Free Republic

The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the...

MOSCOW, Russia - When she fled the Soviet Union for Israel with her family as a teenager, the last place Irina Azanyan expected to end up 15 years later was in Moscow. "My parents were desperate to get away, and we went as soon as we could," she said. "I loved Israel, even before I'd ever been there. I don't know why, maybe it was in my genes." Yet here she sits in her fifth-floor office at the Moscow Jewish Community Center, alternating effortlessly between Russian and Hebrew as she fields calls for Russia's chief rabbi, Berl Lazar. The chorus...

<p>MOSCOW - (KRT) - As authorities struggled to restore calm in eastern Uzbekistan on Saturday after a bloody uprising a day earlier, President Islam Karimov defended the decision by his troops to quell the violence by firing into a large crowd, killing up to 300 people by some estimates.</p>

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press President Bush spoke during a news conference in Riga, Latvia, with presidents Valdas Adamkus, left, of Lithuania, Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia and Arnold Ruutel of Estonia. Mr. Bush called for "free and open and fair" elections in Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe. MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands, May 7 - President Bush used the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat to warn President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Saturday that "no good purpose is served by stirring up fears and exploiting old rivalries" in the former Soviet republics on his borders. "All the nations that...

MIND YOUR OWN DEMOCRACY, SAYS PRESIDENT PUTIN, DEFENDING RUSSIA'S AND CRITICIZING AMERICA'S ELECTORAL COLLEGE SYSTEM, IN AN EXCLUSIVE "60 MINUTES" INTERVIEW SUNDAY ON CBS A combative Vladimir Putin tells Mike Wallace he should question his own country's democratic ways before looking for problems with Russia's. The Russian president also says the U.S. shouldn't try to export its democracy, as it is trying to do in Iraq, in an exclusive interview to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday May 8 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Wallace gets quite a reaction from Putin by asking him about a recent...

Bush, Putin Meet, Set Aside Differences Sunday May 8, 2005 11:01 PM By TERENCE HUNT AP White House Correspondent MOSCOW (AP) - Changing the tone from tough talk to buddy-buddy friendship, President Bush and Vladimir Putin went out of their way to take a unified stand on Middle East peace and terrorism Sunday after sharp words in recent days about democratic backsliding and postwar Soviet domination. A smiling Putin even put Bush behind the wheel of his prized 1956 Volga, a pristine white sedan, and let him take it for a spin around the grounds of his private compound 25...

Filed at 1:34 p.m. ET RIGA (Reuters) - President Bush denounced Soviet Cold War rule of eastern Europe as ``one of the greatest wrongs of history'' on Saturday in a jab at Moscow two days before celebrations of the 1945 victory over Hitler. Bush, visiting Latvia before the ceremonies in Moscow marking 60 years since the end of World War II in Europe, also held up the three Baltic states as examples of democratic reform since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He said the end of the war brought liberty from fascism for many in Germany but...