Eurasia

The Venezuelan president is visiting Russia, apparently shopping for hardware to boost its military against the USA. Vladimir Putin welcomed Hugo Chavez for talks at the presidential retreat outside Moscow, saying economic affairs and military-technical co-operation were on the agenda.

One of the biggest challenges Tony Blair will face as a Middle East envoy of the international community is Arab anger over the wars in Iraq and Lebanon, and the suspicion that he is a lackey of US President George W. Bush.

General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish Army General Staff, called again on Wednesday (June 27th) for a cross-border operation against the terrorist organisation Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.

The head of the Turkish armed forces insisted Wednesday on the need for a military incursion into northern Iraq to hunt down Turkish Kurd rebels based there, but said he needed the government’s green light to do so.

According to sources from Ingushetia, on Tuesday morning of June 26, a mobile squad of Mujahideen attacked a base of Russian occupation gang the so-called “reconnaissance squad”.

He was always a heavy drinker, but until his health problems got bad in the mid-1990s he could usually hold his liquor. The real problem was that he was a man of action who didn’t have an idea in his head.

The authorities of Russia are planning, under pretext of getting ready for possible 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, large-scale construction projects in the immediate proximity to the borders of a World Heritage Object – the “West Caucasus” reserve – and in its buffer zone.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is urging Russia not to veto a new resolution on Kosovo at the UN Security Council.

A court in the southeast town of Diyarbakir sentenced ten people to life in prison Monday (June 25th) for a series of bombings in the early 1990s.

Leaders from the 12 nations in the Black Sea Economic Co-operation (BSEC) organisation gathered in Istanbul on Monday (June 25th) to mark the group’s 15th anniversary at a one-day summit, hosted by Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.