Eurasia

BERLIN, Germany Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday (April 19th) that his country would strengthen the EU’s internal market if it joins the bloc. Erdogan was speaking in Hanover, a day after attending a birthday party for former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who turned 65 on April …

ANKARA, Turkey Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of the Ankara mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular Turkish state, on Sunday (April 19th) to protest arrests stemming from an alleged plot to topple the country’s Islamic-rooted government.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) High Representative Valentin Inzko said on Sunday (April 19th) that constitutional changes in BiH are no condition for shutting down the office of the high representative or for the country’s EU accession.

TIRANA, Albania President Bamir Topi on Sunday (April 19th) again urged all citizens to participate in the June 28th general elections, given the importance of these elections to potential EU membership.

ASTANA  – Kazakhstan will not take part in NATO-led military exercises in Georgia in May, the Kazakh defense minister said on Tuesday. Kazakhstan was earlier scheduled to take part in the Cooperative Longbow/Cooperative Lancer-2009 command-and-staff exercise, which Russia has criticized as unhelpful in the wake of last summer’s armed conflict …

MOSCOW  – The pro-Russian breakaway region of South Ossetia has detained several observers from the OSCE for illegally crossing the Georgian-South Ossetian border, a separatist official told Reuters on Tuesday. “OSCE representatives were detained on South Ossetian territory for illegal border crossing,” Irina Gagloyeva said, without giving further details. She …

JAKARTA, April 21 – Romania has appointed Gheorghe Vilcu as the country’s ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a statement from the ASEAN Secretariat said here Tuesday. The new ambassador becomes the ninth ambassador to ASEAN, who comes from the European Union (EU). Vilcu presented his letter …

Romania has announced plans to give citizenship to up to 1 million Moldovans, a project that has left Brussels dismayed. Bucharest has put forward a bill to extend the right to naturalisation for Moldovans whose grandparent or great-grandparent was a Romanian. Previously, only Moldovans with Romanian grandparents could apply. The …

Bulgaria’s President, Georgi Parvanov, stated that the country was striving to develop positive business and political relations with the Russian Federation. Parvanov made the statements in an interview for the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung published Monday and cited by the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. “There are so many great traditions shared …

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini says the attitude of the European Union towards Serbia “has not been good as of lately”. To the remark that he had recently presented an eight-point plan for a speedier EU integration of the Balkans, he underlined that many were wrong to believe that all …