As government representatives from the United States, South Korea, and Japan announce that they will meet in Washington, D.C., in early December to discuss North Korea following its attack on South Korea, the recent WikiLeaks release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables has shed new information on the world’s sole remaining Stalinist state.

Communist China remains passive in pointing the finger at North Korea over the the sinking of the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan, seemingly giving the benefit of the doubt to the North. If a shooting war flares up on the Korean Peninsula, would China intervene militarily on behalf of the North, as it did in the Korean War?

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other House leaders paid tribute to Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) on September 22, despite the fact that he was overwhelmingly censured by the House less than a year ago for ethics violations and has a history of courtship with Soviet and Communist subversive activities.

In an article posted on the ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability website, on October 13, 2009, ICLEI announced and welcomed the entry of Oklahoma City as its 600th local government member in the United States (illustration at left). Now, two years later, as the awareness of sustainable development, ICLEI and its ties to the United Nations’ Local Agenda 21 program have become more known, a backlash of activism has spread across the country leading many cities and towns to withdraw their membership from ICLEI.

Last month, while still in the midst of turmoil, the people of Albania commemorated the 20th anniversary of the alleged fall of Communism in their country.

On February 20, Albania’s ruling Democratic Party, led by Prime Minister Sali Berisha, announced to a crowd of 300,000 supporters in the capital city of Tirana that just 20 years earlier “Albania managed to bring down the fiercest communism regime in Europe,” referring to the 40-year reign of communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Located on the on the 23rd floor of the high-rise Viru Hotel in the Estonian city of Tallinn are strange “stacks of metal cases with black knobs and dials [that] look like something from a 1950s sci-fi movie — in fact, they were once highly secret communications equipment used by the feared Soviet secret police, the KGB,” during the Cold War, Reuters reported.

As country after country attempts to recreate the historic events in Tunisia and Egypt, most of the world's and media’s attention has been focused on the Middle East. Cable news reports often depict a map of the region with the countries in turmoil highlighted: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. But no matter what cable news station one watches, one country — in the midst of turmoil and anti-government protests — remains unhighlighted and unmentioned on those maps: Albania.

On January 27, Hungary's former Interior Minister Béla Biszku, 89, was prosecuted in Budapest “for denial of the crimes of national socialist and communist regimes.” The charges were filed in response to comments made by Biszku on August 4, 2010, in a televised interview on Hungary’s state-run Duna TV.

Self-identified communist activists have claimed responsibility for a bomb explosion at 9:00 a.m. Thursday which caused only minor damage at the four-star Morosani Posthotel in Davos, Switzerland, a few hundred yards from where company heads, central bankers, and politicians are meeting at the World Economic Forum.