It has been described as a publishing sensation. Helene Berr was a young French student murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. Her recently discovered journal has now hit French bookstores — and become an immediate bestseller. By Siobhán Dowling more…

Photo Gallery: The Journal of Helene Berr
Six Decades after WWII: Massive Holocaust Archive Opens to the [...]

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Summary: Is China democratizing? The country’s leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China’s liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open [...]

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Bolivian President Evo Morales faces an uphill battle to keep his nation whole as several eastern provinces, which hold the country’s lucrative gas reserves, are balking at his constitutional reform proposals. Among the proposals being put forward by Morales — Bolivia’s first indigenous leader — is a more equal distribution of the country’s revenue [...]

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Russia will fully equip a fifth strategic missile regiment with new silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2008, a spokesman for the Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) said on Thursday.
At present, Russia operates 48 Topol-M systems (NATO reporting name SS-27) and will deploy another two with a missile regiment in the Saratov Region in southern Russia this [...]

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Russia’s state-owned Gazprom is moving to gain access to Nigeria’s gas reserves, considered Africa’s largest.
According to Nigerian officials, Gazprom has already approached energy officials in Abuja about investing in Nigeria’s infrastructure in return for development rights in the country.
“What Gazprom is proposing is mind-boggling,” a Nigerian official told The Financial Times newspaper last week.
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Mr Rogozin’s appointment is a reflection of Russia’s more assertive stance towards the West, the BBC’s James Rodgers reports from Moscow.
Nato is viewed with great suspicion in Russia – politicians and ordinary people alike see the alliance’s post-Cold War eastward expansion as blatantly hostile, our correspondent says.
Mr Rogozin has previously called for Russia to rearm [...]

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We are witnessing a systemic decline in Russia’s relations with the West. There is a long list of complaints from the industrial democracies regarding Moscow’s behavior, many of them justified. But the US-Russia relationship (and that of Europe and Russia) does not occur in a strategic vacuum. Many of Russia’s contemporary offenses pale before what [...]

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Two orbiting U.S. spacecraft were forced to change course to avoid being damaged by the thousands of pieces of space debris produced after China carried out an anti-satellite weapon test one year ago tomorrow.
The maneuvering, ordered by ground controllers and conducted several months after the test, is an example of lingering problems caused by China’s [...]

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But what bothered U.S. Navy brass more was China’s Nov. 20, 2007 refusal of Hong Kong port calls by two U.S. mine sweepers trying to avoid bad weather. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Tim Keating was clearly irritated. “It is not, in our view, conduct indicative of a country that understands its obligations as a responsible [...]

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This is part three of MIT researcher Geoffrey Forden’s look at the possibilities of an all-out Chinese assault on American satellites. Click for parts one and two.
If China was to attack the strategically important deep-space satellites it would give the United States at least an indication of the impending attack two or more weeks prior [...]

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