Word: points
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...China, he will turn out to be a politician of more than local significance. And he's going to try. "I'm in the business of making a difference," he told TIME during a rare pause between meetings on a flight from Perth to Melbourne. "There's no point in being here for being here. In the grand tradition of Australians, we believe in having...
...like a visit by the U.S. President to bolster Russia's status in the world. Moscow got an unexpected reminder of Washington's clout in its backyard when Kyrgyzstan announced on June 23 that it would renew an American lease on its air base in Manas, a critical transshipment point for U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan. That decision was a victory for the Obama Administration: just four months ago, the Kyrgyz government had said that the U.S. military had to go. More broadly, Moscow's ability to project its power has been reduced by the fall...
...allegations of vote-fixing when Ahmadinejad visited Yekaterinburg. That's because Russia's interests in Iran have always been strategic. "Iran is a special relationship for them," says Eugene Rumer, a senior fellow at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. "It is their entry point for Middle East politics. It's a country they don't want to upset." Equally, Iran has cultivated Russia. The mullahs have supported Islamist insurgencies from Lebanon to Bosnia, but not in Chechnya, from which Iran has stayed away, in deference to Russian interests. (See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms...
...Just as Russia won't help much on Iran, Obama will likely tell Medvedev and Putin that America's ties with Ukraine and Georgia are based on shared values - they're both democracies - and strategic interests, including the protection of vital oil and gas supply routes. To underscore that point, Biden plans to visit Kiev and Tbilisi shortly after the President's trip to Moscow. The Vice President's visit, says Blacker, will "demonstrate to the Russians that we have equities in the region." (See pictures of Joe Biden...
There are few better records of the shifting fortunes of Liberia than the guest register at the Mamba Point Hotel. When Chawki Bsaibes opened up in the old Dutch embassy on Monrovia's bullet-pocked seafront in the dying days of Liberia's first civil war in 1993, his customers were peacekeepers, war correspondents and development workers. When fighting started again in 1999, the reporters returned, followed by mercenaries, and then - with the arrival of a second fragile peace after President Charles Taylor's defeat and exile in 2003 - a wild-eyed group of Western carpetbaggers after a quick buck...