China urges easing Korea tensions
Leader of China, Japan and South Korea on Sunday left their annual summit meeting divided.....

U.S. China hail summit’s results
China relations ended with some accord on contentious issues of currency and trade, and underlined.....

Japan backs down
Hatoyama allows U.S. Marine base on Okinawa, despite campaign promise.....

Big Man In Brazil
IN BRAZIL, PERHAPS THE ONLY THING THAT'S BIGGER than Eike Fuhrken Batista is Pão de Açúcar, the peak that dominates Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro. "Sugarloaf" mountain stares across to his tenth-floor office in the Praia do Flamengo building. Six years ago Batista swore he'd become Brazil's richest man. Now he is: With a net worth of $27 billion, two-thirds of that gained over the last 12 months, he's.....

Ponzi in Peking
AS DEVELOPED NATIONS struggle to eke out a bit of growth and to get unemployment rates out of double digits, Chinese output gallops ahead at an 8% annual rate. This $4.7 trillion economy, it seems, is the world's dynamoand the prototype for the future.
Take a close look, however, and you may come away thinking .....

Riches in the near abroad
DURING his first visit to Kazakhstan in 1996. Jiang Zemin was reportedly amused to learn that his Central Asian neighbour, the ninth-largest country in world by land mass, had a population of only around 15m. “You probably all know each other,” China’s then president is said to have equipped to his hosts. With its population of 1.3 billion, China naturally thinks