A powerful earthquake struck Monday close to densely populated areas of southwestern China, flattening schools and homes and killing more than 100 people, according to early estimates.
The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale, was felt in cities across a swathe of southeast Asia including the Thai capital Bangkok, more than 1,800 [...]

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The number of oil-producer-based conflicts is likely to grow in the future as stratospheric prices of crude oil push more countries in the developing world to produce oil and gas. In 2001, the Bush administration’s energy task force hailed the emergence of new producers as a chance for the United States to diversify the sources [...]

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And the correlation between oil and violence is likely to grow stronger, since as Ross points out, countries in Africa, the Caspian basin, and Southeast Asia will soon become “significant oil and gas exporters. Some of these countries, including Chad, East Timor, and Myanmar, have already suffered internal strife. Most of the rest are poor, [...]

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Now, a young, well-traveled, multilingual foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khanna, suggests in “The Second World” that we are on the cusp of a new new world order — “a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.” The three are the United States, the European Union and China. The [...]

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