There is an odd quiet globally. The Middle East is seeing tension easing across the board. Tensions between Russia and the Czechs or Georgians have mounted, but nothing like they could have. The Chinese are tense but managing the run-up to the Olympics and the oil price rise as well as can be expected. Nothing [...]

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This is brought to you by JohnMauldin@InvestorsInsight.com. John provides a free daily newsletter that you can sign up for. George Friedman is making this forecast available so that you might sign up for his service.
Read original source with maps included.
Here’s the article:
By George Friedman at Stratfor.Com.
Introduction
For the first half of 2008, Stratfor focused [...]

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Russia has overtaken Niger to become the world’s fourth largest uranium producer, after Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan. Russia received its new rating in 2007, when it produced 3,527 tons of uranium.
It has ambitious plans to mover even further up the league, based on promising deposits in Eastern Siberia and other regions, and opportunities for mutually [...]

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The Christian Science Monitor surveys the usual experts, and declares that a U.S. attack on Iran is “not coming soon.” So does that mean the Israelis might bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities on their own? They might be able to pull off a preventive strike. But Robert Kaplan, writing for the Atlantic, doesn’t think the Israelis [...]

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Argentina raised the prospect of posting military forces in the Antarctic region yesterday, with the announcement of plans to use troops to defend its interests.
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner told defence chiefs that Argentina must be prepared to assert its sovereignty and protect its natural resources, as nations compete to claim areas of the region [...]

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Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.
What is the Role of Nuclear Weapons in China’s grand strategy? The paper will also discuss how the ancient writings of Sun Tzu have informed China’s [...]

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Corruption continues to intensify in two-fifths of the world’s nations, nurtured by persistent poverty, political instability and crime.
In percentage terms, the number of countries perceived to be corrupt fell slightly, according to recent surveys by Transparency International, an international watchdog group. But that’s only because the sample size of its annual study has gotten larger [...]

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Mother Nature goes to extremes in the summer, spoiling the gift of good weather with hurricanes, heat waves, fires and floods. This year she started early. On May 2, Cyclone Nargis laid waste to large parts of Myanmar. According to the latest counts, the disaster left 2.4 million people destitute, more than 50,000 missing and [...]

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Only al-Qaeda and Iran pose bigger danger
The services are understood to fear that Russia’s three main intelligence agencies have flooded the country with agents, The Times understands.
There is reported to be deep irritation within the services that vital resources are having to be diverted to deal with industrial and military espionage by the Russians.
Read [...]

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The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Read More…
Video: North Pole May Melt In Total

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Meanwhile experts believe Iran will be able to produce inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of reaching Europe, and possibly America, by 2015. Some intelligence reports suggest Iran will have obtained the amount of uranium needed for a nuclear weapon much sooner.
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Connecting the Dots
The articles below show Iran developing the technology to enrich uranium, build a [...]

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Tour a few of the most ambitious and audacious designs breaking ground in some of the world’s least free countries.
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Video: New World’s Tallest Building - the Burj Dubai

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As full of fun facts as the Pew Report is, however, it has a fairly limited scope. Lots of numbers and percentages are bandied about but with very little historical context or explanation. Why, for example, do Russians prefer powerful leaders over straight-up democracies? Why do Tanzanians like President Bush so much? Oh, and why [...]

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Scientists From Around the Globe Join ABC News in a Forum on Surviving the Century
Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?
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Video: Collapse - How Societies Choose [...]

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Gen. Nikolai Makarov has replaced tough, old Gen. Yury Baluyevsky as the chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces and has been tasked with rapidly modernizing them — but the odds are against him.
Despite all the stories of gloom and doom about them that regularly appear in the Western media, the Russian armed forces [...]

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In McMafia, Misha Glenny draws the dark map that lies on the other side of Tom Friedman’s bright flat world. That connected globe not only brings software coders and supply-chain outsourcers closer together; it’s also opened the gates to a criminal network of unsettling vastness, complexity, and efficiency that represents a fifth of the earth’s [...]

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World leaders, alarmed over the spiraling number of hungry in their countries and at their borders, Tuesday urged each other to contribute money, ideas and compassion to feed an estimated 950 million people.
The presidents of Brazil, Iran and Zimbabwe, among others, joined scientists, humanitarian relief experts and diplomats to forge immediate responses and long-term ideas [...]

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Coastal Nations Grab for Ocean Floor Riches
Vast quantities of resources may be hiding beneath the ocean floor. But who owns it? Countries on the coasts are laying claim to ever larger chunks of seawater. But many of the claims are disputed. By SPIEGEL Staff more…

Photo Gallery: The World’s Last Gold Mines
Black Gold under the Ice: [...]

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“If not handled properly, this issue could trigger a cascade of other crises — affecting economic growth, social progress, and even political security around the world.”
Participants at the High-Level Conference on World Food Security will discuss short-term solutions as well as new strategies to deal with the effects of global warming, growing demand for biofuels [...]

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Iran’s nuclear programme has made big strides in recent months and the country is on course to pass an important threshold for nuclear weapons capability next year, scientists and analysts say.
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Video: Israel Reveals Iran Closer To Having Nukes

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Those Canadians who hope to see the new Asian giants rival the U.S. in a few decades as the great global engine and the new big market for Canada simply do not realize that such a change would be an unmitigated disaster for us.
China is a brutal one-party dictatorship, a mixture of totalitarianism and unbridled [...]

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