Free Republic

Iranian embassy staff in the Albanian capital worked through the night after they were given 24 hours to leave the country over a major cyberattack that the Albanian government blames on Iran. It is the first known case of a country cutting diplomatic relations over a cyberattack. Movement inside the Iranian embassy in Tirana continued nonstop from Wednesday into Thursday. An empty barrel was seen taken into the compound and later a fire was started in it, apparently burning documents. A diplomatic car went in and out, while an Albanian police officer communicated with the embassy before two officers entered...

Ninety-nine years ago today, April 25, in the very early hours before dawn, some 1200 kilometers from Jerusalem, members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – or ANZACs – landed on the western shore of the Gallipoli Peninsula, in modern-day Turkey, at a place we now call Anzac Cove. At roughly the same time, British forces landed at the southern tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, at Cape Helles, whilst French forces went ashore at Kum Kale, on the Turkish mainland just opposite Cape Helles. Indian and Canadian troops later joined the campaign. This multinational invasion force was to...

was like something from a film - what started as a farce ended as a tragedy. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo on June 28 1914, someone threw a bomb at him but it missed. Gavrilo Princip was meant to shoot him there and then but couldn’t get a clear shot. So he went to sulk in a café instead. It was only when Ferdinand’s car later went down the same street by the same café and got stuck in the road - that Princip took his chance and shot the Archduke dead. But what if Princip had missed?...

The shot that changed the world rang out on a sunny summer's morning in Southeastern Europe. No one knew then that the assassin's bullet would spell the death not just of an Austrian aristocrat but the entire global order, with four empires and millions of lives lost in a conflict on a scale never before seen.. Exactly 100 years ago Saturday, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife, Sophie, were shot at close range by a young Serbian nationalist on the streets of Sarajevo. The assassination set off a chain reaction that, barely a...

Archduke Franz Ferdinand is best known as the man whose assassination is widely believed to have led to the outbreak of World War I. But behind that figure lies a story of forbidden love, an obsession with hunting, and a near-miss that could have killed the archduke months before he was shot dead with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo 100 years ago.