Free Republic

Tehran (AsiaNews) – Iran will become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the signing of the memorandum of obligation at a summit in Samarkand, on 15-16 September. “This year, within Uzbekistan's chairmanship, Iran, as an observer state will ... become a full-fledged member of the SCO,” RIA Novosti quoted Uzbek Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov as saying yesterday during a meeting in Moscow. Iran took one step closer to full membership on 17 September last year when its application was accepted 15 years after it was made. On that date, SCO began the country's accession, which usually...

HONG KONG — On a frontier where Vietnamese and Chinese soldiers exchanged bullets in a short but bloody war three decades ago, construction workers from the two countries will soon join forces to build a highway that promises to bring new wealth to their once heavily guarded border regions. Plans for a four-lane highway from Hanoi to Kunming are expected to clear the last hurdle on Friday, when the board of the Asian Development Bank gives the green light to a loan that will underwrite the Vietnamese side of the project. By 2012, when the highway is supposed to be...

The Chinese government has proposed to divide up the Pacific Ocean into U.S. and Chinese spheres of influence. The Chinese proposal would have yielded a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” to China while allowing the U.S. to dominate in the portion of the Pacific between Hawaii and California. Chinese officials said they got the idea from some papers they found in an old filing cabinet.

A new grand pan-Asia grouping was born today with the holding of the first-ever East Asia Summit(EAS) here today and India telling the 16-nation body that the development created a virtual East Asian economy and presented a cusp of new opportunities. The Kuala Lumpur Declaration, signed by the leaders, said the participating countries established the EAS as a forum for dialogue on broad strategic, political and economic issues of common interests and concerns with the aim of promoting peace and economic prosperity in East Asia. The declaration said the EAS would focus on fostering strategic dialogue and promoting cooperation in...