Free Republic

- We wanted democracy, and now we get less and less responsibility. We wanted national integrity and territorial sovereignty, and we have control from Brussels. We wanted a free market, and we got the social market. We went one way, after the fall of the communist system, and after two decades of this, we go another. It is a disappointment for all the countries that broke free of communism, said Klaus. As noted, the current radical changes in the EU must be a cause for concern throughout Europe. He yesterday met with Serbian President Boris Tadic, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic,...

Floating Around Europe New & Old... Old Europe tends to tell the U.S. what to do (about taxation, welfarism, Islamofascist terror, and foreign policy). New Europe -- perhaps more appreciative of America's role in its own de-satellization -- tends to want to learn from us, to take our lead, or even (on, e.g., taxation) to show us the way... Floating around for two weeks in Europe old and new, it certainly seems so -- not least in a service level, a desire to please visitors and customers, rarely seen in the U.S. That hospitality, even with the dollar plunged to...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's get to what Republican policies have become. Let's listen to excerpts of Senator McCain's speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles today. Here's number one. MCCAIN: We can't build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to. We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact, a league of democracies that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 Democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests. At the heart of this new compact...

Lithuania Hosts Proliferation Security Initiative Interdiction Exercise The United States congratulates Lithuania for successfully hosting a Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) exercise on April 26-27 in Vilnius and Siauliai, Lithuania. Twenty-two nations, including the United States, participated in the Lithuania-hosted PSI exercise, Smart Raven. Smart Raven, the first PSI exercise hosted by Lithuania and the 26th PSI exercise, addressed the challenge of interdicting proliferation shipments by air. The Lithuanian-hosted exercise advances the operational capabilities of PSI nations by allowing them to actively participate in or observe the air interdiction processes of Lithuania and its neighbors Estonia, Latvia, and Poland. Exercise Smart...

WARSAW - Poland's new Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has called for a bigger role for European Union (EU) newcomers in the bloc's decision-making processes and insisted that Poland will defend its "moral identity" within the EU. "We are and we want to be in the EU, to participate in everything...But we want enlargement to mean real participation, not just formal participation (of new member states) in all decision-making mechanisms," Kaczynski, the twin brother of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, said in a policy speech to parliament. "We will strive toward this end on our own but also with the Weimar Triangle"...

VIENNA, Austria — Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Haditha. America's problems with Iraq are casting a long shadow over President Bush's meeting with European Union leaders this week. The gathering is restricted to U.S. officials and the European Union leadership, and the agenda focuses on Iran's nuclear ambitions, agricultural subsidies and the West's dependence on imported oil and gas. But the United States' precarious world standing will be the unspoken theme of Wednesday's session in Vienna. Ahead of the visit, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said he doubted Bush would have much to say about the U.S. prison for terror suspects at...

A culture of common security From Warsaw Business Journal It was in May 2003, just after Poland obtained active observer status in the European institutions, that I first experienced EU policymaking from the inside at a meeting of political directors. Yet another human disaster in Africa was making headlines, and various colleagues had argued successfully for a peacekeeping operation in northeastern Congo. But others from both older members and accession countries were doubtful, seeing no direct link to either EU or national security. Navel gazers Three years later, despite the unquestionable success of what became known as Operation Artemis, history...

Today the EU-Commission will launch its improvement-report concerning the entry of both countries into the union. Both countries of the Balkan seem to have massive problems. Is the final decision about their join-in postponed to the January 2007??! Hamburg - Example Bulgaria: About 173 contracted murders happened since 1990. Last week the businessman Ivo Markov was shot in Sofia on the street. In February the supposable underworld chief Iwan Todrow was hit by deathly bullets. In the last 6 years more than 120 murders or murder attempts happened in Bulgaria and not a single one was cleared up. In mid...

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...

PRAGUE (Reuters) - Cuba has given a Czech diplomat in Havana 72 hours to leave, the Czech Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. It called the move retaliation for Czech criticism of Cuba's human-rights record. Cuban President Fidel Castro's communist government gave no reasons for refusing to extend the visa of the first secretary at the Czech embassy, Stanislav Kazecky. The Czech Foreign Ministry said it had summoned the Cuban charge d'affaires in Prague to protest and said the government would take reciprocal action. "The Czech Republic understands this as an act of expulsion," the ministry said in a statement. "Cuba...

Some new EU states cooling on the euro By Carter Dougherty International Herald Tribune WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2006 FRANKFURT In Poland, the conservative Law and Justice Party has campaigned against joining Europe's common currency, and four months after its upset victory in national elections, one thing has become clear: It will not go out on a limb for the euro. "We don't see any benefits in adopting the euro," the party's leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said during the campaign. "Euro adoption would lead to lower exports, lower national income and higher unemployment." Governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic felt...

The spectacle of a hapless little boy staring through the heavy mesh of a cage launched mega-successful author of the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling, on a crusade to end the caging of Eastern European tots. Referring to a 2004 story in Britain’s Sunday Times about little Vasek Knotek imprisoned in a Prague hospital, Rowling wrote in today’s Times, "If you read the piece and it’s as bad as the picture, then you’ve got to do something about it.” The story hit her hard, she wrote, especially since she has a horror of what she sees as "one unendurable terror...

New iron curtain divides Europe MatthewLynn Friday, February 10, 2006 When eight countries from the old communist empire in the east joined the European Union in May 2004, the rhetoric was all about healing historic divisions. And now? The relationship between eastern and western Europe is increasingly fractious. The easterners are becoming truculent members of the EU, while the westerners are growing ever more suspicious of their new partners in trade. An iron curtain is descending across Europe once again. The old one was political, the new one is economic. "This is one of the big issues facing the EU,"...

EU states urged to open up to eastern labour The European Commission will urge 12 European states on Wednesday to finally open their borders to workers from the bloc's ex-communist newcomer states as a way of boosting their economies. . In the first of three reports on the transitional phase since the European Union's "big bang" enlargement of May 2004, the EU's executive arm says that fears of an invasion by cheap "Polish plumbers" were unfounded. . "In spite of fears expressed on the occasion of the successive enlargements, free movement of workers has not led to disruption of national...

MEPs demand EU clampdown on homophobia The European Parliament is calling for tough action against EU member states that fail to uphold the human rights of homosexuals. MEPs from all the main political groups have tabled resolutions condemning moves by several EU countries, including Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, which they believe stigmatise gays and lesbians. “We need to fight across Europe for similar equality but worryingly, many European countries are not nearly at this stage,” said Michael Cashman, the British Labour MEP. “Gay pride marches are still being banned, political and religious leaders are using the language of hate and...

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15464 Something remarkable has been happening to me in the past nineteen days. Wherever I go, no-one launches abuse at me. When I open my mouth to speak, I am received with civility and the occasional ’ Have a good one.’ I am not attacked or intimidated to the point of abject fear and loathing. Where have I been visiting for the past two and a half weeks? And where do I live?

Slide Show >> They came from around the world, young men with handles like SnapDragon and Bladerunner attacking computing problems so complex that even experienced coders could only stare at the screen in bewilderment. Only one mastered the final algorithm problem: Eryk Kopczynski, a.k.a. Eryx, a reticent Warsaw University student who wears his long hair in a ponytail and says his life's ambition is to "discover some interesting notion." Kopczynski's triumph in this year's TopCoder Open, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, was no fluke. He was following in the footsteps of a slew of computing geniuses to emerge from the...

On Nov. 22, the German parliament elected Angela Merkel as the new chancellor. It could mark a seminal event. Ms. Merkel is the first female chancellor in Germany's history; the first leader who spent most of her life under Communist rule; and the first head of a coalition between the two major German parties since 1969. She takes over in a country that has been, in effect, without a government since May, when the outgoing chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, announced his intention to bring about new elections. Angela Merkel becomes chancellor at a moment of crisis for her country, poised between...

The man who sparked the flat tax revolution is former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar. He governed his country from 1992 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2002. When the historian became Prime Minister in 1992 at the age of 32 he knew nothing about economy. Laar’s area of expertise were Europe’s 19th-century national movements. “It is very fortunate that I was not an economist,” he says. “I had read only one book on economics – Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatisation,...