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Federal prosecutors have brought charges against a former worker at Germany’s foreign intelligence agency who is suspected of passing information to American spies. The 32-year-old former Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) worker is accused of treason, infringing official secrets and corruption after passing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in exchange for cash. […] The alleged spy joined the BND in 2007 and worked for the CIA from 2008, they said. He passed documents and confidential internal information about the work and personnel of the BND to his American handlers in exchange for payments totaling €95,000. A search of the accused’s computer...

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is reportedly resigning, and Greece will hold snap elections on September 20. According to Reuters, which cites a Greek government official, Tsipras will hand in his resignation on Thursday. Reuters added that Greece was likely to hold snap elections on September 20, less than a year after Tsipras and Greece's left-wing Syriza party were voted into power in late January. Tsipras is set to make an address later on Thursday. The Greek newspaper Kathimerini had earlier reported that elections would most likely be announced on Thursday. This latest round of elections come as Syriza has...

Greece saw 21,000 migrants and refugees arrive in the last week, while about 107,000 arrived in Europe in July Hungary is planning on sending hundreds of soldiers to Serbian border to help stem the flow of people Meanwhile Turkish tourist shops are now doing a roaring trade selling lifejackets to the migrants risking their lives This morning alone, five refugees died in the sea off the coast of Bodrum while trying to reach the island of Kos Greece has pleaded for help to deal with the daily influx of migrants arriving on its shores as it is revealed more than...

Germany expects to receive up to 800,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, a new record, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Wednesday, as he urged action from the European level on the crisis. "This development is a challenge for us all," de Maiziere told reporters as he announced the new official estimate. Berlin had previously expected 500,000 asylum-seekers to arrive this year. Germany, the EU's most populous country and top economy, has struggled to accommodate a flood of asylum-seekers from war zones such as Syria but also from countries without military conflict in southeastern Europe, including Albania, Serbia and Kosovo. ......

A man who hid under a sink from the Charlie Hebdo gunmen for eight hours has accused French media of endangering his life. Paris prosecutors have opened an inquiry into broadcasters' handling of January's police siege of the Kouachi brothers, who had previously killed 12 people at the satirical paper's offices. Graphic designer Lilian Lepère, 26, hid in a cupboard under a sink in the printshop where he worked in Dammartin-en-Goële, near Paris, as police laid siege to Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. ... Lepère's sister Cindy confirmed in an interview with France 2 that her brother was probably inside and...

BERLIN — Germany's parliament overwhelmingly approved a third bailout for Greece on Wednesday, removing a key hurdle to providing new loans to the country and keeping it from defaulting on its debts in as little as 24 hours. The vote's result also seemed to dispel any speculation that Chancellor Angela Merkel would have difficulty getting her conservative bloc to sign on. Lawmakers voted 454-113 in favor, with 18 abstentions. The approval is among the last due from parliaments across Europe, with the Dutch scheduled to vote later Wednesday, after which Greece is expected to get the first installment of its...

Chancellor Angela Merkel today condemned a surge in German attacks on refugee shelters and warned that the issue of asylum could become a bigger challenge for the European Union than the Greek debt crisis. Asked about more than 200 arson attacks against homes for asylum-seekers seen in Germany this year as the country faces a record influx of refugees, Merkel said: "That is unworthy of our country." Merkel warned that waves of refugees would "preoccupy Europe much, much more than the issue of Greece and the stability of the euro". "The issue of asylum could be the next major European...

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on Tuesday that Europe must work out a fairer way of sharing refugees, days after Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that the refugee crisis would likely prove a greater political challenge for Europe than Greece. […] On Tuesday, business daily Handelsblatt reported that the federal government would release forecasts on Wednesday showing that it expects as many as 750,000 asylum seekers to arrive this year—an increase of two-thirds over the previous official estimate of 450,000. Sweden may take up to 74,000 asylum seekers this year, and took 13 percent of the European total in...

Outside the island's main police station, about 50 migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran threw stones and exchanged blows as tempers boiled over in the intense mid-summer heat. Riot police stood by without intervening. The migrants have little chance of getting aboard the ship, the Eleftherios Venizelos, as priority is being given to Syrians, who are treated as refugees as they are fleeing their country's civil war and have greater rights under international law than economic migrants. All have crossed the narrow stretch of water from Turkey in small boats and dinghies as they try to find a better life...

Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, has pledged to block any future attempts by the UN to hit Iran with fresh sanctions. "When Resolution 1929, the last series of sanctions resolutions, was adopted… we made it clear behind closed doors to our US and EU colleagues that Russia will not let another sanctions resolution against Iran be passed," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on Friday. Resolution 1929 was approved by the Security Council in June 2010, banning the supply of conventional weapons to Iran. It resulted in the suspension of Russia’s contract...

Martin Matishak, The Fiscal Times August 14, 2015 The Air Force didn’t help its long-standing argument that the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jet should be retired when the service announced this week it would deploy more of the aircraft to Europe this fall. The 23rd Wing at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia announced it will send 12 attack planes and crews to Central and Eastern European to bolster NATO’s “Operation Atlantic Resolve,” an ongoing show of military might meant to deter Russian aggression in the region. In March, the Air Force deployed a dozen A-10s from Davis-Monthan Air Force...

Discussion on the Greek bailout and implications for the EEC

The U.S. came within seconds of launching a nuclear strike on Russia ,unleashing WW3 during the coldest period of the Cold War, according to secret documents revealed by a historian. Washington and Russia came extremely close to a massive nuclear war because of a faulty 46-cent component that caused a computer glitch, according to the documents. The secret documents were revealed and detailed in a book by American author Eric Schlosser titled Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. The documents include over 1,000 accidents with nuclear weapons that occurred due to the negligence...

It does not bode well that an Obama administration that assures us that the nuclear deal with Iran will not be violated by the mullahs is clearly looking the other way as Iran’s ally Russia blatantly violates the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed with the former Soviet Union. The Obama White House is sitting on a Pentagon risk assessment report completed last month that states “that the breach involved a new missile that violates the limits set by the treaty. The treaty bans holding, producing, or flight-testing ground-launched ballistic or cruise missiles with ranges of between 310 miles...

Once thought dead and buried on the battlefields of Iraq, a muscular and militaristic "neoconservative" approach to US foreign policy is making a comeback. For most of the last decade, the "neocons" -- personified by former vice president Dick Cheney and ex-Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld -- have been out of office and out of fashion. But the 2016 presidential race has seen Republican candidates embrace ideas and advisors once ostracized for the catastrophes and hubris of George W. Bush's "preemptive war" in Iraq. During last week's Republican presidential debates, 17 candidates tripped over themselves to declare President Barack Obama weak...

A divided Hellenic parliament has approved a third bailout for the country in five years, amid protests in Athens. The tense vote has lead to divisions within the ruling Syriza party, with snap elections on the horizon. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was handed a pyrrhic victory early Friday after opposition legislators approved a 85-billion-euro ($94.8 billion) bailout to keep the country financially afloat. A clear majority of 222 MPs approved the 400-page text containing the bailout conditions - there were over 64 who voted against and 11 abstentions. However, only 118 of the 162 members of Tsipras' governing coalition...

Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State (IS) jihadists in northern Iraq have reported being attacked with chemical weapons, the German defense ministry said Thursday. “We have indications that there was an attack with chemical weapons” against the Peshmerga fighters that left many suffering from “respiratory irritation,” a ministry spokesman told AFP. […] IS has previously been accused of using chlorine against Kurdish forces in Iraq. In March, the autonomous Kurdish government in northern Iraq said it had evidence that the jihadist group used chlorine in a car bomb attack on January 23. …

Invasion of Europe news…. Dubi, North Bohemia, Aug 8 (ČTK) — Several hundred people from the Czech Republic and Germany protested against the arrival of refugees at the former customs building on the Czech-German border crossing Cinovec-Zinnwald today, Mayor Petr Pipal has told journalists. ... The Saxon town of Altenberg wants to accommodate the refugees in the former customs building. The capacity of the facility will be 110 places, while some 80 refugees from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are to be placed there. ... We are told the refugees will be allowed to leave the center for “walks” during...

UPDATE: The US Air Force confirmed that one of its F-16 fighter planes crashed in the forest near Engelmannsreuth, northern Bavaria on Tuesday morning. The pilot was able to escape serious harm using the aircraft's ejector seat.A statement from the 52nd Fighter Wing at Spangdahlem air base in western Germany said that the plane, part of the 480th Fighter Squadron, crashed at 9.38 am and that the pilot was able to eject safely. He also managed to jettison the plane's external fuel tanks safely over an unpopulated area. Bavarian police told AFP that a passerby found the slightly injured pilot...

Germany’s second-largest police union on Tuesday called for the reintroduction of internal European border controls and demanded more personnel to deal with a record flood of refugees. “From a policing point of view, a return to border controls would be the best of all measures,” said Rainer Wendt, chairman of the German Police Union (DpolG), in a newspaper interview. The union, which wants an extra 1,000 personnel, was later Tuesday to show Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière the “catastrophic conditions” for overworked police near the German-Austrian border. …