NATO warned Russia Wednesday to stop undermining Georgia’s territorial integrity, after Moscow announced it would send more peacekeepers to two rebel Georgian regions.
Russia’s move, to counter what it said was the massing of Georgian troops near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, raised concern in the United States while the European Union has said that any [...]

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Iran has taken command of its nuclear technology and could have an atomic bomb in a year, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz was quoted as saying Wednesday, citing Israeli intelligence.
According to Channel 10, Mofaz made the comments during talks with US officials in Washington where he leading an Israeli delegation holding meetings within the framework of [...]

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DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that bone fragments exhumed last year belong to two children of Czar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia’s last royal family, a regional governor said today.
Bone fragments dug up near the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg are indeed those of Crown [...]

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GEORGIA and Russia agree upon one thing: the situation in the breakaway province of Abkhazia is bad and getting worse. Georgia, an ex-Soviet republic with close links to America, says that Russia is illegally putting more troops in the region. Last week it produced video footage of what looks like a Russian warplane shooting down [...]

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The United States Air Force had considered a plan to drop nuclear bombs on China during a confrontation over Taiwan in 1958 but it was overruled, declassified documents showed Wednesday.
When he learned about it, President Dwight Eisenhower instead required the Air Force to initially use conventional bombs against Chinese forces if the crisis escalated, according [...]

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CIA chief Michael Hayden charged Wednesday that China was beefing up its military with “remarkable speed and scope,” calling the buildup “troubling.”
The Chinese, he said, had fully absorbed the lessons of both Gulf wars, developing and integrating advanced weaponry into a modern military force.
Hayden said while Beijing’s new capabilities could pose a risk to US [...]

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Germany’s population is shrinking, with serious consequences for the country’s economy and pension system. Can Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen persuade Germans to breed? By David Gordon Smith in Berlin more…

SPIEGEL Interview with German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen: ‘A Dangerous Breeding Ground for Right-Wing Extremism’
Rage Against the Baby Machines: Germany’s Neo-Housewives Spark [...]

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The ferocity with which Israel responded to the threat posed by a nuclear weapons program in the hands of one of its worst enemies contrasts with the reluctance of the U.S. to attack North Korea’s nuclear facilities over years of off-again, on-again efforts to get the North to abandon the program.
Although the U.S. has repeatedly [...]

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That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world’s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for [...]

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The sprawling site, known as Natanz, made headlines recently because Iran is testing a new generation of centrifuges there that spin faster and, in theory, can more rapidly turn natural uranium into fuel for reactors or nuclear arms. The new machines are also meant to be more reliable than their forerunners, which often failed catastrophically.
On [...]

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Some of the world’s major concentrations of military power and potential hot spots are in Asia: for example on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Straits and between India and Pakistan. Strong economic growth in our region is leading to the build-up of modern military forces in China and India, as well as in South [...]

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Nial Ferguson: war of the Worlds - 20th Century history revised

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An indispensable account of how the world’s diminishing sources of energy are radically changing the international balance of power
Recently, an unprecedented Chinese attempt to acquire the major American energy firm Unocal was blocked by Congress amidst hysterical warnings of a Communist threat. But the political grandstanding missed a larger point: the takeover bid was a [...]

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By George Friedman
The Middle East, already monstrously complex, grew more complex last week. First, there were strong indications that both Israel and Syria were prepared to engage in discussions on peace. That alone is startling enough. But with the indicators arising in the same week that the United States decided to reveal that the purpose [...]

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DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once [...]

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DURING HIS RECENT TRIP TO Europe, President Bush sent mixed signals about U.S. policy with regard to Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. At one point he dismissed the prospect of military action as ridiculous; immediately after, he emphasized all options were on the table; then at another point he suggested there might be “convergence” between [...]

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Russia’s defence ministry is sending extra peacekeeping troops to two Georgian separatist regions in response to what it calls aggressive moves by Georgia.
“Analysis of the structure of the armed forces in this region leads to the conclusion that a bridgehead is being prepared… for military operations against Abkhazia,” the ministry said.
Russia maintains a peacekeeping force [...]

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Syria will not sever ties with Iran and Hezbollah even as part of a possible peace agreement with Israel, a senior Syrian analyst who is handling the government’s contacts as it relates to the peace process said on Tuesday.
“It would be naive to think Syria will neglect or abandon its strategic alliances that do not [...]

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The new planes, which are an upgraded version of the Tu-160 model, are able to carry 12 X-55 cruiser missiles with a 3000 km range. A total of 40 tons of ammunition can be loaded in the aircraft.
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It is impossible to spend even a few days in Europe without encountering the striking anti-Americanism that suffuses the political media of the continent. Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright would feel quite at home here.
Extensive polling shows that this constant drumbeat of leftist propaganda has also filtered down to ordinary citizens.
This “unpopularity” has [...]

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The fiasco of the Olympic torch relay has focused attention on human rights in China. What is the source of human rights abuses in that country today?
Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship and that abuses occur because a strong, centralized state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard [...]

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