Rebiya Kadeer, a human rights activist for the Uighur people of northwestern China, spent six years in jail in China for "leaking state secrets" in fact sending local newspaper articles to her husband in the US. She was released in 2005 and has since then made her home in the Washington, D.C. area, where she advocates for Uighur rights and for greater US support of Uighur issues.
After a concerted campaign by Washington to reopen the channels of communication with Uzbekistan, American troops may be returning to the Central Asian nation almost three years after being unceremoniously booted out amid the fallout over the 2005 Andijan events.
After a concerted campaign by Washington to reopen the channels of communication with Uzbekistan, American troops may be returning to the Central Asian nation almost three years after being unceremoniously booted out amid the fallout over the 2005 Andijan events.
Finland's Foreign minister Ilkka Kanerva, who took the helm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on January 1, believes the time has come to build what he calls "a new spirit of Helsinki."
Aid for almost every country in the former Soviet Union will be falling in 2008, under the current foreign affairs budget released by the US State Department. Much of the planned US assistance will go toward helping independent-minded states in the region resist Russian efforts to reassert its dominance in the Caspian Basin and elsewhere.
In light of increasing instability in Pakistan and the apparent decline of President Pervez Musharraf's influence, American analysts say the United States needs to broaden its approach toward Pakistan to include aid not just to its army, but to civil society organizations, political parties, the court system and police.
U.S. President George W. Bush has arrived in Israel for the first leg of a Middle East tour that will also take him to a number of Arab states in an effort to encourage Israeli-Palestinian peace and rally support to contain Iranian influence in the region.
Less than three months ago, the United States and Turkey seemed poised for a political falling out. Since then, bilateral ties have made a stunning comeback, and Turkish President Abdullah Gul, who arrived in Washington on January 7, is expected to stress "the new found warmth" during a meeting with US President George W. Bush.
Rare is a U.S. intelligence report that seems to strike joy in the hearts of Iranian leaders. But a new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which concludes that Iran is not currently at work on a nuclear weapons program, appears to have done just that.
