A funny thing happened in the last few years when no one was paying attention. J.R. Ewing, the legendary Texas oilman, and his wife Sue Ellen sold Southfork, their ranch near Dallas, and moved to a new home in Pennsylvania (Northfork?). JR immediately began buying subsurface mineral rights for acres of land above the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Appalachian Basin.

Ifri's December conferences have become a staple event for Europeans eager to understand the evolutions underway in the United States. For our tenth edition, we discussed the main specificities of the U.S. judiciary system and their impact on non-U.S. citizens and entities, the up-coming presidential elections, the economic situation of a country caught between the debt and a recession, and finally, the evolution of U.S. attitudes vis-a-vis the upheavals in the Arab and Muslim World.

FELIN, the world's first "integrated soldier system", will enter service in the French Army this year. Throughout history, infantrymen have sought to capitalize on technology while seeking the best compromise between three basic requirements: mobility, firepower and protection of combatants.

The Look East policy (LEP), launched in the early 1990s, was intended to engage India more closely with the East Asian region, but it met with only limited success initially, for India was not seen to be a major contributor either to regional security or economic development.

Up to Europe’s threshold in the middle of Sahara and Sahel region, a growing insecurity led beyond mere reconsideration of field practice to a whole change of paradigm for multilateral and bilateral aid institutions.