Winning and then staging what are sure to be spectacular and successful games will help justify the party’s continued rigid authority, and let it bask in most Chinese people’s excitement to be hosts.
But the games will also be seen as one of history’s most expensive, and well-orchestrated, coming-out parties.
After three decades of breakneck economic growth, [...]

read more....

Russia’s Arctic neighbours saw the exploit as a blatant land grab, an attempt to pre-empt any new agreement on sharing the undersea resources among the littoral powers. They have already begun moves to stake their claims: Norway and Denmark are carrying out surveys and the US is organising an expedition ostensibly “in search of hydrothermal [...]

read more....

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 [...]

read more....

“The most important thing about the Hainan development is that if you look at the map, there is really nowhere China could go except south,” said Arthur Waldron, an expert at the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the South China Sea and critical sea lanes, including the Strait of Malacca straddling Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
“This [...]

read more....