ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

BY Gordon Lubold , Dan Lamothe - " FP " - When a retired Army colonel and an enlisted soldier from Albuquerque, N.M. were charged last year with defrauding the National Guard Bureau out of about $12,000 the case drew little public attention. But it's now become clear that the two men are among the roughly 800 soldiers accused of bilking American taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars in what a U.S. senator is calling "one of the biggest fraud investigations in Army history." The wide-ranging criminal probe centers around an Army recruiting program that had been designed to help the Pentagon find new soldiers during some of the bloodiest days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The program went off the rails, investigators believe, after hundreds of soldiers engaged in a kickback scheme that allowed them to potentially embezzle huge quantities of money without anyone in the government noticing. In one case, a single soldier may have collected as much as $275,

A man drives a horse-drawn cart in a village south of Chisinau in the autonomous region of Gagauzia in 2007. (DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images) Summary A key referendum held in an autonomous region of Moldova serves as a reminder that the ongoing EU-Russian competition extends beyond Ukraine and into the broader European borderlands -- and that Moscow retains a strong position in many of these countries. In the referendum, which was held Feb. 2 in the autonomous republic of Gagauzia to decide whether to integrate further with the European Union or with Russia, 98.4 percent of voters chose closer ties with Russia's Customs Union, while 97.2 percent voted against closer EU integration. It is unlikely that Gagauzia will actually follow through on accession to the Customs Union or split off from Moldova completely, but such discussions will undermine Moldova's integration plans, as well as those of other countries in the EU-Russian periphery. Analysis Gagauzia is a largely agr

Zeng Qinghong could be the next target for Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, according to unverified rumors circulating in Hong Kong and Chinese-American media since January. Zeng served as chief of the Communist Party's powerful Organization Department and sat on the previous Politburo Standing Committee under former President Hu Jintao. Stratfor cannot verify these rumors, and has doubts about their provenance. However, while their probability is low, their significance, if true, is high. There are few people as powerful as Zeng, and any attempt to prosecute him would likely lead to substantial pushback. Thus Zeng's prosecution would suggest that either Xi's administration is confident of its position or it is nervous and desperate to strip its opponents of power. The rumors have been circulating for weeks from Falun Gong-linked New Tang Dynasty Television and the Epoch Times. Hong Kong's Open Magazine, a pro-democracy publication that works

Video Transcript: Fred Burton: Hi, I'm Fred Burton with Stratfor. And I'm here today with Lauren Goodrich, our senior Eurasia analyst, to talk about the security surrounding the Sochi Olympics and the ongoing militant threat in the Caucasus in Russia. Lauren, there's been a lot of discussions going on concerning the security for Sochi, and we certainly covered it a lot. And I think people have a lot of different assessments as to what are the real problems surrounding the Olympics. So how do you view the Caucasus and the impact to the potential Sochi Olympics? Lauren Goodrich: Well, I would start off by saying that the militant threat inside the Caucasus is just nothing new. It's something that Russia has struggled with ever since Russia actually got the Caucasus within its own territory back in the late 18th century. The Caucasus threat has been there ever since. The people of the Caucasus are just not integrated into Russia. They are of different ethnicities; they'

By Tom Engelhardt  - The fact that 97% of scientists who have weighed in on the issue believe that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon is not a story. That only one of 9,137 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between November 2012 and December 2013 rejected human causation is not a story either, nor is the fact that only 24 out of 13,950 such articles did so over 21 years. That the anything-but-extreme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers an at least 95% guarantee of human causation for global warming is not a story, nor is the recent revelation that IPCC experts believe we only have 15 years left to rein in carbon emissions or we’ll need new technologies not yet in existence which may never be effective. Nor is the recent poll showing that only 47% of Americans believe climate change is human-caused (a drop of 7% since 2012) or that the percentage who believe climate change is occurring for any reason has also declined since 2012 from 70%

By Bill Van Auken - In the wake of last week’s failed talks in Geneva, Washington and its allies are escalating pressure on Syria over chemical weapons and professed “humanitarian” concerns. The shift toward a more aggressive posture toward the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad only underscores the fact that the Western powers remain committed to an agenda of regime change, whether by means of United Nations-brokered talks or outright military aggression. UN envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi was compelled to admit last Friday, after the final round of talks, “We haven’t made any progress to speak of.” The reason for the collapse of the negotiations was clear. The talks began with a ceremonial session in which US Secretary of State issued an ultimatum that the Syrian regime had to accept the removal from power of President Bashar al-Assad and the installation of a puppet of Washington’s choosing. Throughout the rest of the talks, the Western-backed “rebels” of the Syrian Natio

Members of government listen as Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta addresses parliament in Bucharest in 2012. (DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images) Summary Constitutional reforms under discussion in Romania have raised concerns that the country is headed the same direction as Hungary, where the ruling Fidesz party is using its control of parliament to enhance its influence on the economy and politics. Since coming to power in late 2012, the government of Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been calling for Romania to abandon its semi-presidential system and introduce a parliamentary system, which would diminish the role of the president and concentrate power in parliament. Ponta's ruling Social Liberal Union currently holds two-thirds of the seats in parliament. However, the difference between Romania and Hungary is that the former has more significant obstacles in the way of increased control of the political economy. Analysis The Romanian parliament plans to vote on the constitutio

Summary Throughout the Cold War, state-sponsored terrorism was a Marxist-Leninist/Maoist phenomenon that spanned the globe. In Europe, the Soviets and their allies trained and equipped left-wing terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Irish Republican Army and the Red Army Faction in Germany to carry out bombings, kidnappings and targeted assassinations to undermine their opponents in the West. Such groups were dealt a serious blow in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. In the following years, logistical support, funding and advice from the Soviets, as well as the Marxist ideology that inspired leftist militants, withered away. The radical impulse in Europe that began with student protests in the late 1960s eventually moved toward other issues, such as environmentalism and anti-globalization, thus creating a complex mix of overlapping ideologies. Further hindered by other developments such as German reunification, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and th