SCO is a good tool to make UK and US behave cowardly as they did while USSR confronted them. That is, all hypocritical rhetorics of US and UK was allowed but militarily they were supposed to have their mouth shut. What is more important the aggressive international steps of Anglo-Saxon Empire today will be rolled down to acceptable proportions with a further development of SCO. How about that, Sir?

Serg, Moscow,

GLOBAL CONNING
The predicitions of global warming based on CO2 emissions are a complete con. There is no credible underlying scientic evidence that the two are linked. The computer models on which the predicitions of doom are riddled with uncertainties and assumptions. The earth's climate has been changing naturally since the earth's formation with a number of periods of extensive glaciation. These people who are predicting global warming is linked to CO2 levels cannot even reliably predict the weather for more than a few days ahead so how can they claim what is going to happen over the next ten or twenty years? Ten years ago they were prediciting that we were heading for aa new ice age.
The media fuelled frenzy over the CO2 issue is a twentieth century witch hunt which the politicians have welcomed with glee as an excuse to impose more and more taxes and the media and business are riddled with an increrasing number of meaningles terms such as "carbon footprint", "ca

Frank Brady, London,

Now - why would Mahmoud Ahmedinejad oppose a "missile shield" unless to "win friends and influence people" - like Russia for example ..

This from a man from Iran - with the largest oil reserves in the world - who insists on building nuclear "fuel" for a country that has no nuclear reactors.

More and more - the "New Cold War" resembles the "Old Cold War" as aspiring powers arm and use proxy agents in a new version of the "Great Game".

This does not bode well for civilised life in the 21st Century ...

drk, Cadiz, Spain

For all your sophisticated justifications and imagined dramas that justify the murder of a million Semites in Iraq, Britain still cannot escape the judgment of history. Aren't Britons by now starting to worry about the weight of enemies amassing against you? Talk about your Cold War chills, distract yourselves with non-existant Iranian warheads, find frigid comfort in "alternative fuel" arguments, but they're all just buying time before the the weight of global disbelief and simple pragmatics are going to crush you. Britain is already a pariah, the rest of the world is simply waiting for you to realise it. I hope it takes long enough to push up oil prices for long enough so that you have enough time to invest even more hundreds of billions via government subsidies and corporate profits in "biofuels". Only once your infrastructure is all paid for and in place, only then will oil prices come down, undercut your "green" fuel and knock that final hole in your empire's sarcophagus.

Al, Johannesburg, South Africa

A prescient article. Europe needs to, once again, stop fighting amoungst member states, stop bashing the US- its saving grace, and unite with the States to form a formidable deterrent and force to undermine Russia and China, It could be done easier than one imagines.

Michael Standard, london, UK

Energy is the wrong weapon to choose, and it's a mistake I hope they persevere in! Anything more calculated to spur the growth of alternative supplies of energy than a belligerent SCO controlling fossil resources is hard to imagine. And we need all the spurs we can get.

Ian Kemmish, Biggleswade, UK

If you think that proximity to Afganistan is an "advantage" in any sense, you must be mad (no pun intended).

Michael, Dubai,

nay a swiss bank account is agreat ice breaker,business is the same the world over,remember russia lost billions after the fall of the myth called communism, the closet greedy capitalist were just a few vodcas away,

michael joseph heavey, cahersiveen/adams town, MADNESS