Titles

• Putin: US cannot do whatever it wants
• Egypt buys US war planes
• Iran: "Britain will receive a punch on the mouth..."
• Terror havens in four states: US
• Malaysia rules Catholic paper has right to use 'Allah'

 News Details

Putin: US cannot do whatever it wants

Russia needs more weapons to punch through America 's new missile defence shield, Vladimir Putin said yesterday in blunt remarks that will complicate efforts to cut the nuclear arsenals of the former Cold War rivals. The Russian Prime Minister, reasserting himself as the country's real ruler, said that Moscow should press ahead with a new generation of weapons to stop the Americans doing "whatever they want". "To preserve the balance we must develop offensive weapons systems, not missile defence systems as the United States is doing," he said during a visit to the naval port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Until now, it had seemed that Washington and Moscow were edging towards a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), despite failing to meet the original target of December 5. Asked why the talks had failed to reach agreement on a new deal, Mr Putin said: "What is the problem? The problem is that our American partners are building an anti-missile shield and we are not building one."

Egypt buys US war planes

US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin is to sell 24 F-16 jet fighters to Egypt in a 3.2 billion dollar deal, a company spokesman said Tuesday. "We understand that the governments of the United States and Egypt have reached an agreement over a contract for military sale to provide 24 F-16s to Egypt ," Lockheed spokesman Joe Stout told AFP.

The company hoped to get the contract signed "early next year," he said, adding that the 3.2 billion dollars "was the amount in the agreement between the two countries." The Egyptian Air Force is the fourth largest F-16 operator in the world, according to defense industry reports. Egypt , which receives about 1.5 billion dollars in annual US aid, was the first Arab state to make peace with Israel , a top US ally.

Iran: "Britain will receive a punch on the mouth..."

This week the Iranian government vented its anger at Britain , declaring that London deserved a "punch in the mouth" for its role as the "chief culprit" behind the mass protests sweeping the Islamic Republic. The British ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the foreign ministry to answer charges of interfering. Iranian anger had been fuelled by Foreign Secretary David Miliband's public condemnation of the crackdown. Iran 's Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, warned: " Britain will receive a punch on the mouth if it does not stop its nonsense."

Terror havens in four states: US

US President Barack Obama has identified Afghanistan , Pakistan , Yemen and Somalia as the four places where terrorists were hatching plans to attack the United States .

"We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan , Yemen or Somalia , or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland", he said

Malaysia rules Catholic paper has right to use 'Allah'

Malaysia's high court ruled Thursday that a Catholic paper had the right to use the word "Allah" after a long-running dispute between the government and the weekly in the Muslim-majority nation. The ruling overturns the government's controversial threat to cancel The Herald's annual publishing permit."The applicant has the constitutional right to use the word 'Allah'," Judge Lau Bee Lan told a packed courtroom, declaring the government's ban on the paper's use of the word "illegal, null and void".The weekly used the word "Allah" as a translation for "God" in its Malay-language section but the government argued "Allah" should be used only by Muslims. Lau said the home ministry, which licenses all newspapers in the country, had taken into account "irrelevant considerations" when making the paper's publishing permit conditional on it not using the word. She said it had shown no evidence that the use of the word by Christians was "a threat to national security".