China's "growing military muscle" has "raised the urgency for the US and Japan to resolve its standoff over where to station US troops in Japan," Japan's foreign minister said in The Wall Street Journal on May 14.

• May 15, 2010

The Club reports that the session held under the chairmanship of CEIBC president and CEO Telman Aliyev made a decision to conduct systematic sessions dedicated to ecological risks in the Caspian, consider opportunities and promote use of renewable energy sources in countries of the Caspian-Black Sea and Baltic region.

• May 15, 2010

Utilities in South Korea are turning to cheaper alternatives to their main source of coal, Australia, as prices there hit an 18-month peak and have stayed high, industry sources said on Friday.

• May 15, 2010

Russian diplomacy has been on a roll in recent months, the revival of ties with Ukraine being the most dramatic manifestation. But a string of successes, major and minor, sung and unsung, has been notched up below that high point - in Poland, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Norway and Syria.

• May 15, 2010

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been in the headlines, first for describing his predecessor Joseph Stalin as a "totalitarian dictator" and then for making the first state visit to Syria by a Kremlin chief since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

• May 14, 2010

China and other key world powers, except the US, have keen national interests at stake as far as Teheran is concerned

• May 14, 2010

More than 300 Romanian, U.S., Ukrainian and Macedonian troops will participate from May 17-June 24 in 'the Black Sea Rotational Force 2010' drill organized in eastern Romania, according to a news release on Thurday from the Romanian Navy General Staff.

• May 14, 2010

Russia is hoping its relations with Britain will get better when the new government takes office. Both experts and politicians do forecast an eventual warming in bilateral relations, but at the same time they warn that an early breakthrough is unlikely.

• May 14, 2010