Taliban fighters once derided as a ragtag rabble unable to match U.S. troops have transformed into a fighting force – one advanced enough to mount massive conventional attacks and claim American lives at a record pace.

According to the American pro-Russian “dissidents” in the person of a journalist Wayne Madsen in the American edition of Online Journal, a group of American neoconservatives, led by McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann and George Soros, lobbying Washington’s recognition of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia as independent states in response …

NATO should re-consider where it has bases and other infrastructure and the European Union should take concrete steps in response to Russia’s actions in Georgia, Estonia’s foreign minister said.