Norwegian rescuers searched in vain on Thursday for a Russian helicopter missing at sea with eight people aboard off the coast of the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

• October 26, 2017

China’s Communist Party revealed its new leadership helmed by President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, breaking with recent precedent by failing to include a clear successor to the president among the seven-man line-up.

• October 24, 2017

Cyber attacks using malware called “BadRabbit” hit Russia and other nations on Tuesday, affecting Russian Interfax news agency and causing flight delays at Ukraine’s Odessa airport.

• October 24, 2017

Russia cast a veto at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday preventing the renewal of the mandate for a mission that investigates the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

• October 24, 2017

China’s top steelmaking city, Tangshan, will step up curbs on industrial output as it makes greater efforts to cut hazardous smog, the China Securities Journal reported on Monday.

• October 23, 2017

Russia respects the desire of Iraqi Kurdistan to assert its identity but this must be done in dialogue with the Iraqi government, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday at talks with his Iraqi government counterpart.

• October 23, 2017

A military option must remain on the table in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Monday, adding that nobody wants tensions in the Korean peninsula to be resolved in such a way.

• October 23, 2017

By Benyamin Poghosyan, PhD, Executive Director, Political Science Association of Armenia
A raft of issues are complicating relations between long-time allies Turkey and the United States. But both sides continue using diplomatic back-channels to get as many concessions as possible from each other without fatally harming bilateral relations.
US - Turkey relations are probably at their lowest point since the start of the Cold War in late 1940s. Turkey, as a NATO member, played a key role in fortifying the alliance's southern flank against the Soviet threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union created new geo-strategic conditions, and both the US and Turkey were in quest of new rationales for fostering their relationship. In the 1990s, Turkey was perceived in the US as a potential model on how to develop democratic institutions in newly independent republics with Muslim majority populations from the Caucasus and Central Asia. READ MORE

• October 23, 2017