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Irish police arrested a man in Dublin earlier this week who they suspected of being an ISIS extremist and who had been under surveillance since he was deported from Turkey. Last Thursday the suspect attempted to fly from Dublin to Istanbul, but he was sent back to Ireland as authorities in the Turkish city felt that there were “irregularities” with the Eastern European passport he was using. On his return to Dublin, Irish police (Gardaí) made the decision not to arrest him but placed the man in his 30s under surveillance as he left Dublin airport. Earlier this week, however,...

Germany and Cuba have signed framework accords to formalize future ties. Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s visit to Havanna is the first by a German foreign minister since Germany’s reunification 25 years ago. Thursday’s signing by Steinmeier and his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez, involved two documents intended to open regular consultations between their ministries and cultural exchanges. They also contained an acknowledgment of human rights, an issue raised by Amnesty International, which is critical of Cuban clamps of freedoms of expression. Steinmeier’s trip comes just days ahead of the intended reopening by Cuba and the US of their embassies. President Barack Obama announced...

A French anti-Semitism watchdog group reports that a Jewish family was attacked and robbed in their suburban home Wednesday. According to the National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism (BNVCA) report, three masked men, described as of African descent, broke into a home in Le Blanc-Mesnil, a few kilometers outside of Paris. They then held the parents and son captive while they searched the home. The criminals allegedly told the family that they chose to break into the apartment “because they are Jewish and Jews have money.” …

Awful. Let’s go to the videotape (starts around 1:50 mark): What an absolute slap in the face to the memories — and the families — of the four French Jews murdered in cold blood last month. Newsflash, Mr. President — these weren’t just “a bunch of folks” who were “randomly” shot “in a deli”; they were targeted by an Islamic extremist.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Tuesday criticized Israel’s opposition to the nuclear deal agreed upon by six world powers and Iran, Reuters reported. According to the report, Steinmeier said the agreement would help contribute to security in the Middle East. “This is a responsible deal and Israel should also take a closer look at it and not criticize the agreement in a very coarse way,” he was quoted as having told German broadcaster ARD. …

As numbers of refugees entering Germany reach record highs, police have warned that they are struggling to cope with the growing demands on their time and resources. Speaking in Berlin on Monday, Bundespolizei (federal police) chief Dieter Romann said officials have seized over 63,000 people who entered the country illegally so far this year—with around 3,000 cases recorded last weekend alone. The total for this year so far has already eclipsed last year’s sum of 57,000, which had previously been the highest level since German reunification in 1990. […] The most numerous are those from Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan, although...

... Bokas also does installation and repair jobs — and half of those involve cash deals with no receipts for his labor. The result is that a job costing 250 euros ($275) goes for 125 euros because he doesn’t charge the client sales tax and Bokas doesn’t report the income for taxation. “I’ve got a receipt for everything I sell in my shop,” Bokas said. But tax officials “don’t know what my hands do.”

A new group has been established in Ireland to campaign on behalf of the undocumented Irish in America. The group, called The Families of the Undocumented Irish in America, will be chaired by Bundoran man Michael McMahon. Speaking after the launch, Mr. McMahon said: “For far too long, successive Irish governments have sat on their hands and failed to support their citizens living in America. The current American administration has exhausted all avenues to introduce comprehensive immigration reform at this stage, but I am hopeful that the issue will resurface during and after the coming Presidential election campaign. However, there...

As European Union leaders push Greece for more austerity reforms, Athens enters political crisis and social media erupts in response. A two-day emergency meeting on Greece’s economic future ended Sunday with strict conditions from the European Union, including contentious austerity reforms, if it wants a new bailout and keep the euro. To meet the conditions for fresh aid packages and a third bailout that Greece needs to avoid bankruptcy, European finance ministers want Greece to pass a series of austerity measures--including tax and pension reforms-- through Parliament and put them into law by Wednesday. Greece will also have to lose...

Britain receives less than half the money it puts into the EU back as subsidies thanks to the ongoing Eurozone crisis, a new report has found. The report also found that British households could be as much as £933 a year better off if Britain left the EU. The think tank which compiled the report advised that staying within the EU poses “serious risks”.The comprehensive new report from Business for Britain, runs to a mammoth 1,032 pages, has found that, between 1976 and 2003 the average return from Britain’s financial input into the EU was 68 per cent, meaning that,...

An anti-Islamic group founded in Germany, which it emerges now has an Irish branch, is objecting to the building of a mosque in Tralee, County Kerry. The group denies it is racist, but says it wants to save Ireland from Islam. It is to launch a political party shortly. Kerry is the rural county with the biggest population of Muslims outside the main cities, such as Cork and Dublin. Killarney already has an Islamic cultural center. However, it has no full mosque. The second attempt in recent years to construct a mosque in Tralee on a large site is now...

A driver has been arrested for killing two people and shooting at others before fleeing in his convertible, rocking the small Bavarian town of Tiefenthal. In Germany, how easy is it to get a gun?

Western planemakers look set to reap billions of dollars in deals with Iran, if a deal is done on its nuclear program to allow one of the world’s most promising aviation markets to come out of quarantine. Iran and six world powers were struggling on Friday to remove the last obstacles to an historic deal in Vienna that could resolve a more than 12-year dispute over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, extending talks through the weekend. For Tehran, the prospect of sweeping economic sanctions and a long-standing U.S. trade embargo being lifted represents a chance to renew a fleet whose average age...

Bad ideas take a long time to die Since the start of the 21st Century, the leftward lurch in Latin America has been unmistakable. By early 2008, the nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and, to a certain extent, Mexico and Peru, have all embraced center-left political parties or movements. The reason for the tilt is a familiar one: the siren song of government-mandated wealth redistribution and increased levels of social spending have resonated with people with a long history of economic and development troubles. “I think it’s difficult for conservative candidates to...

London mourned the dead and the mutilated on the tenth anniversary of the massacre of 7 July 2005. Fifty-six victims at the hands of suicide bombers with birth certificates from Luton, Bradford, Manchester. A few days ago, at a beach on the Mediterranean, Jihad returned to kill thirty Englishmen. But ten years later, they still do not get it. We did not understand that the terror that struck the British metropolis was a war, not the idea of ​​a few fanatics, but the vocation of choice of the best examples of integration, boys and girls, Muslims who attended the Foremarke...

The German-American friendship no longer exists. It may still remain between citizens of both countries, but not between their governments. Perhaps it has always been an illusion; perhaps the United States pulled away over the course of time. But what binds these two nations today cannot be considered friendship. Openness and fairness are part of the essence of friendship, which is about mutual respect and trust. A quarter century after the United States helped the German people restore their national unity, little remains of this friendship. As new documents from WikiLeaks and reporting by Spiegel show, the NSA has been...

The U.N. Security Council delayed a vote on a British-drafted resolution that would condemn the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war as “a crime of genocide” until Wednesday after Russia informed council members it would veto the measure. Supporters of the resolution had been hoping for its unanimous approval to mark the 20th anniversary of the slaughter by Bosnian Serbs of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys who had sought refuge at what was supposed to be a U.N.-protected site. But leaders of the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia, who have close religious and cultural ties to Russia, have...

Hundreds of ISIS members could infiltrate Europe together with masses of refugees from Libya, Syria, and Iraq—ironically fleeing ISIS terror in their homelands, said Michele Coninsx, head of the EU’s judicial cooperation agency Eurojust. Speaking Monday in Brussels, Coninsx told reporters that the EU was working together with other countries to prevent the migration of ISIS terrorists. She declined to specify exactly what steps were being taken. A video released last week by ISIS in Libya and published by the Arabic-language Asharq al-Awsat shows the two perpetrators of a deadly attack on the Corinthia Hotel in January threatening that ISIS’s...

ISIS has threatened to flood Europe with half a million migrants from Libya in a 'psychological' attack against the West, it was claimed today. Transcripts of telephone intercepts published in Italy claim to provide evidence that ISIS is threatening to send 500,000 migrants simultaneously out to sea in hundreds of boats in a 'psychological weapon' against Europe if there is military intervention against them in Libya. Many would be at risk of drowning with rescue services unable to cope. But authorities fear that if numbers on this scale arrived, European cities could witness riots. Separately, the militants hope to cement...

The speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, has told a Dublin audience of his determination to overcome Republican resistance to immigration reform. Mr. Boehner also told how Taoiseach Enda Kenny has harangued him on the matter, telling him how the lack of reform has left some Irish immigrants listening to a parent’s funeral by phone. His remarks indicate he may yet move to confront opponents of reform within his own Republican party, which is in the vanguard of resistance to it and has a majority in the House. […] Imitating Mr. Kenny, Mr. Boehner said he was...