Russia is reeling from the global financial crisis: its stock markets plunging , its currency on the brink. The drop in oil prices means the world’s second largest oil exporter - recently rich - is now in the red. How will America end up paying? Will financial crisis turn into political and military instability? Will [...]

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The United States can expect a terrorist attack using nuclear or more likely biological weapons before 2013, reports a bipartisan commission in a study being briefed Tuesday to Vice President-elect Joe Biden. It suggests the Obama administration bolster efforts to counter and prepare for germ warfare by terrorists.
“Our margin of safety is shrinking, not growing,” [...]

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Global Trends 2025, a new report written by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) ahead of President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration, envisages a future world marked by diminished US power, dwindling resources, and more people.
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The current trend of global wealth and economic power shifting roughly from West to East, described as “without precedent in modern history”, [...]

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President-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on 20 January 2009, will face a number of key foreign policy problems. Here are 10 current challenges - and how he might tackle them.
1. US ROLE IN THE WORLD
2. IRAQ
3. AFGHANISTAN
4. war ON TERROR
5. IRAN
6. MIDDLE EAST PEACE PROCESS
7. RUSSIA
8. NORTH KOREA
9. CHINA
10. ‘NEW DIPLOMACY’: FINANCE, CLIMATE CHANGE, [...]

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In what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to rattle the president-elect, Mr Medvedev said that short-range Iskander surface-to-surface missiles would be stationed in Russia’s baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders EU states Poland and Lithuania.
Delivering his most aggressively anti-American speech yet, Mr Medvedev said he was ordering the deployment in retaliation to a missile [...]

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