Russia cannot afford to quarrel with the countries of the Islamic world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
“Russia has no right to quarrel with the Islamic world, not to mention to allow anybody to make it quarrel with the Islamic world,” Lavrov said at a Foreign and Defense Policy Council session on Saturday.
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Discussants:
Richard Halloran
John J. Tkacik Jr.
March 19, 2007
In early March, China announced it will increase military spending by nearly 18 percent in 2007, to more than $45 billion. Experts say Beijing understates its defense budget by more than half but the proposed 2008 U.S. military budget of $481 billion still dwarfs China’s. Yet the spending increase, [...]

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There are a number of factors behind Putin’s recent rhetoric and actions in the Middle East. First, by embracing Middle Eastern monarchies and Islamist authoritarianism in Iran, he is signaling that Russia continues to distance itself from Western norms of internal political behavior. This has important implications, since 2007-2008 are election years in Russia. Putin [...]

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In the difficult times ahead, it will be more important than ever to try and get an early fix on where serious trouble may be brewing. This means trying to read between the lines of official statements and published reports. Or stepping back and looking at seemingly unrelated developments to see if, in combination, they [...]

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China’s economic expansion, the source of about a 10th of global growth last year, is unstable and environmentally unsustainable, Premier Wen Jiabao said.
“China’s investment growth is too high, lending growth too fast, liquidity excessive and trade and international payments very imbalanced,” Wen said at a press conference in Beijing today. Energy efficiency and environmental [...]

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NEW DELHI: After a series of technical hiccups, India’s long-running project to build nuclear submarines is finally gaining momentum. As per the revised target, the Navy is likely to get the first such operational submarine by 2012.
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During the Cold War, the Russian-Chinese relationship was watched by Western intelligence analysts like hawks on mice.
What if Moscow and Beijing form an alliance? What if there is another border dispute between them? What if Russia provides advanced fighters to North Korea? How would the United States respond to a Russian attack on Japan?
Today, the [...]

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March 19, 2007 — RECENT military news out of China includes double trouble. First, Beijing an nounced a jaw-dropping 18 percent jump in its defense budget - 5 percentage points more than last year’s alarming rise -at the yearly meeting of the National People’s Congress.
On top of that came news from an unidentified Chinese admiral [...]

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MUMBAI: The quest for energy security has become the primary and most immediate strategic concern of Asia’s two rising giants, India and China. The Middle East will soon feel the full force of this growing competition.
China’s and India’s blazing 9% plus economic growth rate has pushed them well beyond their original [...]

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Washington (CNSNews.com) - Chinese espionage directed against the United States has met with “total success for China” and “total failure” for America’s own intelligence operations, said an author and reporter on national security issues.
Counter-intelligence operations have allowed the Chinese to block and manipulate U.S. electronic eavesdropping operations while the theft of U.S. technology has [...]

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(IsraelNN.com) Israel has developed a new technology that is supposed to safely dispose of radioactive waste.
The system was developed by Environmental Energy Resources (EER), an Israeli company that helped clean up after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and is based on plasma gasification melting (PMG) technology. The toxic waste is turned into a highly ionized gas, [...]

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To defend against Iranian missiles fitted with nuclear warheads, Israel continues to advance the Arrow. In fact, recent test results of this enduring anti-ballistic missile program have been very strong. It would seem, therefore, that Israel’s pertinent military technologies remain up to the growing existential challenge. It also seems that the mutual benefits of continuing [...]

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The Trident submarine base at Bangor, just 20 miles from Seattle, has become home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal. In November 2006, the Natural Resources Defense Council declared that the 2,364 nuclear warheads at Bangor are about 24 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal.
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At a recent international security conference in Munich, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a vicious anti-American speech. It may have cheered some old-style leftists in his European audience, but it probably disheartened many others who had imagined or hoped that post-Communist Russia could be smoothly integrated into the West. It seems that, once again, Moscow [...]

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So far, Putin has good reason to be pleased with the SCO, which he portrays as becoming a powerful bloc that other governments want to join in defying American influence. There are, however, several factors present (many of which the Russian press acknowledges) which limit Putin’s ability to implement his ambitious visions for the SCO.
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