Russia's actions in 2008 left no doubt that it was interested in being a global partner to the US and European states in a multipolar world. Moscow denied it was interested in a revival of Cold War competition with the West.
BBC
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Russia's state arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, plans to grow the volume of Russian armament and military equipment to Africa over the next four to five years.
Kester Kenn Klomegah
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland January 28, 2009
Vladimir Putin
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A "High Level Meeting on Food Security for All" convened by the United Nations and the Spanish government ended Tuesday without approving concrete measures but with a commitment to redoubling efforts to bolster official development aid (ODA).
Tito Drago
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One of the deceptive clichés of Western accounts of post World War II history is that NATO was constructed as a defensive arrangement to block the threat of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. This is false. It is true that Western propaganda played up the Soviet menace, but many key U.S. and Western European statesmen recognized that a Soviet invasion was not a real threat. The Soviet Union had been devastated, and while in possession of a large army it was exhausted and needed time for recuperation. The United States was riding high, the war had revitalized its economy, it suffered no war damage, and it had the atomic bomb in its arsenal, which it had displayed to the Soviet Union by killing a quarter of a million Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hitting the Soviet Union before it recovered or had atomic weapons was discussed in Washington, even if rejected in favor of “containment,” economic warfare, and other forms of destabilization. NSC 68, dated April 1950, while decrying the great Soviet menace, explicitly called for a program of destabilization aimed at regime change in that country, finally achieved in 1991.
Prof. Edward S. Herman
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Israel is preventing the Palestinian Authority from transferring cash to the Gaza Strip to pay its workers and others hard hit by war, Western and Palestinian officials said yesterday.
Arab News, agencies
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Rich nations could raise $200 billion in climate funds through a levy on their greenhouse gases from 2013-2020 to help poor countries prepare for global warming, the European Union will say next week.
Pete Harrison and Gerard Wynn
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As relative calm settles over Gaza for the first time in three weeks following the Israeli ceasefire, the scale of the humanitarian crisis is becoming evident. Some 100 bodies have been discovered in areas that were previously inaccessible.
IRIN News
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Even with the International Monetary Fund’s $16.5 billion bailout, Ukraine’s finances are deteriorating as the country battles with Russia over natural gas prices and the cost of steel, its biggest export, sinks. Yields on Ukraine’s $105 billion of government and company debt are the highest of any country with dollar-denominated bonds except Ecuador, which defaulted in December. The currency, the hryvnia, weakened 40 percent in the past 12 months against the dollar. The benchmark stock index lost 85 percent, the biggest drop in the world after Iceland, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Bloomberg.com
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A United Nations report that Israel ordered civilians into a building and then shelled it marks yet more evidence of widespread targeting of civilians in the Gaza assault.
Mel Frykberg
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Indians would have remembered John Milton's lines as they stepped into the New Year, "Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud/Turn forth her silver lining on the night?" A hopeful, comforting prospect suddenly appeared from nowhere in the midst of the darkening South Asian security scenario.
M K Bhadrakumar
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The UN has warned that power networks were down in large parts of the Gaza Strip on 4 January, with hospitals relying on generators. Without power for pumps, 70 percent of Gazans are estimated to be without tap water.
IRIN
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South Asians will watch the year end in a pall of gloom. The region is fast getting sucked into the vortex of terrorism. The Afghan war has crossed the Khyber and is stealthily advancing towards the fertile Indo-Gangetic plains.
M K Bhadrakumar
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The number of test launches for Russia's Bulava ICBM will be increased from three or four to at least five next year, a senior Navy official said on Tuesday. The intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of breaching anti-missile defense systems, failed a test launch from a submarine earlier on Tuesday.
RIA Novosti
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Files released this autumn at the National Archives in Kew include one dossier showing how the Special Operations Executive - Churchill's "secret army" - was not disbanded at the end of the Second World War, as is commonly thought.
BBC
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