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CHINA has told Australia its army should oversee the local leg of the Olympic torch relay amid mounting security concerns. Chinese officials have asked Australian Federal Police to hand over security to its own forces to ensure protests do not mar the relay when it lands in Australia next month. The move – which has been rebuffed by the AFP – comes as Beijing reels from an embarrassing relay launch in Greece when human rights activists hijacked the event. China has responded by radically cutting back its relay legs in cities where it expects more trouble, police sources told The...

BERLIN — She was a young leftist with a machine gun and bizarre thoughts about changing the world, but that was 30 years ago, back when Brigitte Mohnhaupt helped lead a terrorist gang whose assassinations of politicians and industrialists mesmerized postwar Germany. On Sunday, Mohnhaupt again rattled the public consciousness when she was released from prison as an unrepentant convicted murderer. Once a brazen and unrelenting mastermind for the anticapitalist Red Army Faction, or RAF, the 57-year-old inmate stepped back into a nation still agitated over a bygone era of bombings, fanatical screeds and urban guerrillas.

BERLIN - A court paroled a one-time leader of Germany's notorious Red Army Faction Monday after 24 years in prison, amid bitter memories of the left-wing terrorist group's attacks on law enforcement and business leaders, which plunged the country into fear three decades ago. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, 57, is to leave prison March 27, the first day she becomes eligible for release, the Stuttgart state court ruled. Her case has set off a public debate about whether it is time to show mercy to those who showed none to their victims and has made Germans relive a tense time when their...

A Nazi state has been reborn within the European Union and its "blasphemous" leaders are bent on glorifying the Third Reich and insulting Russia. There is talk of sanctions and even of internal armed resistance. That, at least, is the view from Moscow, where politicians from President Vladimir Putin on down have condemned the government in the tiny Baltic republic of Estonia. On a snow swept square outside the medieval walls of Tallinn's old town stands the cause of a row that is straining Russia's relations with its former-Soviet neighbours. The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn was erected 60 years ago....

Oracle Commentaries 7/22/2006 Urgent Intelligence Update UNCOVERED: RUSSIAN-SYRIAN-IRANIAN AXIS For students of Bible prophecy, even the title of this communiqué should set off alarm sirens. I just received some electrifying intelligence data. First, from the Debka-Net-Weekly’s briefing. And second, from some personal intelligence sources (I carefully guard) that confirm Debka’s report. Russia, Iran and Syria have entered a defense pact that is in the process of altered the balance of power in the entire Middle East. Russia’s part in the pact has been kept relatively secret for a long time. But the facts reveal a long steady Russian commitment...

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis." The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts....

Israel was left fuming over Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invite Palestinian poll winners Hamas to Moscow, slamming the move as a "knife in the back" from a key negotiator for Middle East peace. The invititation was later backed by France as potentially positive for the peace process. But it puzzled Washington and delivered a blow to the Jewish state's appeal to the international community to isolate the radical movement as it prepares to form a new Palestinian government. "This initiative is a real knife in the back... because it aims to give international legitimacy to a terrorist group...

Welcome bear hug By Arnon Regular Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement that he would be willing to meet with Hamas leaders did not come as a complete surprise to Hamas, which is currently on a drive to obtain international legitimacy for its future government. Within 24 hours after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, its leaders had identified the Russian-Chinese axis, as well as a few European countries, as the place to concentrate its efforts to soften the stringent conditions for acceptance by the international community that are currently being set by the United States, Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Nevertheless, even...

RUSSIA and China have bowed to pressure from the US and Europe to send Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions over its nuclear program. After months of resistance, the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers abandoned their softly-softly approach towards Tehran's nuclear ambitions at a late-night private dinner in London at the home of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. They signed a joint statement yesterday asking the International Atomic Energy Agency to formally refer all issues related to Iran's nuclear capacity and compliance to the Security Council, where sanctions and other penalties could be imposed. Bush administration officials...

Putin Touts Russia's Missile CapabilitiesPutin Boasts That Russia's Missiles Can Penetrate Any Missile Defense System, News Agencies Report By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV Associated Press Writer The Associated Press MOSCOW Jan 31, 2006 — President Vladimir Putin boasted Tuesday that Russia has missiles capable of penetrating any missile defense system, Russian news reports said. "Russia … has tested missile systems that no one in the world has," the ITAR-Tass, Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies quoted him as saying at a news conference. "These missile systems don't represent a response to a missile defense system, but they are immune to that. They...

Here's a sad but safe new year's prediction: U.S. relations with Latin America, which plunged to their lowest point in decades in 2005, will get still worse in 2006. The year ended with a string of reverses. In a regional summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in November, President Bush was jeered by demonstrators and taunted by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who aspires to make Latin America anti-American and anti-democratic. Then came the Chavez-backed victory in Bolivia of Evo Morales, a former llama herder and coca farmer who describes himself as Washington's "nightmare." Morales's victory sets the stage for a year...

January 20, 2006: Three years ago, the United States withdrew U.S. Army Special Forces instructors, who had been training Venezuelan special operations soldiers. Venezuela has resumed that training, using several hundred instructors from the Chinese special forces (Quantou Budui). The Chinese have been in Venezuela for about six months, and are training Venezuelan troops in recon techniques, and counter-terrorism tactics. The Chinese speak good Spanish, and are apparently enjoying their assignment. Over a hundred other Chinese troops are also providing personal security for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. China has also sent some intelligence specialists, who are helping Venezuela to upgrade...

MOSCOW. Jan 20 (Interfax) - The Russian delegation to the January session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will strongly oppose any attempt to equate Communism to Nazism, Head of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachyov said. "This is unacceptable, we are not ready to uphold any attempt to compare these ideologies as branches of totalitarianism," Kosachyov said at a Friday press conference in Moscow devoted to the upcoming on January 23 PACE winter session in Strasbourg at which a resolution condemning...

Russian FM Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday sanctions are not the best and only solution. DEBKAfile adds: Moscow is muscle-flexing ahead of EU-Russian negotiations due to take place with Iran over a formula for Iranian nuclear enrichment in Russia, mediated by Chancellor Angela Merkel and accepted for study by Tehran. When the talks yield a proposal, it will be brought before Washington. The Kremlin is saying the threat of UN sanctions is counter-productive if the next round of diplomacy is to succeed. The five permanent UN Security Council members meeting in London failed to agree on a referral of the Iranian...

Moscow, Jan. 14 (AP): Russia's Defence Minister on Friday defended his country's military contacts with China, insisting that the cooperation would not upset the security balance in the Far East despite Japanese concerns about Beijing's moves to boost its defence capability. Defence contacts between China and Russia "have developed, are developing and will develop, I can assure you of that," Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, said after a meeting with his Japanese counterpart. Since the 1991 Soviet collapse, Moscow and Beijing have developed what they call a strategic partnership, pledging commitment to a "multipolar world" - a term that highlights their...

Russia's Gazprom, the world's largest gas-producing company, has become locked in a commercial battle with Ukraine over the price of the fuel, but it is widely and correctly understood that the Kremlin's hand is behind what is quickly being recognized as the final ascent to the summit of a struggle between "East" and "West" for global power, even for dominance, by virtue of control over strategic energy resources. Why can it accurately be said that such a monumental struggle of global proportions is now heating up? What evidence exists to support the insinuation that the world order is polarizing again...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's appointment last year was supposed to be good news for Russia: A longtime student of the former superpower, Miss Rice had publicly declared her love for the country and its culture, and even spoke its language. Most importantly, Moscow had applauded Miss Rice's view -- expressed during the 2000 presidential campaign -- that the United States should "get out" of Russian domestic affairs. But far from enjoying warmer relations, a year later officials from both countries are openly voicing their frustrations with one another. One official described Moscow's recent behavior as "inexplicable. Or just mad."

MOSCOW, December 20 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will take Syria's side if charges against Syrian officials with involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri cause a conflict between the United States and Syria, two Russian parliamentary members said Tuesday. "If Russia is to choose between its two strategic allies, it will undoubtedly take Syria's side," said Shamil Sultanov, a coordinator of an inter-faction association, Russia and the Islamic World: A Strategic Dialogue. Nikolai Leonov, a member of parliament's security committee, who had recently visited Syria along with Sultanov and other MPs, said it was primarily beneficial...

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia — Evo Morales, the socialist coca farmer who would be Bolivia's first Indian president, appeared poised to join the ranks of like-minded leaders who have pushed Latin America's democracies to the left in recent years. With exit polls running strongly in his favor, Morales took an early congratulatory phone call from Venezuela's belligerently anti-American president Hugo Chavez. At a party at Morales' home in Cochabamba, his supporters toasted as the candidate announced that Chavez planned to contact Cuba's Fidel Castro. Said Morales of Chavez: "He's going to tell Fidel the good news" _ eliciting laughs from those nearby....

"I want to remind those who are on the other side, those who allegedly defend Islam, that the Russian Federation has always been the most consistent, loyal and staunch advocate of Islam," Putin said. "Russia was and remains the best partner of Islamic states," he said.