This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin says the world is engaged in a new arms race and Nato is failing to accommodate Russia's concerns.
In a nationally-televised speech, he condemned Nato's expansion and the US plan to include Poland and the Czech Republic in a missile defence shield.
Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here.
An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy
— as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.
Not everyone was so wrong about Iran. There was one leader who warned that we had no evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, and that "running around like a madman with a blade in one's hand is not the best way to solve such problems." Unfortunately, that was Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Putin went on to take effective control of Russia's industry, courts and major media. Critics, even potential ones guilty only of latent political power, have been jailed. Journalists are regularly murdered _ 261 since the fall of the Soviet Union. The atrocities of the puppet rulers of Chechnya go unreported. The lethal blunders of security forces in responding to incidents of terrorism are covered up. Russians have a lot more personal liberty than they did under communist rule _ so long as they do not call themselves to the attention of the government.
Mr. Putin also has been using Russia's gas and oil wealth, along with Soviet-style propaganda, to reassert Russian control over other former Soviet states. In the last few weeks the propaganda seems to have intensified in several countries _ no more so than in Georgia, on the eastern Black Sea.
