Geopolitics Weekly

Now the downturn has wiped billions off property prices, thrown thousands of workers out of jobs, and left banks reeling with bad debt.

Equally important, the recession has exposed costly inefficiencies in the Spanish economy such as low worker productivity and high administrative costs that were papered over during boom times. All of a sudden, Spain has turned from a highflier to the sick man of Europe.

Domenech believes more coordination between the Spanish regions is needed to reduce companies' administrative costs. Yet while such reforms would certainly boost efficiency, skeptics question whether provinces such as the Basque Country and Catalonia, which jealously guard their independence, would be willing to give up certain powers to boost the nation's overall competitiveness.

Russia backed Mr. Voronin

At a news briefing, a State Department spokesman, Robert A. Wood, also expressed concern about the violence, but he said policy makers in Washington had not yet assessed whether the elections had been free and fair.

Mihai Moscovici, 25, who provided updates in English all day over Twitter, painted a more nuanced picture. He said the gathering on Monday night drew only several hundred people. The protesters agreed to gather the next morning and began spreading the word through Facebook and Twitter, inventing a searchable tag for the stream of comments: #pman, which stands for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, Chisinau’s central square. When Internet service was shut down, Mr. Moscovici said, he issued updates with his cellphone.

Barack Obama wrapped up a landmark eight-day swing through Europe with a surprise visit to Iraq today - his first as president - and told US troops that Iraqis now needed "to take responsibility for their own country".

"You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country," he said. "It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country."

"I have a responsibility to make sure that as we bring troops out, that we do so in a careful enough way that we don't see a complete collapse into violence," he said. "So some people might say, wait, I thought you were opposed to the war, why don't you just get them all out right away? Well, just because I was opposed at the outset it doesn't mean that I don't have now responsibilities to make sure that we do things in a responsible fashion."

Thailand's prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, rejected calls for his resignation as tens of thousands of protesters marched today in Bangkok, posing the biggest challenge to his government amid fears of violence.

Dressed in red, the massive crowd marched through Bankok's historic northern district, overtaking main boulevards and waving pictures of their leader-in-exile, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a 2006 coup after six years as prime minister.

The protesters say Abhisit, who was appointed by parliament in December, took power illegitimately and should step aside so parliament can be dissolved ahead of fresh elections.

Raul Castro has held talks with members of Congress in his first face-to-face meeting with US politicians since he became president last year.

Barack Obama is expected to ease some of the travel and economic restrictions imposed on Cuba nearly 50 years ago.

Last week, a bipartisan group of US senators introduced a bill that would allow all US citizens to travel freely to Cuba for the first time since 1962. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan said the policy had "failed for 50 years", adding that he believed it would win enough votes in the US Congress to pass.

Details of user e-mails and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) from Monday under an EU directive.

The plans were drawn up in the wake of the London bombings in 2005.

All ISPs in the European Union will have to store the records for a year. An EU directive which requires telecoms firms to hold on to telephone records for 12 months is already in force.

The recent surge in the Washington area's defense-contracting workforce would begin to ebb under Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates's latest budget proposal as the Pentagon moves to replace legions of private workers with full-time civil servants.

The budget would reverse a contracting boom, beginning after the 2001 terrorist attacks, in which the proportion of private contractors grew to 39 percent of the Pentagon's workforce. Gates said he wants to reduce that percentage to a pre-Sept. 11 level of 26 percent.

Roughly 7.5 percent of metropolitan Washington's labor force -- about 291,000 jobs -- is tied to Pentagon contracting. Defense analysts and government contracting experts said Gates's move could affect companies such as CACI and SAIC, which do large amounts of government contracting work, offering technical services, administrative support, database outsourcing and contract management.

South Korea has rejected claims by North Korea that it poisoned its players before last week's 2010 World Cup qualifier in Seoul, as tensions mounted over the North's long-range rocket launch on Sunday.

A North Korean statement on Sunday called the alleged poisoning "a product of [South Korean President] Lee Myung-bak's moves for confrontation with the DPRK [North Korea] and a deliberate behaviour bred by the unsavoury forces instigated by it". It also accused the match's Omani referee of bias, adding: "The match thus turned into a theatre of plot-breeding and swindling."

U.S. officials have taken "very seriously" a plot to assassinate President Barack Obama involving a Syrian man who was arrested late last week in Turkey

officials also noted that while Obama gets more threats than usual as the first African-American U.S. president,

The plot was first reported by the Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Watan, which revealed that Turkish security services arrested a man of Syrian origins Friday in connection with a plan to kill Obama during his visit to Turkey.

During last year's presidential election campaign, Obama had no doubt. "The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence."

Obama, with Turkey's president Abdullah Gul and before parliament yesterday, refrained from using what the Turkish media call "the g word". It was not because his views had changed, he said, but because of ongoing talks between Turkey and Armenia, they no longer matter. "What I want to do now is not focus on my views but on the views of the Turkish and Armenian people," he said.

It was only Barack Obama's telephone diplomacy -- which came in the form of a call to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- that solved the problem. In the end, the two agreed that Turkey would not blackball Fogh Rasmussen in return for reportedly gaining an important seat in the alliance and a pledge to start procedures to shut down the Danish television station Roj TV, which Turkey accuses of having ties to the Kurdish militant group PKK.

Turkey is a very important strategic partner for the US, a fact which already led presidents Clinton and Bush to give vocal support to Ankara's ambitions to join the EU.

Another fact is that Turkey's army -- which alone has 1,200 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan -- is the second largest among those of NATO's member states.

The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed - sometimes for hours - the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society yesterday said their findings showed Israel's military committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. In their 92-page report, compiled by five senior health experts from across the world, they documented several specific attacks, with interviews from 44 separate witnesses.

Human rights groups have accused Israel's military, as well as Palestinian militants in Gaza, of war crimes. "The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone," the report said.

Pakistan is "battling for its own survival", its president, Asif Ali Zardari, has told visiting US special envoy for Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke.

Mr Zardari said Pakistan needed "unconditional support" to fight terrorism and extremism.

Mr Holbrooke, the joint US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Islamabad after talks with Afghan leaders in Kabul.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the UN needs to take a strong position in response to North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket

"It's a provocative act that has grave implications," Mrs Clinton told reporters.

"North Korea ignored its international obligations, rejected the unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations."

Barack Obama extended an olive branch to the Muslim world from the floor of Turkey's parliament yesterday by declaring the US was not "at war with Islam" but instead sought its partnership to pursue common goals.

Mindful of Turkey's offer to mediate in settling America's 30-year-old dispute with Iran, he reiterated his previous offer of rapprochement to the leadership in Tehran but warned it must abandon any ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.

Turkish television channels emphasised Obama's supposed links to Islam throughout the day yesterday by repeatedly referring to his middle name, Hussein.

The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.

Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.

as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

President Barack Obama set out his vision for ridding the world of nuclear arms on Sunday, declaring the United States ready to lead steps by all states with atomic weapons to reduce their arsenals.

The Bush administration spent years trying to isolate people the Turkish government thought should be engaged—Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas, to name a few. The Obama administration broadly endorses engagement. Turkish-American relations are therefore about to change from being good despite fundamental disagreement to being a genuine meeting of minds.

From Turkey's perspective, the most important item on the agenda is what it does not want: official U.S. recognition that what happened to the Armenians was genocide. I doubt Obama would have accepted an invitation to visit Turkey now if he was not planning to oppose a congressional resolution on the subject, or if he intended to use the G word on April 24, when he will make a statement commemorating the Armenian massacres of 1915

Like Tony Blair and Tayyip Erdogan, Obama is thought to recognize that Hamas can no longer be ignored, though he cannot possibly say so publicly. Turkey's leaders (and their advisers) can provide Obama with valuable insights, and help start the ball rolling. This would allow Obama to avoid political exposure in Washington for "talking to terrorists" until he has a sense of the other side's position.

Iran criticized on Monday U.S. President Barack Obama for saying Tehran posed a threat with its nuclear program and urged Washington and other countries possessing atom weapons to dismantle their arsenals.

Qashqavi noted that the Bush administration, which spearheaded a drive to isolate Iran over its disputed nuclear plans, had also described the Islamic state as a threat. "It seems that the repetition of the past U.S. administration's accusations (against Iran) would be in contrast with the slogan of change (by Obama)," Qashqavi said. "And such a thing -- nuclear armament -- does not exist in Iran to be inferred as a threat," he said.

Qashqavi said nuclear weapons had no place in Iran's defense doctrine and that the existence of such arms was a serious threat to the global community. "We, like the rest of the world community, are awaiting a world free of nuclear arms," Qashqavi said. "Our expectation from the U.S. and others is to take serious and practical measures toward nuclear disarmament and dismantling of weapons of mass destruction," he said.