Word: oil
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...events in Georgia will be shaped by its refusal to fully accept Georgia's independence. Russia has long sought to re-establish influence in Georgia and prevent it from joining NATO (a move Russia sees as part of a hostile encirclement by the West), and also to prevent the oil pumped to Turkey from Azerbaijan and elsewhere in Central Asia from bypassing Russian control. Georgia claims that Russian planes have in recent days bombed the strategically important oil pipeline that transits Georgia. The pipeline actually had been inoperative since Aug. 6 as a result of a fire in its Turkish...
...There will be change," the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi once said, "because all the military have are guns." Perhaps that was true in 1988. Today, the generals have much more than guns. They have huge revenues from oil and gas, relations with powerful neighbors India and China, and the support - occasionally the censure - of fellow members of ASEAN. They have a large standing army that has struck cease-fires with most of the ethnic rebel armies ranged against it and set about annihilating the rest. In many ways - economically, militarily, politically, regionally - Burma's generals are better...
...Chinese get more than half of their surging oil imports from the Middle East and are deathly afraid of turmoil in the Persian Gulf. "They lose sleep at night thinking that they [rely] on the Middle East," says Jon Alterman, a senior fellow at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of a new study called "The Vital Triangle: China, the United States, and the Middle East...
...core of Bush's business in Beijing this weekend. But even if the Chinese may be sidling up to the idea of one last sanctions push, it's not at all clear that Bush's fellow sports nut, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is. Though Moscow is a major oil producer and sells arms to Tehran and Syria (among others) in the Middle East, it presumably would want to avoid the crisis an Israeli strike might bring. For one thing, another big spike in crude oil prices could cripple oil demand in the west, and drive down global prices...
...disparity between U.S. spending and Iraqi spending suggests that leadership in Baghdad would rather see outside powers foot the bill for the country's rehabilitation while saving windfall oil profits. Signs of Iraq's slowness to rebuild are everywhere in Baghdad. Roughly 20% of the city is without proper sewage pipes. Published statistics say the Baghdad is getting roughly 11 hours of electricity a day on average, but many residents go days with only sporadic bursts of power. Iraqi officials say fixing just this problem could take up to 10 years. Chronic electricity shortages for another decade mean little energy...