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ABC News has learned that Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has died. On Friday, Holbrooke was rushed to the hospital with a torn aorta. He went through more than 20 hours of surgery. Earlier this evening, speaking at the US State Department, President Obama sang Holbrooke's praises and called him "a tough son of a gun." Holbrooke, 69, was a former ambassador to the United Nations and served as chief negotiator at the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote a nice story about Holbrooke last year,...

U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke has died. He recently underwent operations to repair a tear in his aorta, the large artery that moves blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Holbrooke, who had been serving the Obama administration as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was stricken on Friday during a meeting at the State Department with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He was rushed to the hospital for a 20-hour operation that was followed by an additional procedure on Sunday. Clinton said Monday there has been an "outpouring of support" for Holbrooke from around the world. Afghan...

America's biggest strategic problem in the Balkans is the role of Turkey, through its pawn, Haris Silajdzic is trying to compete with neootomannic position in the Balkans and the Middle East - said in a dispatch of the U.S. ambassador in Ankara since January this year, which was sent to the State Department called " Ankara87 ", published on page Wikiliks. Comparing the Turkish efforts as "ambition" Rolls-Royce ', but with the resources of' Rover ', "the ambassador wrote that, being aware that they have their own resources for this policy, they must find" your own errand boy in the...

Bosnian Islamic fighters during their Jihad which was blessed by President Bill Clinton I come from a member state of the European Union which is meant to uphold the rights of all religions, political ideologies, acknowledge national and cultural rights, and is meant to spread “European brotherhood.” However, it appears that this does not apply to the Orthodox Christians of Bosnia and Kosovo respectively because not only have they been abandoned but outside Islamic powers are stepping up their Islamization agenda in both Bosnia and Kosovo. In Kosovo the de-Christianization of the Orthodox Christian community continues and hundreds of Orthodox...

The former Croatian president Stjepan Mesic is just one of some 6,000 Croatian retirees receiving pensions from Serbia, the Serbian press has reported. These people used to work in Serbia and have paid contributions to the country’s fund for pension and disability insurance (PIO Fond). The director of public relations sector of the PIO Fond Jelica Timotijevic says that all of those who had worked for the presidency of the former Yugoslavia, for example – and have later become state officials and politicians in their own countries – have a right to a Serbian pension based on individual agreements between...

Mark Imblum Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC) at the US Embassy in Sofia. Interview with Mark Imblum, Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US Embassy in Sofia, for the Bulgaria-US Survey of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency)Mark Imblum, a Commander in the US Navy, is the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A former helicopter pilot, he now serves the US Navy as a Foreign Area...

PRAGUE — At least seven people have been charged with participating in an international organ-trafficking network based in Kosovo that sold kidneys and other organs from impoverished victims for up to $200,000 to patients from as far away as Israel and Canada, police and senior European Union officials said Monday.

.... Americans out there still think it’s merely a coincidence that everything we touch turns to Islam, think again. Anyone who finds it strange that 9/11 led not to increased restrictions on people, money and influence flowing into America from the Middle East but to increased openness to these will be interested to know that in 9/11 our government saw not a formidable enemy to be dealt with, but a new market to be tapped....

The Hague - A witness for the prosecution testifying in the trial of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, told the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), that the Bosnian Muslim army at least on one occasion fired at their own people to blame the Serbs during 1992-1995 war. Canadian general David Fraser, who served with the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, told the tribunal that Bosnian Serbs shelled the capital Sarajevo “excessively and unselectively” during 44-month siege, But “at least in one case”, it was determined that a mortar fired from Muslim positions hit the centre

Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac were two friends who grew up together sharing the common bond of basketball. Together, they lifted the Yugoslavian National team to unimaginable heights. After conquering Europe, they both went to America where they became the first two foreign players to attain NBA stardom. But with the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, Yugoslavia split up. A war broke out between Petrovic's Croatia and Divac's Serbia. Long buried ethnic tensions surfaced. And these two men, once brothers, were now on opposite sides of a deadly civil war. As Petrovic and Divac continued to...

...In the somewhat intellectually perverse foreign policy salons of New York and Washington, the more ties a Balkan politician has to drug smuggling, human trafficking, and al-Qaeda, the bigger their fan club is likely to be.....

Serbfest celebrates Serbian traditions and Eastern Orthodox beliefs. But the priest at Holy Trinity Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church, which was established a century ago, also made a point Saturday to express his love of the United States. "The more you know about America, the more you love it," the Rev. Radomir Chkautovich, who fled socialist Yugoslavia in 1963, said with an accent. Chkautovich, a retired U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and chaplain, regularly leads tours of his church during Serbfest to explain its history and Serbian traditions....

BELGRADE -- A commemorative service was held in Belgrade to mark 15 years since the Croatian military Operation Storm and the exodus of ethnic Serbs from that country. Serbian president Boris Tadic, right, attends the service (Tanjug) Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Irinej held the service before a number of officials, including Serbian President Boris Tadich, Deputy Prime Minister Jovan Krkobabich and General Secretary of the Serbian parliament Veljko Odalovich, as well as many people who gathered on the occasion. "We have gathered here today to remember in prayer the people killed 15 years ago, who were guilty first of being...

...."In the case of non-compliance... for example challenges to fundamentals of the Bosnia and Herzegovina state, the [envoy] will be able to recommend to the EU High Representative [Lady Ashton] that Council impose travel bans and/or the freezing of assets in the EU," said the paper seen by The Daily Telegraph. "This option should be made more accessible by a Council decision to impose a travel ban on those individuals who have challenged key provisions." European diplomats have confirmed that the new measures will be used against "anyone deemed to be obstructive", including Milorad Dodik, the elected prime Bosnian Serb...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The United Nations' highest court said Thursday that Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia did not break international law. The judges voted 10-4 to pass the nonbinding opinion, setting the stage for Kosovo to renew its appeals for further international recognition. The opinion, read by International Court of Justice President Hisashi Owada, says international law contains no "prohibition on declarations of independence" and therefore Kosovo's declaration "did not violate general international law."

Ramadan Ramadani, Imam of the Isa-Bey Mosque in Skopje (Photo: Maja Zlatevska, Dnevnik ) Western diplomats and religious experts have voiced concerns about the spread of radical Islam among Muslim communities in the Balkans, after it transpired that alleged Wahabist radicals are operating and increasing their influence in Macedonia. The foreign-inspired religious group is active in the area around Skopje, Macedonia's capital. It has tried to perform a putsch in the Islamic religious community (IRC) after an incident in the Isa-Bey Mosque in Skopje last week. The Isa-Bey Mosque has turned into a stronghold of radical Islam, Ibrahim Shabani, Skopje's...

Forced to have sex with as many as 10 men every day, women clandestinely interviewed by MSNBC.com as part of a four-month investigation into the sex trade ran by ethnic Albanians, insisted that their real identities not be revealed. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/4138089#4138089 (Warning: Some of this testimony is pretty graphic)

The Israeli government is blaming IHH extremists for the violence that erupted onboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara when troops boarded it at sea on Monday. In this photo of the ship before setting sail, a white and green IHH banner is draped on the hull, between Turkish and Palestinian flags. (Photo: IHH) The Turkish organization responsible for the ill-fated attempt to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip is part of an Islamic “charitable” network that was designated by the U.S. government in 2008 for funding Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza. Although the State Department points out...

The Hague, 10 June (AKI) – A United Nations tribunal on Thursday sentenced two Bosnian Serbs to life in prison for committing genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslim civilians. The UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found that Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara guilty for their role in the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the eastern town of Srebrenica in July 1995. The court jailed five other defendants for between five and 35 years in jail. The case is the largest yet at the tribunal, set up to deal with...

<p>Looking back in hindsight, one can always find things that perfectly portended the future. Note the date of this article - 1988 - BEFORE any of the republics seceded from Yugoslavia and the wars of the 1990s began.</p> <p>A group of American-Croatians called a small but decorous press conference in the Bismarck Hotel last week to speak from the American heartland about strife in their homeland thousands of miles away.</p>