BRUSSELS, Belgium: The State Department’s point man on Russia Wednesday said Washington was concerned about democracy under President Vladimir Putin and disappointed over relations with Moscow.
“The trends unfortunately are not going in the right direction,” said David J. Kramer, U.S. deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs. “We hope those trends will not continue,” [...]

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So far, the international community has stood firm in demanding that any Palestinian government, be it Hamas or otherwise, recognizes Israel as a precursor to lifting financial sanctions. Questioning Israel’s very “right to exist” is a well-employed tool of Israel’s detractors to call into question the Jewish state’s legitimacy as part of an effort to [...]

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Should Doha fail, the consequences would be broadly felt, especially in the developing world. Stalled efforts at multilateral trade deals could well prompt developed countries to strike bilateral deals with other developed countries and to ignore less efficient budding economies from which they don’t have as much to gain. This report from the Carnegie Endowment [...]

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Israel’s conflict with Hizbullah last summer will now be referred to as The Second Lebanon War, according to a decision by the Ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies on Wednesday.
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All of these point to a new �cold war� over energy resources. No wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his speech at the 43rd Security Conference in Munich last February, sharply criticized the United States, saying that it went beyond the limits almost in every issue. This should be seen in the context [...]

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BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to counter the increasingly anti-American attitude of her coalition partners, the Social Democrats, has called on the European Union to find a common position over American plans to deploy part of an anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.
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On October 30, 1961, the most powerful weapon ever constructed by mankind was exploded over the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Sea. The device was code-named “Ivan,” and it was a multi-stage hydrogen bomb which was built in only fifteen weeks by engineers in the USSR, using off-the-shelf nuclear weapon components.
Originally Posted [...]

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The New York Times has already revealed that it is preparing a series of articles commemorating the Six Day War, during which Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan. (Jordan had seized and annexed the West Bank after Israel’s 1948 war of Independence). In that same Six Day War, Israel took the [...]

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March 20, 2007 - In what foreign policy experts believe to be a direct response to the hit American movie “300,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today declared war on Sparta. Even for the mercurial Ahmadinejad, the move struck many diplomatic insiders as extraordinary, since the consensus in the international community is that the city-state of [...]

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Besides Gwadar, this string includes Chittagong of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal and Myanmar in the Indian Ocean. China has helped build the Chittagong port in Bangladesh where it is seeking an extensive naval and commercial access. In the case of Myanwar, Beijing has showered billions of dollars in military aid.
It has provided support [...]

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A quick evaluation of nuclear capabilities in the Middle East makes it clear that the region is hosting one major military nuclear state, Israel, and one major nuclear-ready state, Iran. However, the list will be inconclusive if we do not consider that, in the course of the past 40 years, a longer list of [...]

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Russia knows perfectly well that the batteries are no threat to its nuclear forces. The system is a symbol of Russia’s loss of status. In 2002, Moscow viewed Washington’s decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with deep regret. This was not because Russia perceived a serious threat to its security, but because [...]

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MOSCOW. (Ian Pryde for RIA Novosti) - In June 1992, the president of the Kyrgyz Republic, Askar Akayev, a research physicist before going into politics, told me in an interview that although the former Soviet republics were flying apart just like the universe after the Big Bang, eventually they would be drawn back together again [...]

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Threat from China
Taiwan’s new envoy to the United States, expected in Washington next month, is warning of increased threats from communist China as his government tries to pursue policies to normalize relations with its huge neighbor.
Joseph Wu, now chairman of the government’s Mainland Affairs Council, raised the alarm about China’s military buildup and diplomatic offensive [...]

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