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It is estimated that the continuing trade surpluses for years have helped China amass a whopping two trillion US dollars in dollar-denominated assets. Last year alone, China added US$450 billion to its reserves at a rate of over a billion dollars a day. About half of the Chinese US dollar-based assets are in the form of US treasury bonds that fund the ballooning US deficits. Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, recently told James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, "Be nice to the countries that lend you money". Gao was clearly hinting at this new reality of " balance of financial terror" shifting in China's favor. If history is any guide, the power of the lender over debtor nations is not just theoretical. The key moment when the world leadership passed from Britain to the United States came during the Suez crisis of the 1950s as a result of Britain's large WWII debt owed to the United States. When Britain, France and Israel invaded...

Why is the Zardari government acting so apologetic and condemning Pakistan in the process? We don't trust the Indians and they don't trust us. That's the way it is. The Mumbai attacks are not about the identity of Kassab. It is about how he reached there and how the attacks conveniently meet the interests of anti-Pakistan elements in India. It is time Pakistani officials started asking India the tough questions and expose what New Delhi is hiding from its own people. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan— Who says evidence in such a huge case cannot be fabricated? Remember Colin Powell, the foreign minister of the world's lone superpower, sitting in the U.N. Security Council one fine evening in February 2003, showing fake and doctored pictures and other evidence to prove Iraq's WMDs? It all turned out to be bogus . Yet U.S. led a major war against Iraq and changed the course of history based on those lies. Now India wants action replay –fancying itself another superpower after the su...

BAGHDAD — Calling someone the “son of a shoe” is one of the worst insults in Iraq . But the lowly shoe and the Iraqi who threw both of his at President Bush, with widely admired aim, were embraced around the Arab world on Monday as symbols of rage at a still unpopular war . In Saudi Arabia, a newspaper reported that a man had offered $10 million to buy just one of what has almost certainly become the world’s most famous pair of black dress shoes . A daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, reportedly awarded the shoe thrower, Muntader al-Zaidi, a 29-year-old journalist, a medal of courage . In the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, people calling for an immediate American withdrawal removed their footwear and placed the shoes and sandals at the end of long poles, waving them high in the air. And in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, people threw their shoes at a passing American convoy. In street-corner conversations, on television and in Internet chat rooms, the subje...