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South Korea has offered high-level talks with North Korea next Tuesday to discuss its possible participation in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.

Kim Jong-un, said earlier he was considering sending a team to Pyeongchang in South Korea for the Games in February.

South Korea's president said he saw the offer as a "groundbreaking chance" to improve relations.

Saudi Arabia's crown prince has taken a more conciliatory public stance towards Iran, trying to balance long-held animosity with economic considerations and bridge differences with Washington over how to tackle Tehran's regional behaviour.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an interview aired late on Tuesday that Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia wanted a good relationship with Shi'ite Iran. read more "We do not want for Iran to be in a difficult situation, on the contrary we want Iran to prosper and grow. We have interests in Iran and they have interests in the Kingdom to propel the region and the world to growth and prosperity," he said.

Saudi and Iranian officials held direct talks this month, six years after cutting diplomatic ties, about Yemen and the 2015 nuclear accord between global powers and Iran, which Riyadh opposed for not tackling Tehran's missile programme and regional proxies.

TOKYO — When President Joe Biden’s national security team prepares to meet their Chinese counterparts at a high-stakes summit in Alaska on Thursday, one of the most urgent issues they must tackle is Beijing’s growing threat to Taipei.

It’s a timeline they say has been accelerated by the Trump administration’s repeated provocation of Beijing, China’s rapid military build-up, and recent indications that Taiwan could unilaterally declare its independence from the mainland.

Such an invasion would be an explosive event that could throw the whole region into chaos and potentially culminate in a shooting war between China and the United States, which according to the Taiwan Relations Act would consider a Chinese invasion a “grave concern” and is widely understood as a commitment to help Taiwan defend itself against Beijing.

Widespread protests and criticism from abroad have put growing pressure on Iran over its handling of the incident.But the ayatollah tried to rally support as he led Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time since 2012.

The ayatollah called for "national unity" and said Iran's "enemies" - a reference to Washington and its allies - had used the shooting down of the plane to overshadow the killing of senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike."Our enemies were as happy about the plane crash as we were sad," he said. "[They were] happy that they had found something to question the Guard and the armed forces."

The Iranian authorities initially denied responsibility but, after international pressure mounted, the Revolutionary Guard admitted that the plane had been mistaken for a "cruise missile" during heightened tensions with the US.Hours before it was shot down, and in response to the killing of Soleimani, Iranian missiles targeted two airbases in Iraq that housed US forces.

The targets are China’s main adversaries: the United States and Taiwan, which are moving closer and closer together.The propaganda has accompanied a series of military drills in recent weeks, including the test-firing of ballistic missiles and the buzzing of Taiwan’s airspace. Together, they are intended to draw stark red lines for the United States, signaling that China would not shrink from a military clash.

Global Times, the voice of the Communist Party’s hawks, warned recently that the United States was “playing with fire” by supporting Taiwan, which Beijing claims as part of a unified China. Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, the editorial went on, would be “wiped out” if she moved against Chinese sovereignty.

As always, China’s Communist Party has the ability to dial up propaganda — and to dial it down — to suit its domestic and geopolitical goals.

The Biden administration is weighing a Turkish proposal to buy a fleet of F-16 jet fighters that officials in Ankara say would mend ruptured security links between the countries, but the sale faces opposition from members of Congress critical of Turkey’s growing ties to Russia.

Senior Turkish officials say the deal could be a lifeline for their relationship with the U.S., which has suffered for years over Turkey’s purchases of Russian arms, clashing interests in the war in Syria and U.S. criticism of Ankara’s human-rights record. And in both countries, analysts say blocking the sale could push Ankara closer to Russia.

U.S. arms export control laws require the administration to notify Congress of proposed foreign military sales, giving lawmakers a chance to review and oppose or try to block a deal. The administration hasn’t formally notified Congress about the proposed F-16 sale.

Russia has more than 92,000 troops amassed around Ukraine’s borders and is preparing for an attack by the end of January or beginning of February, the head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency told Military Times.

Such an attack would likely involve airstrikes, artillery and armor attacks followed by airborne assaults in the east, amphibious assaults in Odessa and Mariupul and a smaller incursion through neighboring Belarus

Russia’s large-scale Zapad 21 military exercise earlier this year proved, for instance, that they can drop upwards of 3,500 airborne and special operations troops at once, he said.

The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” is ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919.

. In December 1917, the 18th Amendment, also known as the Prohibition Amendment, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.

Nine months after Prohibition's ratification, Congress passed the Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, over President Woodrow Wilson's veto. The Volstead Act provided for the enforcement of prohibition, including the creation of a special unit of the Treasury Department. One year and a day after its ratification, prohibition went into effect—on January 17, 1920—and the nation became officially dry.

What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.

Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”

What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.

he great liberal commentator Walter Lippmann wrote at the height of the Cold War: “You can’t decide these questions of life and death for the world by epithets like appeasement. I don’t agree with the people who think we have to go out and shed a little blood to prove we’re virile men.”

Lippmann also wrote, in September 1961: “This being the nuclear age, it is the paramount rule of international politics that a great nuclear power should not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between suicide and surrender.”

The West was obliged to watch in impotent horror as the Russians crushed the anticommunist Poles in 1945, then the Hungarian rebels in 1956, then the Czechs of the 1968 “Prague Spring.” There was also the 1959 Chinese seizure of Tibet. The list is a long one.

The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult.

At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.

And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design.

LONDON (Reuters) - Russia on Wednesday sharply criticised a U.S. decision to supply advanced rocket systems and munitions to Ukraine, warning of an increased risk of direct confrontation with Washington.Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters: "We believe that the United States is purposefully and diligently adding fuel to the fire."

U.S. President Joe Biden has agreed to provide Ukraine with advanced rocket systems that can strike with precision at long-range Russian targets as part of a new U.S. package to help Kyiv defend itself in the three-month-old war that began with Russia's Feb. 24 invasion.Washington agreed to supply the rockets, which are capable of hitting targets as far away as 80 km (50 miles), after Ukraine gave "assurances" they will not use the missiles to strike inside Russia itself, senior U.S. officials said.

Ukrainian officials have been asking allies for longer-range missile systems that can fire a barrage of rockets hundreds of miles away, in the hopes of turning the tide of the war.U.S. President Joe Biden wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times: "We have moved quickly to send Ukraine a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition so that it can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table."Earlier, state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying, when asked about the prospect of a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia: "Any arms shipments that continue, that are on the rise, increase the risks of such a development."

President Yoon Suk-yeol’s governing party won​ 12 of the 17 races for big-city mayors and provincial governors

The results on Wednesday were a decisive victory for Mr. Yoon, who won the presidential race by a razor-thin margin in March and was inaugurated just three weeks ago. Although this week’s elections were only held at the local level, the results were seen as an early referendum on Mr. Yoon’s performance as leader.

The election​ results were a stunning setback for the Democratic Party. During the last local elections four years ago, it won 14 of the same 17 races for leaders of big cities and provinces.

e prone to manage their mutual relations with deep rivalry and a high risk of war

One conclusion that follows from his world-view is that states are bound to take seriously the concept of “spheres of influence”, an old-fashioned term for a phenomenon that is still very much alive. However much spheres of influence may challenge the idea of the sovereign equality of states, they have by no means disappeared in international relations.

Take the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In demanding the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles from Cuba, America was, in effect, defending the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

For what was apparently the first time since the Civil War, the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy and without a trial.

It highlights the perils of a war conducted behind a classified veil,

The missile strike on Sept. 30, 2011, that killed Mr. Awlaki — a terrorist leader whose death lawyers in the Obama administration believed to be justifiable

North Korea on Thursday threatened to attack American military bases in Japan and on the Pacific island of Guam in retaliation for training missions by American

Now that the U.S. started open nuclear blackmail and threat, the DPRK, too, will move to take corresponding military actions.”

DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,

The Kremlin has upped the geopolitical ante by pledging to send a heavy aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, as reported by Russian news agency Interfax

The warship holds several sea-based fighters and helicopters, missiles, anti-submarine systems and a crew of 2,000 people.

The carrier is the only one in Russia's fleet, so its deployment is an unmistakable signal of Moscow's seriousness about protecting their regional interests, some of which are directly tied to the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Syria port of Tartus.

It was the second time in four months that Israel had carried out an attack in foreign territory intended to disrupt the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah,

“The Israelis are saying, ‘O.K., whichever way the civil war is going, we are going to keep our red lines, which are different from Obama’s,’ ”

A Pentagon official said in 2010 that Hezbollah was believed to already have a small supply of Fateh-110s. Additional missiles could increase Iran’s ability to threaten Israel through its Lebanese proxy if Israel ever mounted airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear installations.