Andreas Fuchs and Nils-Hendrik Klann of Germany University of Geottingen looked at 159 countries' trade patterns with China between 1991 and 2008 to see what effect a high-level meeting with the Dalai Lama had on bilateral trade.

After the midterm elections, Barack Obama will get a chance to follow a long line of American presidents who have had setbacks at home. He will go abroad. His long-delayed Asian trip this week - India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan - is by chance perfectly timed.

Russian counternarcotics agents teamed up with U.S. and Afghan forces in an unprecedented joint raid that destroyed nearly $56 million worth of heroin near the Pakistani border, officials said Friday.

Senior militia fighters loyal to a notorious Afghan warlord have been flown to Australia to train with elite special forces as part of a covert strategy to strengthen military operations against the Taliban.

President Obama will visit one of the world’s largest mosques and deliver a major address to the people of Indonesia when he visits that island nation next month, in a long-delayed trip that White House officials say will mix childhood reflections with outreach to the Muslim world.

Multiculturalism just doesn't work in Germany, according to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Speaking to the youth association of her Christian Democrat Union party (CDU), she said that the "multi-kulti" concept that "we are now living side-by-side and are happy about it ... this approach has failed, utterly." Merkel described this as living in "parallel societies" similar to the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco or the Little Italy in Philadelphia.

Looking at pictures of the statuesque Emir of Qatar (the emphasis is on the first vowel, by the way), and his even more statuesque wife, they seem perfectly at home in London. There’s a reason for that. His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to give him his full title, owns large parts of it.

China is expanding its military reach by sending, for the first time, a marine unit of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to train with another country in an upcoming exercise with Thailand's armed forces.