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China, Russia welcome Iran into the fold M K Bhadrakumar April 18, 2006 The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which maintained it had no plans for expansion, is now changing course. Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan, which previously had observer status, will become full members. SCO's decision to welcome Iran into its fold constitutes a political statement. Conceivably, SCO would now proceed to adopt a common position on the Iran nuclear issue at its summit meeting June 15. Speaking in Beijing as recently as January 16, the organization's secretary general Zhang Deguang had been quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying:...

Ray: Sammi provides a partial translation of a notebook that appears to be from an Iraqi connected with the former SSO. The Center for Non-Proliferation Studies describes the SSO: If authentic, this document helps to establish the role that Syria played with Iraq as an arms provider. A lot of people may not realize this but Syria provided Iraq with many conventional munitions before the Gulf War and after. It is a little easier to accept the "Mission Impossible" sounding plot that Saddam moved remaining WMD to Syria if you realize they were sneaking weapons across the border all the...

BEIJING. April 13 (Interfax-China) - The Shanghai Cooperation Organization's summit, due to be held on June 15 2006, will discuss the issue of renaming and reforming the organization's secretariat, said the SCO's Executive Secretary Zhang Deguang. "The Secretariat was set up at the organization's onset. The SCO has gone through significant change and development, which requires that the Secretariat be reorganized and renamed," Zhang said. The upcoming summit will also address the issue of granting the status of permanent members to individual observer states, at their request, he said. Regarding talks between the SCO defense ministers, set for the...

Large parts of an economics thesis written by President Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday, citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however, whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations at the time. Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, said 16 of the 20 pages that open the thesis' key second...

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's foreign spy agency denied Saturday that Moscow gave Saddam Hussein information on U.S. troop movements and plans during the invasion of Iraq, while analysts speculated the Pentagon claim was tied to a growing rift between the West and the Kremlin. A Pentagon report Friday cited two captured Iraqi documents as saying Russia obtained information from sources "inside the American Central Command" in Qatar and passed battlefield intelligence to Saddam through the former Russian ambassador in Baghdad, Vladimir Titorenko. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service dismissed the claims. "Similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia's intelligence have been made more...

THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text. Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University...

Russia is the lead supplier for Iranian civilian nuclear efforts, having sold Tehran a $1.2 billion nuclear reactor at Bushehr, which is scheduled to be completed this year. Also, Moscow plans to supply Iran with up to five more reactors at a cost of up to $10 billion, which can be used to produce fissile material. In December, Russia announced its intention to sell Iran $700 million worth of short-range surface-to-air missiles, and is reportedly negotiating a sale of long-range SA-10 anti-aircraft missiles. These weapons could be deployed in an air-defense system that could make it extremely difficult for the...

Russian generals and anti-American propagandists would like you to believe that George W. Bush was behind 9/11, or else it was “the Jews.” Anti-Semitism is alive and well today, from the “historical revisionists” who say the holocaust never happened to the obnoxious conspiracy nuts who believe that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are authentic. Anti-American and anti-Jewish propaganda are of a piece. The one set of lies is related to the other, as the fate of the Jewish people in World War II foreshadows the fate of the American people in World War III. Extermination of the hated...

MOSCOW: Moscow denounced on Friday an official US report criticizing the state of human rights in Russia, saying it smacked of double standards and could damage relations between the states. The annual report released on Wednesday by the US State Department was "not objective" and posed a threat to "the normal development" of relations between the governments, the foreign ministry said here in a statement. Its spokesman, Mikhail Kamynin, pointedly mentioned allegations of US rights abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The government of President Vladimir Putin came in for stinging criticism in the Washington report, which singled out the "continued...

In recent weeks, Russia has distanced itself from positions on the Middle East that it once held in common with the U.S. and the European Union. In February, Russia negotiated with Iran to establish a joint uranium-enrichment venture to supply nuclear reactor fuel to the Islamic Republic. As well, it is selling anti-aircraft missiles to Syria. And on March 3, a high ranking delegation of the Hamas terrorist organization visited Moscow at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visits Washington to discuss the Middle East on March 6-7, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should inform...

FORMER Soviet leader and Nobel peace prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev has turned 75, bitter that the end of the Cold War has left the United States with what he called a "superiority complex". "It would be in everyone's interest if that big country America recovered from that disease," he said. Mr Gorbachev, who launched the democratic and economic reforms that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, described the end of the Cold War as a gift that the United States has squandered. He also denounced growing Russophobia, saying "some in the West would like to...

Italian Panel: Soviets Behind Pope Attack By VICTOR L. SIMPSON, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 31 minutes ago ROME - An Italian parliamentary commission concluded "beyond any reasonable doubt" that the Soviet Union was behind the 1981 attempt to kill Pope John Paul II — a theory long alleged but never proved, according to a draft report made available Thursday. ADVERTISEMENT The commission held that the pope was a danger to the Soviet bloc because of his support for the Solidarity labor movement in his native Poland. Solidarity was the first free trade union in communist eastern Europe. "This commission...

Stalin's resurgence in Russia Two events last week starkly illustrate the dilemmas of countries grappling with a terrible past. In Austria, Holocaust denier David Irving received a three-year jail sentence for his public assertions that the Nazis did not carry out a systematic extermination of the Jews during World War II. Meanwhile, in Russia, as the country marked the 50th anniversary of its official turn away from Stalinism under Nikita Khrushchev, many people regard the late dictator's legacy as mostly positive—and a new museum celebrating that legacy is about to open. Irving's sentence reflects Europe's hard-line approach to its Nazi...

In the 1970s and 1980s there were several indications about Saddam Hussein’s development of the WMD programs (biological, chemical and nuclear). The Israeli attack on the Iraqi French-made Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 slowed down the progress of the Iraq’s nuclear weapons program but the biological and chemical WMDs were highly developed, due to the Soviet assistance, Iraqi scientists and a sophisticated system of procurement, organized by the Iraqi Intelligence in Western Europe and in other parts of the World. The nuclear weapons program was never abandoned by the regime, and before the first Gulf War (1991) Iraq was very...

The speech Russia wants to forget By Tim Whewell BBC News It was a speech so shocking that even 50 years on, Nikolai Baibakov refuses point-blank to describe what he heard that day - a devastating attack on the man he worshipped above all others. The retired Communist Party official, now 91, can reel off scores of statistics of industrial production and oil extraction in the 1950s. But he tries every stratagem to avoid recalling the cataclysmic event to which he is one of the very few surviving witnesses. It was the secret final session of the 20th party congress...

Venezuela has received the first three of at least 10 military helicopters purchased from Russia. Military officials say the three MI-17 helicopters arrived Tuesday in Caracas. Venezuela bought the helicopters as part of a $120 million deal signed last March. Caracas also agreed last year to buy 100,000 Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifles. U.S. officials have criticized the deals, saying they could trigger an arms race, destabilizing the region. MI-17s can be used in an assault role or as a transport craft. Venezuelan military officials say the helicopters will be used to patrol the border with neighboring Colombia. The remaining helicopters...

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them. "The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

Russia's top military chief on Thursday warned the United States against launching a military strike against Iran and a top diplomat voiced hope that close cooperation with China could help resolve the Tehran nuclear crisis. With tension mounting over Iran's nuclear programs, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the chief of Russia's general staff, warned the United States against attacking Iran. "A military scenario can't be ruled out," Baluyevsky was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. He said that while Iran's military potential cannot compare to the United States', "it is hard to predict how the Muslim world will respond to the...

So Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited Hamas leaders for talks in Moscow. The invitation purifies the rat, and make no mistakes about it: At this point in time, Hamas is a real rat. Hamas – as it now stands – cannot be a partner for dialogue for any democratic country or government, nor for any aspiring democracies. The Hamas covenant, written in 1988, says - amongst other things - that the "Land of Palestine – from the river to the sea – is a Muslim waqf, and will remain so for all time. Any concession on any part of...

Putin Rejects Suspension of Aid to Hamas-Run PA 20:21 Feb 08, '06 / 10 Shevat 5766 (IsraelNN.com) In an interview with Spanish media, published today, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his objection to suspending aid to the Palestinian Authority, regardless of the Hamas terrorist organization's position there. Putin is beginning a two-day state visit to Spain today. "It would be a big mistake to suspend aid to the Palestinians," the Russian leader said. "If we stop helping simple Palestinian citizens, are we going to eradicate terrorism and criminality? Of course not." Putin added that while Hamas is "considered as terrorist...