orders for six billion dollars worth of sales per year through 2008.
Read More…

read more....

China’s surging space program could launch explorers on the moon before Americans make a lunar return, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told a congressional oversight panel Thursday.
Griffin offered the assessment at a budget hearing before the House Science and Technology Committee. The panel offered bipartisan support for an increase in spending on NASA’s Orion moonship, which [...]

read more....

France Thursday renewed the call for the lifting of the EU ams embargo on China, denoucing opposition to the move as illogical, according to a news report.
The call was made by Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie who was on a visit to Japan, AFP reported.
“There is a lack of logic in the position of some,” Alliot-Marie [...]

read more....

This has been a banner week for Syrian diplomacy. First, together with their big Iranian brothers, the Syrians were given a place at the table alongside US officials at the conference on Iraqi security in Baghdad last weekend.
At the same time as their underlings exchanged recriminations with the US, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and Iranian [...]

read more....

Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” thesis has generated a lot of debate, and some justified criticism. He has been accused of simplification, but also for underestimating the case of Islam. Huntington does talk about “the bloody borders” of the Islamic world. However, he has also stated that there is nothing implicit in Islamic [...]

read more....