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Judging by flags alone, you'd never guess that Nuuk is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. All around this humble capital – population 15,000 – one sees the fluttering Greenlandic flag. The Danish one, by contrast, is rarely seen at all. But if some in this largely autonomous Danish territory have their way, it will one day fly in front of a future Danish embassy here. For 30 years, Greenland's 56,000 people have been pushing for greater control over their own affairs. Despite their best efforts, it was assumed that poor, remote Greenland would remain tied to Denmark indefinitely. But with the recent surge in global oil and mineral prices – and melting ice on land and sea improving access to potential reserves of both – the prospects for Greenland's independence have never looked better.

"If Greenland becomes economically self-sufficient, then independence becomes a practical possibility," says Aleqa Hammond, minister for finance and foreign affairs in Greenland's home-rule government, which already controls most of the island's affairs. "We know that we have gold and diamonds and oil and great masses of the cleanest water in the world … It may be closer than we think."

Greenland is in the midst of renegotiating its relationship with Denmark, which has ruled the island since 1721. Talks were supposed to conclude last month, but have stalled on questions over ownership of the island's oil and mineral wealth. Denmark wants to maintain the current arrangement, by which they will receive half of any royalties; Greenland wants a greater share. "We always had this idea that we had closets of resources of every kind, but with the rise in prices, it has affected the negotiations," says Kuupik Kleist, one of two Greenlandic representatives to the Danish parliament, who is heading the resource negotiations. "On the Danish side, they have gone from being almost indifferent about the future of Greenland to being very, very much focused on not giving up Danish rights on mineral resources."

In Denmark, which provides half of Greenland's domestic budget and cradle-to-grave social guarantees, many argue that it would be unreasonable for Danish taxpayers to continue forking over a grant of 3.2 billion Danish krones ($600 million) each year if the island struck it rich. "Greenland can't both earn a bundle on oil and keep its block grant," Danish negotiator Frank Jensen told journalists recently.

Greenland has been granting exploration permits, and Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and other energy giants are looking for oil off the western coast. Although there are no proven sources, the US Geological Survey estimates there are 31.4 billion barrels of oil off the northeast coast alone. In summer, the island's helicopters were all booked by diamond prospectors.

"It's inconceivable that a country as large as Greenland wouldn't be rich in natural resources," says Minik Rosing, a Greenland-born geologist at the University of Copenhagen, who doesn't share the belief that finding oil will serve the cause of independence. "As everyone else gets more and more desperate for this commodity, you don't want to have it and be a very, very small, very, very independent country, very, very far from anything else," he says. "My personal view is if Greenland finds oil, that is the end of the idea of independence."

Aqqaluk Lynge, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council's Greenland chapter, agrees. "We are afraid that the United States will take over Greenland if the Danes get out," he says. "If Americans can take Iraq, then why not Greenland?" Indeed, sources say that even if Greenland becomes independent – an event supporters see as at least a decade away – it will keep very close ties to Denmark, in large part out of fears of US hegemony. The US military has been active in Greenland since World War II, when it occupied the island to prevent it from falling under Nazi control and to provide mid-Atlantic refueling bases for ships and aircraft. During the cold war, radar stations were added to detect incoming missiles, and Thule Air Force Base in northernmost Greenland is expected to play a central role in plans for a national missile-defense system.

Svend Auken, a veteran Danish politician and former energy minister, says the Greenlanders are right to be concerned. "In the long run, the ideal would be for them to be recognized as an independent state in the United Nations, but in close contact with Denmark," retaining the Danish queen, currency, and defense cooperation, he says. Otherwise, "they will be very dependent on the Americans and they know the welfare society and wages wouldn't be on the same Scandinavian level."

Meanwhile, Greenland is exploring a major expansion in hydropower, a potentially lucrative industry that Copenhagen has no claims over. In May, the government here signed an agreement with Pittsburgh-based aluminum production company Alcoa to investigate the feasibility of building a new hydroelectric plant to power a large smelter. Alcoa would get cheap electricity – the biggest expense in producing the metal – from a renewable source. "The future lies in hydropower," Ms. Hammond says, noting that the proposed smelter would likely employ 3,500 people, equivalent to a tenth of Greenland's workforce. "The waterways will soon be clear year-round for transportation," she says. Other dams and energy-intensive industries may follow.

This plan is not without its critics, who worry about the impacts of pollution and – especially – the guest workers heavy industry will inevitably bring. Greenland's indigenous people, the Inuit, make up 90 percent of the population. "Right now we enjoy being a majority in our own lands," says Mr. Lynge, "but in one or two generations we could see the population develop in a direction that is not in our favor." For this reason, Mr. Rosing thinks it would be far better to deliver electricity to distant consumers than to have them move their industry here. "It would be much better to wait until there are transatlantic transmission lines so you could export the power," he says, noting that neighboring Iceland is considering an undersea line to Britain.

As a newly self-confident, oil-rich Russia teams up with China in joint military exercises Friday, it is moving to reclaim the former Soviet Union's status as a global military power. A seven-year, $200-billion rearmament plan signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this year will purchase new generations of missiles, planes, and perhaps aircraft carriers to rebuild Russia's arsenal. Already, the new military posture is on display: This summer, Russian bombers have extended their patrol ranges far into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, forcing US and NATO interceptors to scramble for the first time since the cold war's end.

"Diplomacy between Russia and the West is increasingly being overshadowed by military gestures," says Sergei Strokan, a foreign-policy expert with the independent daily Kommersant. "It's clear that the Kremlin is listening more and more to the generals and giving them more of what they want."

Economic bloc ups military teamwork

On Friday, Mr. Putin will join leaders of China and other members of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Russia's Chelyabinsk region to view the final stage of the group's most ambitious joint military maneuvers yet, to include 6,500 troops and over 100 aircraft. Also on hand will be leaders of SCO observer states and prospective members, among them India, Pakistan, Iran, and Mongolia. At an SCO summit in Kyrgyzstan Thursday, Putin stressed that while Russia is not seeking to build a cold war-style "military bloc," he does see the SCO expanding from its original purpose as an economic association to take on a greater military role.

"Year by year, the SCO is becoming a more substantial factor in ensuring security in the region," he said. "Russia, like other SCO states, favors strengthening the multipolar international system providing equal security and development potential for all countries. Any attempts to solve global and regional problems unilaterally have no future," he added. The SCO, founded in 2001, is often referred to as a "club of dictators" due to less-than-democratic ex-Soviet members such as Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. The group has been holding joint war games since 2005, when it also demanded that the US vacate military bases it had acquired after 9/11 in former Soviet Central Asia, whose oil and gas reserves are garnering increased attention from the West.

"The SCO clearly wants the US to leave Central Asia; that's a basic political demand," says Ivan Safranchuk, Moscow director of the independent World Security Institute. "That's one reason why the SCO is holding military exercises, to demonstrate its capability to take responsibility for stability in Central Asia after the US leaves."

New naval base, long-range missiles

Moscow's growing military footprint – and the apprehensions of others about it – is evident in a spate of recent news events.

* Last week the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia accused Russian warplanes of invading its airspace and firing a missile, which failed to explode, at a radio station. Russian officials denied the allegation and suggested that Georgian leaders fabricated the incident. Tensions have been high between Russia and Georgia over Moscow's support for two breakaway Georgian regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are protected by Russian "peacekeeping" troops.

* Russian naval chief Admiral Vladimir Masorin announced this month that Russia may reclaim a naval base at Tartus, in Syria, from which Soviet warships used to keep tabs on US ships. "The Mediterranean is an important theater of operations for the Russian Black Sea Fleet," he said. "We must restore a permanent presence of the Russian Navy in this region."

* In July, amid worsening relations between Russia and Britain over the still unsolved poisoning death of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, two Russian Tu-95 bombers flew deep into NATO territory for the first time since the cold war's end and, according to Britain's defense ministry, briefly entered British airspace before being escorted away by British fighter planes. Last week, in another post-Soviet first, Russian bombers "revived the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet US aircraft carriers and greet US pilots visually," ending up near the American Pacific base of Guam, Russian Air Force Maj. Gen. Pavel Androsov told Russian media. He added that the pilots on both sides "exchanged grins."

* Russia has recently conducted tests of new land- and sea-based intercontinental missiles, which are expected to soon replace the country's aging Soviet-era nuclear deterrent. As a partial response to US missile defense plans, Russia will develop a missile defense "project that will include not only air defense systems but also antiballistic missile and space defense systems" to protect Moscow and other Russian centers, Russian Air Force chief Col. Gen. Alexandr Zelin told Russian media last week.

Critics are skeptical that, despite major Putin-era infusions of cash, Russia's weak industrial base can deliver on the Kremlin's ambitions to restore a global military presence. "Now our military leaders have enough money to create a kind of caricature of the Soviet armed forces, and they want to do a lot of the same old things," says Alexander Goltz, military expert with the independent online magazine Yezhednevny Zhurnal. "But their plans are a confused mixture of realistic goals and unworkable Soviet-style symbolism," says Mr. Goltz.

Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim is the world's richest man, worth an estimated $US 67.8 billion, after overtaking Microsoft founder Bill Gates, according to a respected tracker of Mexican financial wealth. A 27 per cent surge in the share price of America Movil, Latin America's largest cell phone operator controlled by Slim, from March to June made him close to $8.6 billion wealthier than Gates, said Eduardo Garcia in Sentido Comun, the online financial publication he founded. Garcia estimated that Gates was worth $59.2 billion. Mexico has a huge rich-poor divide, with a tiny elite holding most of the country's wealth and around half the population living on less than $5 a day.

Forbes magazine reported in April that Slim had overtaken billionaire investor Warren Buffett for the No. 2 spot in the world's richest stakes but was still behind Gates. Forbes bumped up Slim because gains from his holding company Carso and fixed-line telecom Telmex added to the Mexican's fortune while shares of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc fell in the same period.

Three months ago, Sentido Comun's Garcia begged to differ with Forbes and calculated Slim's wealth as more than Gates' -- but only by a whisker. Now he says there is no doubt whose fortune is bigger at current share values. "When I put Slim ahead three months ago Forbes bumped him up to second place (in world rankings) a few days later," Garcia, also the publication's editor-in-chief, said. "Let's see if the same happens again."

Spokespeople at Forbes magazine were not immediately available for comment. Garcia, who uses Forbes' calculations for U.S. billionaires' wealth, says the 5.7 per cent increase in Microsoft share prices in the second quarter is no match for the sharp rise in valuations of Slim's companies. Shares of Telmex in the second quarter rose 11 percent and Slim's bank, Inbursa, saw its stock advance 20 percent.

Garcia's Sentido Comun, which translates as "common sense," reckons Slim and his family own a fortune equivalent to 8 per cent of Mexico's gross domestic product. For Gates to be worth 8 percent of the U.S. economy, his fortune would have to grow to more than $13 trillion, 17 times his current wealth, according to Sentido Comun.

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and "probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" in the Muslim world.

The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be "a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge." The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" to support democratic development.

More than four years after the March 2003 invasion, with Iraq still mired in violence and 150,000 U.S. troops there under continued attack from al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents, the intelligence warnings seem prophetic. Other predictions, however, were less than accurate. Intelligence analysts assessed that any postwar increase in terrorism would slowly subside in three to five years, and that Iraq's vast oil reserves would quickly facilitate economic reconstruction.

The report is the latest release in the Senate committee's ongoing study of prewar intelligence. A July 2004 report identified intelligence-gathering and analysis failures related to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Still pending is a study of how the administration used intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war.

The report was released the same day President Bush signed a $120 billion war funding bill from Congress that includes benchmarks for the Iraqi government.

In a statement attached to yesterday's 229-page report, the Senate intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), and three other Democratic panel members said: "The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists."

In addition to portraying a terrorist nexus between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist, the Democrats said, the Bush administration "also kept from the American people . . . the sobering intelligence assessments it received at the time" -- that an Iraq war could allow al-Qaeda "to establish the presence in Iraq and opportunity to strike at Americans it did not have prior to the invasion."

Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the end of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted last month over the Estonians' removal of a war memorial to the Soviet Red Army, in the capital, Tallinn. In the meantime, Estonia has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of the presidency, parliament, government ministries, newspapers, companies and banks.

The attacks have come in three waves: from April 27, when riots erupted over the removal of the memorial and hundreds of ethnic Russians in Estonia were arrested; then on May 8 and 9, when the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, delivered a speech attacking Estonia; and again this week. NATO has dispatched cyber-terrorism experts to investigate and help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences. "This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised today at a summit involving European leaders near Samara, in Russia. European Union and NATO officials have been careful not to accuse Moscow directly. However, if it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state attacking another by cyber-warfare.

"At present, NATO does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action," said the Estonian Defence Minister, Jaak Aaviksoo. "This means that the provisions of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, or, in other words, collective self-defence, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country. However, this matter needs to be resolved in the near future."

Estonia, a country of 1.4 million people, is one of the most wired societies in Europe and a pioneer in "e-government." With their noted electronic prowess, Estonians have been quick to marshal their defences, mainly by closing down the sites under attack to foreign internet addresses, in order to try to keep them accessible to domestic users.

The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have poured in from all over the world. However, Estonian officials and computer experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses, many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions. "The cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It's political," said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the main newspapers in Estonia, whose website has been targeted and has been inaccessible to international visitors for a week.

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has announced a dramatic shake-up to make all the company’s businesses carbon neutral within the next four years, to combat the “clear, catastrophic threats” posed by climate change. Mr Murdoch has laid out a plan for the company’s film and television, newspaper, publishing and online divisions to reduce their energy use, invest in cleaner technologies, and buy carbon credits to balance out emissions that cannot be eliminated.

He said the company would also try to inspire its audiences to reduce their own “carbon footprint.”

“Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction,” Mr Murdoch said in a speech in New York shown to News Corp employees around the globe. “We must transform the way we use energy … this is about changing the DNA of our business.” In a speech to News Corp employees worldwide, Mr Murdoch has acknowledged that going carbon neutral is “good business” as the issue attracts increasing levels of public awareness and support.

Many companies around the world have announced plans to cut overall emissions to zero, including major banks HSBC, NAB and ANZ as well as the Australian Football League, Fuji Xerox and KPMG. In May last year, BSkyB, the British satellite broadcaster and News Corp subsidiary, became the first media company in the world to become carbon neutral.

Mr Murdoch said News Corp’s total emissions last year were 641,150 tonnes and measures were already in place within some divisions to reduce that figure. Those include switching to more energy efficient light bulbs and solar-powered golf carts on the Fox Studios lot in Hollywood. There is also a plan to use renewable energy in the studio that produces the TV series 24.

Social networking site MySpace has launched a climate change channel, while hybrid vehicles are replacing fleet cars at News Digital Media (publisher of NEWS.com.au). He said the company had also tracked an issue of The Times newspaper in London and a DVD in the US to look for more ways to reduce the emissions of individual products.

“We need to push ourselves to make as many reductions as possible in our own energy use first – and that takes time. But we must do this quickly – the climate will not wait for us.” Mr Murdoch said that “as a last resort”, carbon credits would be bought to offset “unavoidable” emissions. He said the company would begin buying offsets this year from an Indian wind power company.

News Corp is also joining the Climate Group of businesses and governments working to combat the effects of climate change. But Mr Murdoch said the greatest impact the company could have was through inspiring its audiences to reduce their own climate impact. “The climate change problem will not be solved without mass participation by the general public in countries around the globe.

“Our audience’s carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours … that’s the carbon footprint we want to conquer. For too long, the threats of climate change have been presented as doom and gloom because the consequences are so dire. The challenge is to revolutionise the message. We want to avoid preaching … but the debate is shifting from whether climate change is really happening to how to solve it.”

Mr Murdoch has said he is already started adopting a greener lifestyle. “I bought a hybrid car a few months ago,” he told employees.

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