Happy Year of Dog, good bye Alan

Iran's Revolutionary Guards chief Saturday warned the United States and Britain that Iran would respond with its missiles if attacked, a clear threat to Israel, which lies within easy range of such a launch. "The world knows Iran has a ballistic missile power with a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,300 miles)," Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi said on state-run television. (The Jerusalem Post)

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Firing into the air, Fatah gunmen and police stormed Palestinian parliament buildings on Saturday in growing unrest after their long-dominant party's crushing election defeat by Hamas Islamists. The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed. (NY SUN)

China's communist leadership has made tackling poverty in the countryside a key priority, as it acknowledges that three decades of economic and social reforms have left great swaths of the population behind. Clashes between officials and villagers, angry over forced land seizures and inadequate compensation for farmland and redundancies, have been increasing. The government said there were 87,000 cases of public disorder last year, an increase of 6.6 percent from 2004. (FOX)

'The resumption of nuclear research by Iran is currently the market's largest preoccupation,' said BNP Paribas oil analyst Eoin O'Callaghan. He has pushed up his forecast for average oil prices this year to $65 a barrel because of geopolitical risk. He points out that the oil price rose more than 60 per cent in the run-up to the Iraq war; a similar increase now would take prices to $94. (Heather Stewart, economics correspondent, the Guardian)