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Article Tools RSS Printer Friendly E-Mail This Page Discussions SOFIA: A US push to give special NATO partnerships to Australia and other Pacific-rim allies ran into trouble at a top-level meeting due to end Friday after European members voiced scepticism, diplomats said. The proposal would see Australia, New Zealand and possibly Japan and South Korea extended privileged status with NATO that would reflect their active role in some Alliance missions while stopping short of offering membership. Foreign ministers from the 26-nation Alliance discussed the issue, among other topics, at a conference in the Bulgarian capital Sofia that began Thursday. But...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Morten Messerschmidt, a member of the Council of Europe and of Denmark's Parliament for the Danish People's Party. He is involved in the debate about the effects of Muslim immigration to Europe, Islam and terrorism. FP: Morten Messerschmidt, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Messerschmidt: Thanks. FP: Tell us the impact that Muslim immigration is having on Europe. Messerschmidt: We are seeing over the entire continent how the extreme groups of Islam are trying to impose their fundamentalist ideology, which has created awful results in the Middle East, to our part of the world. We see it...

Migrant workers 'boost UK growth' Migrant workers from Eastern Europe are providing a positive boost to Britain's economy, according to a report. New immigration has helped to keep inflation under control, boost output and raise tax revenue, research by Ernst & Young has suggested. Workers from Poland and Slovenia are among those "plugging gaps in a variety of industries", the report said. The UK is one of only three EU states to grant full labour rights to citizens from the 10 recent accession countries. The Ernst & Young Item Club Spring Forecast, which uses the Treasury's own forecasting model for...

Asia Rising Donald Rumsfeld infamously made a distinction between Old Europe and New Europe. He has been scored ever since for his sweeping and impolitic language, but he wasn't sweeping enough: In geopolitical terms, all of Europe is old, the world's most tourist-friendly museum piece. For the future of high-stakes U.S. diplomacy and of great-power politics, look no further than Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the U.S. It is Asia that should occupy an outsized place in our strategic thinking, and it is Europe that should be the relative afterthought, not the other way around. The media and foreign-policy...

Demographics may bring about what the Moors and Ottoman Empire couldn't: a Muslim Europe Anyone know where we can find some Etruscans? You know, members of the Etruscan civilization that existed in ancient Italy, predating even Rome? Well, there aren't any. The Etruscans were absorbed by the Roman civilization and ceased to exist as a distinct people. Ominously, if a growing number of experts and cultural observers are right, it's entirely possible that the same question may be asked 100 years from now -- only about Italians or Spaniards or Russians. As writer Mark Steyn glumly put it in The...

(AgapePress) -- Anyone know where we can find some Etruscans? You know, members of the Etruscan civilization that existed in ancient Italy, predating even Rome? Well, there aren't any. The Etruscans were absorbed by the Roman civilization and ceased to exist as a distinct people. Ominously, if a growing number of experts and cultural observers are right, it's entirely possible that the same question may be asked 100 years from now -- only about Italians or Spaniards or Russians. As writer Mark Steyn glumly put it in The New Criterion, "Much of what we loosely call the Western world will...

BELGRADE, 5 April - The Serbian State Prosecution Office for War Crimes has announced it will charge the Slovene nationals who murdered three Yugoslav National Army's (JNA) conscripts in 1991 with war crimes. The execution of the three soldiers is considered the first war crime in Former Yugoslavia. The murders took place at the Holmec border crossing, and were filmed by the Austrian ORF. Just a few weeks ago the state prosecutor in the Slovene capital Ljubljana brought charges against Mrs. Neka Miklavcic-Predan, the director of the Slovene chapter of the Helsinki Human Rights Group,for publicly referring to the murders...

've had a recurring experience in the last few months. I'll be reading some geopolitical tract like Sands Of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards Of Global Ambition by Robert W. Merry, and two-thirds of the way in I'll stumble across: "With the onset of the Iraq War and European opposition, many Americans embraced a severe anti-European attitude. 'To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history,' wrote Mark Steyn in the Jewish World Review, 'we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic.' "

This latest attack targets a Slovenian friar and comes the same day the Vatican confirms Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey, scheduled for November. Ankara (AsiaNews) – With the battle cry “we will kill you all” a group of youths launched themselves in attack on a Franciscan friar in Izmir (the ancient Smyrna). The attack took place within the confines of St. Helen’s parish. Speaking with evident emotion, Msgr Luigi Padovese, Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, says “The boys grabbed him by the throat shouting “we will kill you all””. According to the bishop this latest aggression is “fruit of rampant fanaticism”....

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., Jan. 29, 2006 – For more than a year, Albanian army Maj. Ilirjan Balliu has served as the senior national representative for Albania with the 63-nation coalition organized to combat global terrorism. Shortly after his arrival to U.S. Central Command here, Balliu had breakfast with a U.S. military officer. As the two shared conversation and coffee, the U.S. officer revealed what was on his mind. "'If you would have told me years ago that I would have been sitting at a U.S. military base, eating and talking to an Albanian military officer, I wouldn't have...

According to People's Daily online, Serbian Assistant Minister of Energy and Mining Slobodan Sokolovic said that relevant ministries in Serbia, Croatia and Italy will be signing a memorandum of intent by mid-January in Rome, adding that Slovenia is expected to participate as well. Sokolovic said that an agreement would launch a company for the development of the oil pipeline project, whose primary task would be to work out all the needed studies and state accords. According to assessments, the building of the 1,500 km oil pipeline from the Romanian port of Constanza to Italy's Trieste would cost about two billion...

Not so long ago, American conservatives seemed to be converting the world to their ideas. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, country after country abandoned socialism for free markets, embracing such Reaganite themes as incentives, individualism, and responsibility. It looked as though the sun would never set on the friends of American conservatism. Yet today, American conservatives have never felt so alone. This is not a matter of how many people around the world like American conservatives, but of how many are like them. To be sure, many political movements don't have counterparts in other countries. But Europe and...

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) - Heads of state from central and southeast Europe insisted Friday that European Union enlargement continue and include Turkey as well as the Balkan states that emerged from the bloody wars of the 1990s. Despite the 25-country bloc's difficulty in agreeing on common constitution, the EU must carry on to include Bulgaria and Romania by 2007, and eventually Croatia and Turkey, according to the 15 leaders attending a summit in Zagreb to discuss European integration and expansion. "The integration process ... has no alternative, and it must not be stopped or thrown in doubt," Croatian President Stipe...

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP): Croatian lawmakers on Thursday unanimously adopted a resolution condemning neighboring Slovenia over a border dispute. Parliament also backed the government's resolve to seek international arbitration over the issue, which is dividing the otherwise friendly nations. Tensions between the two former Yugoslav republics spilled over into a diplomatic furor after Slovenia's parliament on Tuesday passed a law declaring a patch of open water in the northern Adriatic a national ecological zone, also reserving for itself a host of other rights. Croatia reacted by branding the move an effort to annex Croatian territory. Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader said,...

After the 2000 elections, George W. Bush became president without a majority vote. Many Europeans snickered at the sorry spectacle of the world's oldest continuous democracy devolving into Third-World election chaos. Few critics cared to hear about the nature of America's two-century-old Electoral College.

The UN atomic watchdog adopted by vote Saturday an EU proposal that sets Iran up for referral to the UN Security Council, a spokesman said, in what would be a sharp escalation of the West's face-off with the Islamic Republic. The vote was by 22-1, with 12 abstentions on the 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA spokesman Peter Rickwood told reporters.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Hamlet has become a Muslim prince at the Ottoman court in an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy which its Bosnian director says reflects the world after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In possibly the biggest theater co-production the war-torn Balkans region has seen in some 20 years, Haris Pasovic is seeking to put "Hamlet" into a 21st Century setting. "One of the most important issues of the 21st century is the world's increased understanding of the Muslim issue following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York," Pasovic, himself a Bosnian Muslim, told Reuters...

Qatar pledged $100 million in humanitarian assistance Saturday to help Americans recover from Hurricane Katrina, heading a list of more than a dozen countries joining an outpouring of support. They added to the more than 50 countries who had made pledges by the end of the day Friday. ``In these difficult circumstances, the people and the government of the state of Qatar would like to assure the people of the United States of its support and desire to assist the people in the affected area along the United States Gulf Coast,'' said a statement from the oil-rich Persian Gulf state's...

In an accelerating drive, more than 50 countries have pledged money or other assistance to help Americans recover from Hurricane Katrina. Cuba and Venezuela have offered to help despite differences with Washington. Oil giant Saudi Arabia and small countries like Sri Lanka and Dominica are among the nations making pledges. "I hope that will remind Americans that we are all part of the same community," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday as offers kept pouring in. None has been turned down, Rice said at a news conference, disputing a report from Moscow that a Russian offer had been rejected....

Europe's weather crisis eased on Thursday as fires were put out in Portugal and flood waters receded in central Europe, but the death toll rose in Romania and Austria after heavy rains. Since June, the flooding in central and eastern Europe has caused 103 deaths, while fires in drought-stricken Portugal, Spain and France killed 37, according to figures compiled by news agency AFP. Portuguese firefighters said on Thursday they had brought under control all blazes that have ravaged the centre and north of the country over the past two weeks, thanks to the arrival of cooler weather. A villager...