Eurasia

Affirming his country’s support for Turkey’s EU bid, a senior Portuguese official said on Thursday (June 28th) that the goal of accession talks with Ankara is full membership, rather than a privileged partnership.

THE HARD-LINE regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been frightening neighbors with its meddling-by-proxy in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza.

The Russian special services are operating in Poland very aggressively, and threat from their party is considerably high, the chief of military counterespionage of Poland Anthony Matserevich said.

The PACE hears one of the most controversial reports in its history Mikhail Zygar. European lawmakers hear a report on CIA secret prisons – and Chechnya; The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has heard a report on CIA secret prisons in Europe.

The Venezuelan president is visiting Russia, apparently shopping for hardware to boost its military against the USA. Vladimir Putin welcomed Hugo Chavez for talks at the presidential retreat outside Moscow, saying economic affairs and military-technical co-operation were on the agenda.

One of the biggest challenges Tony Blair will face as a Middle East envoy of the international community is Arab anger over the wars in Iraq and Lebanon, and the suspicion that he is a lackey of US President George W. Bush.

General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish Army General Staff, called again on Wednesday (June 27th) for a cross-border operation against the terrorist organisation Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.

The head of the Turkish armed forces insisted Wednesday on the need for a military incursion into northern Iraq to hunt down Turkish Kurd rebels based there, but said he needed the government’s green light to do so.

According to sources from Ingushetia, on Tuesday morning of June 26, a mobile squad of Mujahideen attacked a base of Russian occupation gang the so-called “reconnaissance squad”.

He was always a heavy drinker, but until his health problems got bad in the mid-1990s he could usually hold his liquor. The real problem was that he was a man of action who didn’t have an idea in his head.