Download English Version - Dictatorship to Democracy
In February, the Iranian government showed a fictionalized video on the dangers of foreign plots against the state. One of its stars: a mysterious American named Gene Sharp.
In June 2007, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez publicly accused Mr. Sharp of stirring unrest in Venezuela. Last year in Vietnam, authorities arrested [...]

read more....

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 [...]

read more....

An inside look at the Russian leader’s autocratic regime and his turn away from the West
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity [...]

read more....

Russia’s new President Dmitry Medvedev, winding up his first foreign trip, said Saturday the world could not ignore the joint voice of his country and China, and rejected criticism of the alliance.
Medvedev said it was symbolic that he picked China as his first destination outside the former Soviet Union. The two countries have been increasingly [...]

read more....

Hong Kong, China — Over the past 20 years, China’s military investment has grown faster than any other country. The bamboo curtain that formerly enveloped the country has become a copper curtain.
Furthermore, China has become more difficult to negotiate with than even the former Soviet Union. The tactic of deceiving one’s opponent or competitor is [...]

read more....

The “moment of truth” has come for Europe to resist hardliners in Russia who are bent on stopping the spread of democracy in the former Soviet Union, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said on Thursday.
Moscow has sparked an international crisis by ordering extra troops and equipment to Abkhazia, a Black Sea province which threw off [...]

read more....

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 [...]

read more....

Twenty-two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, work is under way on a colossal new shelter to cover the ruins and deadly radioactive contents of the exploded Soviet-era power plant.
…
The explosion at reactor No. 4 on April 26, 1986 was the world’s worst nuclear accident, spewing radiation over a large swath of the former Soviet [...]

read more....

By George Friedman
For the past year, Stratfor has been focusing on what we see as the critical global geopolitical picture. As the U.S.-jihadist war has developed, it has absorbed American military resources dramatically. It is overstated to say that the United States lacks the capacity to intervene anywhere else in the world, but it is [...]

read more....

When the dust settled following a bus explosion in Togliatti, Russia, on Oct. 31, few explanations emerged as to who was responsible for the attack, which killed eight people and injured at least 50. Although terrorism is a possibility, two leading theories place the blame on Russian organized crime.
One such theory suggests that a [...]

read more....