Russian President Vladimir Putin says US plans for a missile shield could precipitate a situation similar to the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960s.
Mr Putin was speaking after a summit with EU leaders in Portugal aimed at deepening ties despite disagreements over human rights and foreign policy.
Russia has long opposed US plans to build missile bases in European states once in the Soviet sphere of influence.
The Cuba crisis saw the Soviet Union and US go to the brink of nuclear war.
The 1962 stand-off was triggered when US spy planes discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba, within striking distance of the American mainland.
Moscow's decision to deploy these weapons in Cuba was at the time seen as a response to the build-up of powerful US missiles in Europe.
Tensions were only defused when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the bases in return for guarantees that Washington would not attack communist Cuba.
Some Democratic lawmakers questioned on Wednesday whether a new Bush administration request for $88 million to fit "bunker-busting" bombs to B-2 stealth bombers was part of preparations for an attack on Iran.
The proposal was included as part of a nearly $200 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush administration sent to Capitol Hill on Monday.
The request included $87.8 million for further development of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, a conventional bomb designed to destroy hardened or deeply buried targets.
Many of Iran's nuclear development facilities are believed to be underground. The United States accuses Iran of trying to develop a nuclear bomb while Tehran insists its nuclear program is only for power generation.
The total cost, including debt servicing, of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach 2.4 trillion dollars by 2017, a report by the Congressional Budget Office found Wednesday.
The report, by the body which provides non-partisan budget analysis for Congress, said higher estimates for spending for the wars could top out at 1.7 trillion dollars by the end of the next ten year period.
Under the most intense scenarios of US military activity, a further 705 billion dollars could be added to the cost by interest payments, assuming the wars continue to be largely financed by government borrowing, the report said.
The estimate contains estimated costs up to 2007 for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other war on terror spending.
After five years in power, President Hu Jintao has finally gained unquestioned control of China's massive military while transforming it into wealthy, high-tech fighting force, analysts said.
Although Hu was named Communist Party chief in 2002 and president in 2003, he did not inherit the mantle of commander-in-chief until a year later and questions had lingered over who commanded the allegiance of the country's rapidly modernising, 2.3-million-strong People's Liberation Army.
But key military appointments by Hu in the run-up to the five-yearly Communist Party Congress that is due to end Sunday in Beijing should help dispel any questions, experts said.
They include a new general chief of staff, the PLA's highest uniformed position, and new commanders of its naval and air forces.
"It looks like he has full control over personnel now. He has continued to raise the military budget and will continue that. He's well established in power now," said Arthur Ding, a Chinese military expert at Singapore's Nanyang Technology University.
A suicide bombing in a crowd welcoming former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto killed up to 126 people Thursday night, shattering her celebratory procession through Pakistan's biggest city after eight years in exile.
Two explosions—a grenade followed by a suicide blast—struck near a truck carrying Bhutto, but police and officials of her party said she was not injured and was hurried to her house. An Associated Press photo showed a dazed-looking Bhutto being helped away.
Officials at six hospitals reported 126 dead and 248 wounded. Police chief Azhar Farooqi put the death toll at 113, including 20 police, with 300 people wounded. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the differences. But it was believed to be the deadliest bomb attack in Pakistan's history.
Bhutto flew home to lead her Pakistan People's Party in January parliamentary elections, drawing cheers from supporters massed in a sea of the party's red, green and black flags. Police said 150,000 were in the streets, while other onlookers estimated twice that.
US President George W. Bush said Wednesday that he had warned world leaders they must prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons "if you're interested in avoidingWorld War III."
"We've got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel," Bush said at a White House press conference after Russia cautioned against military action against Tehran's supect atomic program.
"So I've told people that, if you're interested in avoiding World War III , it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon ," said Bush.
The former top commander of U.S. troops in Iraq slammed the handling of the war and gave a bleak assessment of the current situation in Iraq.
“There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told a convention of military journalists on Friday.
Sanchez commanded U.S. troops in Iraq from June 2003 to July 2004. His controversial tenure saw the capture of Saddam Hussein and the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqi government, but also the rise of the insurgency and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
While cleared of any wrongdoing, one report found that Sanchez and his deputy, "failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations."
The American air force is working with military leaders from the Gulf to train and prepare Arab air forces for a possible war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
An air warfare conference in Washington last week was told how American air chiefs have helped to co-ordinate intelligence-sharing with Gulf Arab nations and organise combined exercises designed to make it easier to fight together.
Gen Michael Mosley, the US Air Force chief of staff, used the conference to seek closer links with allies whose support America might need if President George W Bush chooses to bomb Iran.
THE United States Air Force has set up a highly confidential strategic planning group tasked with “fighting the next war” as tensions rise with Iran.
Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June.
It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
A huge suicide attack in northern Iraq caused civilian deaths to rise slightly in August despite security gains elsewhere, making it the second deadliest month for Iraqis since the U.S. troop buildup began, figures compiled by The Associated Press showed Saturday.
At least 1,809 civilians were killed, compared to 1,760 in July, based on figures compiled from official Iraqi reports.
The August total included 520 people killed in quadruple suicide bombings near the Syrian border on Aug. 14, the deadliest day since the war began in March 2003. The attacks targeted Yazidis, a small Kurdish-speaking sect whose members are considered to be blasphemers by Muslim extremists.
The world’s first nuclear weapons test took place on July 16, 1945 in the desolate White Sands deserts of New Mexico. In a cryptic reference to a John Donne poem that he knew and loved, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead physicist of the Manhattan Project and scientific director of the test, dubbed the location “Trinity.”
At 5:29:45 a.m. local time, a plutonium-based atomic bomb was detonated atop a 100-foot steel tower erected at Trinity specifically for the test. Scientists hoped that exploding the bomb at an elevated height would reduce the amount of radioactive dust raised by the explosion. They also needed to simulate the air-drop method of deployment that was eventually used by the real bombs.
The Trinity bomb was an exact replica of “Fat Man,” the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war. Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan less than a month after the Trinity test.
Exploding with an energy equal to about 20 kilotons of TNT, the blast carved a crater in the Earth more than 1,000 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Radioactive fallout from the blast was detected as far away as Indiana.
Heat from the explosion was so intense that sand grains fused to form a reflective layer of radioactive, green glass, called “Trinitite,” on the desert floor.
A flurry of bombings in Baghdad killed 26 people Sunday, while officials said the death toll from a giant suicide truck blast that devastated the market of a Shiite town a day earlier was at least 130.
The explosives-laden truck demolished dozens of houses and shops Saturday in Amerli, a village of poor Shiite Turkmen about 110 kilometers, or 70 miles, north of Baquba, the largest city in Diyala Province. The police said that, in addition to the dead, at least 240 people had been wounded in the blast - one of the deadliest single attacks since the start of the war.
A secret U.S. law enforcement report, prepared for the Department of Homeland Security, warns that al Qaeda is planning a terror "spectacular" this summer, according to a senior official with access to the document.
"This is reminiscent of the warnings and intelligence we were getting in the summer of 2001," the official told ABCNews.com.
U.S. officials have kept the information secret, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" that the United States did not have "have any specific credible evidence that there's an attack focused on the United States at this point."
1. Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) have been spotted by the British on at least three occasions crossing the southern Iran/Iraq border nearest Basra and deploying spec. troops. On the Iranian side are the bulk of Iran's Province of Khuzestan's oil fields. These oil fields would be prime targets in the event of a U.S.-led invasion. The IRG specialist troops have the task of attacking communications, command, control, and intelligence facilities, and causing general chaos in the event of war.
2. Iran has rationed fuel to its population causing riots and discontent which have been widely reported in world media.
3. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has dramatically escalated his socialist policies, and actually nationalized all of the Orinoco production facilities, where large US oil and gas companies have literally billions invested in infrastructure.
4. Hamas has taken over the Gaza strip.
5. Hez b'Allah have begun aggressively reasserting itself in Lebanon.
6. Syria has significantly bolstered its troops and moved these troops closer to the Golan Heights much as they did prior to war in '73 (Yom Kippur).
7. Turkey has massed more than 50,000 troops on the northern Iraq border against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Note, however, that NW Iran borders SE Turkey.
8. The Arab Gulf States have openly declared they are preparing/prepared for a U.S./Iran conflict this Summer.
9. Significant U.S. politicians are openly advocating war with Iran. These war advocates are Republicans, however, no voice of dissent is being heard from the Democrats.
10. Anti-Iranian propaganda is in full-swing of late.
11. The largest naval armada assembled off the coast of Iran since the 2003 Iraq war commenced is assembled and waiting. A 4th US Carrier fleet will secure the Suez.
12. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is full.
13. Next round of U.N. sanctions are on the way.
14. Politicians on all sides of this conflict have a vested political interest in war as a means of political survival. They are all hard-liners.
15. Moscow has released nuclear fuel to Iran for the Bushehr reactor.
16. Israel has recently and successfully launched its Ofeq-7 spy imaging satellite which gives it a great view of Iran (amongst others).
Conclusion: War is close.
Understanding that Iran is oil rich, but refinery poor, it is still quite an unusual event for them to ration petrol. They knew that it would cause public discontent and would be covered widely in world media. Despite the embarrassing news of riots, Iran knows that rationing petrol is a strategic preparation for war.
A military cannot function without petrol. And Venezuela's Chavez knows he cannot supply Iran, but he can help starve the U.S. of oil (but not for long ...)
The US military in Iraq has said 10,000 US and Iraqi troops are taking part in an operation against al-Qaeda networks north of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The troops were said to be moving in and around the city of Baquba in Diyala province, which is considered to be an al-Qaeda stronghold.
The US military said 22 militants had been killed early in the offensive, called Operation Arrowhead Ripper.
Diyala province has seen some of the worst violence in Iraq this year. Insurgent groups have moved there in the face of the US troop build-up in Baghdad.
The latest operation's strategy is the same as in Baghdad - clear, hold and build, according to the BBC's Andrew North in Baghdad. US troops do the initial clearing and Iraqi forces hold areas afterwards, followed by rebuilding efforts to win people over, he says.
But the approach has met with mixed success in Baghdad so far and, as has happened so often, the insurgents respond by simply moving elsewhere, our correspondent adds.
It may sound a lot of money for an unsightly steel cube, but Germans are queuing up to pay £60,000 for the latest addition to the garden: a prefabricated nuclear bunker.
With fears of terrorism, natural disasters and a cold war revival on the rise, a German company has tapped into the climate of insecurity and produced the continent's first ready-made fallout shelter.
ABC Guard - its name a reference to the protection it is said to offer from atomic, biological and chemical warfare - invites potential customers to "rely on absolute security made in Germany" as it restores an industry thriving on fears that have not been felt in the country since the withdrawal of Russian troops from former East Germany.
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?
The United States Thursday defended plans to overhaul its sea-based nuclear arsenal with a new generation of warheads, arguing the program did not pose any extra threat to nations like Russia.
The administration wants to replace much of its Cold War stockpile with a new "Reliable Replacement Warhead" (RRW) that it argues would be safer and cheaper to maintain over the coming decades.
Roughly 2,000 of the new warheads would be deployed, one-fifth of Cold War levels. But the US government insists that it has enough technical know-how to avoid having to scrap its moratorium on nuclear weapons tests.
"Today's stockpile is safe and reliable, and does not require testing," argued John Harvey, director of policy planning at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Nevertheless, he told a seminar at the New America Foundation, the Cold War-era warheads now deployed could pose a risk in decades to come as they age.
The world's top military powers are gradually dismantling their stockpiles of nuclear arms, but all are developing new missiles and warheads with smaller yields that could increase the risk of atomic warfare, a Swedish research institute said Monday.
In its annual report on military forces around the globe, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute also said the rising number of nations with nuclear weapons is raising the risk such arms could be used.
"The concern is that countries are starting to see these weapons as useable, whereas during the Cold War they were seen as a deterrent," said Ian Anthony, a nuclear expert at the institute.
The Army failed to make its May recruiting goal, the first time since last September that it came up short, the Pentagon announced Monday. But despite growing domestic discontent over the direction of the war in Iraq, the Marine Corps signed up 560 more recruits last month than it had hoped to enlist.
The Army enlisted only 5,101 of the 5,500 recruits it wanted to bring on board, or 93 percent. The Marines did far better, percentage-wise, signing up 134 percent of its goal of 1,665. The Navy and Air Force both met their goals for May — 2,709 and 2,451 recruits, respectively.
Three men have been held in the United States as "enemy combatants" since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Here are details of their cases:
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national, is the only person currently being held in the United States as an enemy combatant. A federal appeals court on Monday ruled the U.S. military cannot indefinitely detain al-Marri, who has been held in a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, for about four years without charges. The court ordered him released from military custody.
Al-Marri entered the country on Sept. 10, 2001. U.S. government officials have said al-Marri was tasked with helping al Qaeda operatives planning a second wave of attacks.
The US challenges Russia to Russian roulette, and loses. Bush assures anyone who'll believe him that the missile defense is for protection against a harmless nation that's as much a threat to their national security as a couple of flies to a bug zapper. Putin, not so sure, and any country with an average iq breaking the chimpanzee barrier is off preparing for World War III and not being shy about it.
Once america carries out Operation Overkill and launches it's pre-emptive tactical nuclear strikes on Iran essentially nuking cave dwellers back a few years to the stone age, it's going to bite the dust hard as no one takes seriously the last faint and feminine roar of the paper tiger attempting to show its teeth. The US has a fairly bright future at the leading edge of the blastwave.
Another U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, the military said Thursday, pushing the four-year death toll for American forces to 3,501, according to an Associated Press tally.
The count includes 23 deaths in the first six days of June, an average of about four per day.
The soldier was killed Wednesday when a roadside bomb exploded during combat operations in a southwestern section of Baghdad, a military statement said. It added that two other soldiers were wounded in the attack and evacuated to a coalition medical facility.
As U.S. troops push more deeply into Baghdad and its volatile outskirts, Iraqi insurgents are using increasingly sophisticated and lethal means of attack, including bigger roadside bombs that are resulting in greater numbers of American fatalities relative to the number of wounded.
Insurgents are deploying huge, deeply buried munitions set up to protect their territory and mounting complex ambushes that demonstrate their ability to respond rapidly to U.S. tactics. A new counterinsurgency strategy has resulted in decreased civilian deaths in Baghdad but has placed thousands of additional American troops at greater risk in small outposts in the capital and other parts of the country.
President Putin has warned the US that its deployment of a new anti-missile network across Eastern Europe would prompt Russia to point its own missiles at European targets and could trigger nuclear war.
In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Russian leader says: “It is obvious that if part of the strategic nuclear potential of the US is located in Europe and will be threatening us, we will have to respond. "This system of missile defence on one side and the absence of this system on the other . . . increases the possibility of unleashing a nuclear conflict.”
Russia has been alarmed at America’s plans to install a network of defences in Eastern Europe to shoot down incoming missiles it fears that Iran might launch.
War / Draft 
