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IT APPEARS TO STRATFOR THAT THE RELATIONSHIP between Moscow and Washington is — despite public successes of the START negotiations — becoming increasingly complex.

That the American president is choosing to meet with the Central and Eastern European leadership en masse in the same venue that is supposed to be dedicated to the pomp and circumstance of the signing of the new START treaty will not please Moscow. This is particularly true since Russia had originally planned for the signing of the treaty to be a minor stop on Medvedev’s own tour of the region, and because the event was designed to highlight Russia’s status as a superpower worthy of the United States’ undivided attention.

for the first time, archaeologists can excavate broad areas of an Ubaid temple town to understand how a proto-urban community actually functioned in the sixth-fifth millennia B.C.," Stein said.

"The two-millennium-long occupation spans four key periods: two phases of the late Copper Age on top, the Ubaid period in the middle and the Halaf period at the bottom," Stein said.

"The existence of very elaborate seals with near-identical motives at such widely distant sites suggests that in this period, high-ranking elites were assuming leadership positions across a very broad region, and those dispersed elites shared a common set of symbols and perhaps even a common ideology of superior social status," he said.

Britons go to the polls May 6 to cast their votes in what is expected to be one of the closest elections in decades. While polls indicate the conservatives are favored over the ruling Labour Party and the insurgent Liberal Democrats, it is possible that a hung parliament or a weak coalition government could take office, coming at a time when Britain desperately needs strong leadership out of its economic doldrums.

The close electoral race has plunged the United Kingdom into a national debate about the possibility that no party will have an absolute majority with which to form a government, a scenario referred to as a “hung parliament.”

The electoral system employed in the United Kingdom is referred to as “first-past-the-post” — essentially a winner-takes-all system in which electoral districts elect individual members of parliament.

Egyptian Prime Minister and former air force chief Ahmed Shafiq announced to BBC Arabic that discussions are under way for Mubarak to step down.

Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, the military commander for the Cairo area, reportedly told protesters in Tahrir Square, “All your demands will be met today.”

Then, Shafiq reportedly made a statement saying that Mubarak will in fact stay in his post as president and that Mubarak has not made a decision to step down.

The modern Egyptian state is a new polity, founded a mere 60 years ago in the wake of a military coup organized by midranking officers under the leadership of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The provisional military authority, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, led by the country’s top general, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, will play the pivotal role in the post-Mubarak era. To understand what Egypt’s future holds, one must examine the evolution of the incumbent political arrangement, the central role played by the military in the formation of the state, previous transitions, and the reasons behind the regime’s need to oust one of its own.

Ethnic protests have spread across China’s northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the past week, and local security forces and People’s Armed Police have been deployed to contain them. The protests currently are limited to Inner Mongolia, but handling the matter has been a challenge for local authorities.


Ethnic Mongolians have increasingly engaged in small skirmishes with Han workers. While mining development in the resource-rich region has recently increased, most Mongolians’ livelihoods remain largely based on grassland herding. Mongolians blame the Han workers for these resource extraction efforts, which have had little benefit to the indigenous population.

Beijing will likely be able to contain the current bout of unrest. The accelerated Hanization process that began in the 1960s has meant that Mongolians make up a minority even in the ethnically oriented Inner Mongolia, and these Mongolians are internally divided in terms of their relative levels of assimilation to broader Han culture. Unlike other minority groups such as the Tibetans, they are not united by a single religion, there is no clear leadership to organize a protest movement and they have little international support.

A more penetrating look at the very slow recovery of the world’s largest economy points to systemic failure by the financial and political elites.

Can you put the last three years in perspective?

It’s not that it’s not soluble, in many of these countries, but you see it in a destabilization going on beneath the surface. In fact, the riots in London are kind of symptomatic of this, of the fact that some elements of society have lost such respect for the elites that they’re prepared to take extreme action.

Together, the events create the conditions for the U.S. president to expand his room to maneuver in the war in Afghanistan and ultimately reorient U.S. foreign-policy priorities.

With the death of bin Laden, a plausible, if not altogether accurate, political narrative in the United States can develop, claiming that the mission in Afghanistan has been accomplished.

From Langley, Petraeus can no longer be the authoritative military voice on the war effort in Afghanistan. Obama has retained Petraeus as a senior member of the administration while simultaneously isolating him.

Afghanistan, a landlocked country in the heart of Central Asia, is one of the most isolated places on Earth. This isolation has posed huge logistical challenges for the United States. Hundreds of shipping containers and fuel trucks must enter the country every day from Pakistan and from the north to sustain the nearly 150,000 U.S. and allied forces stationed in Afghanistan, about half the total number of Afghan security forces. Supplying a single gallon of gasoline in Afghanistan reportedly costs the U.S. military an average of $400, while sustaining a single U.S. soldier runs around $1 million a year (by contrast, sustaining an Afghan soldier costs about $12,000 a year).

An 11,500-foot all-weather concrete and asphalt runway and an air traffic control tower were completed this February at Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion in Helmand province. Another more than 9,000-foot runway was finished at Shindand Air Field in Herat province last December.

short of a hasty and rapid withdrawal reminiscent of the chaotic American exit from Saigon in 1975 (which no one currently foresees in Afghanistan), the logistical challenge of withdrawing from Afghanistan — at whatever pace — is perhaps even more daunting than the drawdown in Iraq. The complexity of having nearly 50 allies with troops in country will complicate this process.