With the citizens of Bombay still mopping up the blood on their streets and counting the corpses in their hotels, attention has quickly turned to who is behind last week’s terror attacks. India says it has evidence that the gunmen who tore through its richest city were trained in Pakistan, and raised its security status [...]

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DEBKAfile’s military sources report that on Sunday, Nov. 30, Asia’s two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, took their first steps towards a conventional war. India, claiming evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in the Islamist terrorist assault on Mumbai, placed its air and missile units on war preparedness, while Pakistan, disclaiming the charge, diverted its armed divisions [...]

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What would happen to the world economy?
Quite simply the economic consequences of such a raid would be cataclysmic.
It isn’t just that Iran is the world’s second largest oil producer, with the third largest global reserves of oil and the second largest of natural gas. The truly significant part is where Iran actually is. Even assuming [...]

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Policies That Spawn Economic Inequality Rather Than Free Trade Could Bring about an Economic Crisis
These developments have raised concerns about the durability of globalization among its supporters. In April 2005, Martin Wolf of “The Financial Times” gave a lecture titled “Will Globalization Survive?” at Washington’s prestigious pro-globalization Institute for International Economics. More recently, Harvard professor [...]

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Corporate-led, finance-driven globalisation has successfully transferred wealth from labour to capital. This has resulted in inequality and exclusion on a massive scale which, combined with the pressure on water and other environmental resources, is likely to fuel new conflicts.
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A leading Israeli analyst said Hamas has been preparing its forces for an expected Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, Middle East Newsline reported. Jonathan Spyer, a senior researcher at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, said Hamas was adopting Hizbullah’s strategy of asymmetrical warfare meant to significantly improve its combat abilities.
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By Peter Zeihan
As students of geopolitics, we at Stratfor tend not to get overexcited when this or that plan for regional peace is tabled. Many of the world’s conflicts are geographic in nature, and changes in government or policy only rarely supersede the hard topography that we see as the dominant sculptor of the international [...]

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A high-powered group of international experts is warning a “no-holds-barred” race for Arctic resources could shape up unless countries around the world move faster to reach agreements on development, safety and environmental standards.
A new report by 40 experts from six different countries spells out four scenarios for the future of the top of the world [...]

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As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.
The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing environmental stress. Climate change, water scarcity [...]

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Increased military action by U.S. forces in Afghanistan to target suspected terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas is putting a strain on Washington’s already tense relationship with Islamabad. A June 10 U.S. air strike (IHT) in which Pakistan’s army says eleven of its soldiers died was followed, just weeks later, by NATO forces firing into Pakistan [...]

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Although in many respects the situation in the Taiwan Strait appears to be improving, China’s military actions do not reflect this apparent trend. In fact, China has reinforced its troops on the Shandong Peninsula, opposite Korea, where they would engage U.S. and Japanese troops should they attempt to support Taiwan in the event of a [...]

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The BBC’s Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, looks at increasing speculation that Iran may come under attack because of its nuclear programme.
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The talk has alarmed, among others, the former German Foreign Minister, Joshka Fischer.
Germany has, with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, taken the lead in talks with Iran about its nuclear [...]

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DEBKAfile: Our Washington sources report that president George W. Bush is closer than ever before to ordering a limited missile-air bombardment of the IRGC-al Qods Brigade’s installations in Iran. It is planned to target training camps and the munitions factories pumping fighters, missiles and roadside bombs to the Iraqi insurgency, Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist [...]

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Russia is sending a unit from the army’s railway force to the breakaway province of Abkhazia, the country’s defence ministry has said.
The 300 unarmed troops are needed to help carry out repairs on the network, said the head of Abkhazia’s railways.
The move has been denounced by Georgia which says Russia is planning a military intervention [...]

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Since the late 1990s, there has been a flood of research on natural resources and civil war. This article reviews 14 recent cross-national econometric studies, and many qualitative studies, that cast light on the relationship between natural resources and civil war. It suggests that collectively they imply four underlying regularities: first, oil increases the likelihood [...]

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Russia was accused yesterday of stoking separatist tensions as part of a campaign to prevent the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine joining Nato.
Georgia said that Russia was arming rebels in the breakaway region of Abkhazia to provoke a war and scupper its bid to join the military alliance.
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Moscow also angered Ukraine by [...]

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The top U.S. Navy official in the Persian Gulf warned in an interview with ABC News that war with Iran would be “pretty disastrous,” with “echoes and aftershocks” reverberating throughout the region.
“Nobody I’ve spoken to suggests that going to war with Iran is a good thing,” Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff told ABC News. “The preferred [...]

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Russia was effectively charged with committing an act of war yesterday after a United Nations report concluded that one of its planes shot down a Georgian reconnaissance aircraft over Georgia last month.
The inquiry’s conclusions gave the first independent credence to claims by Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, that Russia was responsible for a series of aggressive [...]

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United Nations investigators who examined the downing of an unmanned Georgian reconnaissance aircraft in April have concluded that the drone was struck by a missile fired from a Russian fighter plane, according to an advance copy of their report obtained on Monday.
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The long military standoff in Abkhazia, where a separatist dispute has risked escalating this year to a renewed war, has entered a phase of quiet diplomacy aimed at easing tensions and urging negotiations, according to officials on both sides of the conflict.
No agreement to negotiate has been reached, and the differences between the Abkhaz and [...]

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Supporters of the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, trying to enforce a general strike called by labor unions, clashed with government supporters and blocked roads in Beirut on Wednesday, escalating tensions as the country remained mired in its worst political crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.
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The government said on Tuesday that it would act [...]

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