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"More details have emerged about the arrest in Prague on Sunday of a person described by the Swedish media as "Osama bin Laden's man in Sweden." The man, a 39-year-old Swede of Lebanese origin, is now in custody awaiting a decision on whether extradition proceedings can begin against him. " ~snip~ "Mr Kassir was on a Czech Airlines flight from Stockholm to Beirut, where he hoped to be reunited with members of his family. The plane had a brief stopover in Prague, and as soon as he stepped onto Czech soil he was approached by members of an elite police...

Cracow tops Prague in popularity 07.03.2006 Cracow has topped Prague in popularity. For the first time ever, more tourists visited Cracow than Prague in 2005. Some 8 million tourists came to Cracow and 3.5m of them stayed at least one night in hotels. According to Andrzej Kozlowski, the former head of the Polish Tourist Organisation, this increase in popularity is the result of promotional and marketing efforts, as well as the plethora of budget airlines flying to Poland. "Prague was trendy - so everyone went to Prague. Now the trend has moved over to Cracow," says Mr Kozlowski.

Russia morally responsible for 1968 invasion: Putin Wed Mar 1, 2006 2:47 PM ET PRAGUE (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday his country bore a moral responsibility for the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, but stopped short of offering an apology that many Czechs have long sought. The invasion ended the pro-democracy movement known as the "Prague Spring" and put the country firmly under Moscow's thumb. "We do not bear any legal responsibility, but the moral responsibility is there," Putin said at a news conference in Prague after arriving on Wednesday as part of a trip to...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 8:11 a.m. The Butcher with the Terror Ties The evidence mounts. Drip, drip, drip. Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics’ efforts to whitewash Baghdad’s ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: “There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq.” Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a “nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss...

PRAGUE--On Oct. 27, 2001, the New York Times reported (erroneously) that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta "flew to the Czech Republic on April 8 and met with [an] Iraqi intelligence officer," helping to give credence to the so-called Prague connection. It subsequently cast doubt on it, editorializing in November 2005 that the alleged meeting between the hijacker and the Iraqi was part of President Bush and his team's "rewriting of history" based on nothing more than a false tale "from an unreliable drunk." But was the putative Prague connection solely an invention of the Bush administration--or was it the product of...

ATTA IN PRAGUE [Andy McCarthy] Ed Epstein has stayed on the case and has done the 9/11 Commission one better: he has actually conducted something resembling an investigation into whether the top hijacker met with in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent five months before 9/11. Ed’s report on what he found out, after traveling to the Czech Republic and meeting with the BIS (i.e., Czech Intelligence) officials who were personally involved in the matter is featured in the Wall Street Journal this morning (registration required). His article will not be good news for the Richard Clarkes of Clinton revision-world,...

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Former President Clinton praised former members of the Soviet bloc in the Baltic states and eastern Europe for moving to democracy, but said "we're going through a critical period" on the future of Kosovo. The Serbian province populated by ethnic Albanians and Serbs has been run by the United Nations since NATO's 1999 air war against Yugoslavia, later renamed Serbia-Montenegro. Kosovo wants full independence; Serbia refuses to give it. As president, Clinton ordered the bombing of Serbian targets to force former President Slobodan Milosevic to end a crackdown on armed ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Clinton...

Under Downtown Prague Volume 58 Number 6, November/December 2005 by Nick Holdsworth The Czech Republic's biggest excavation reveals layers of history.(Courtesy Archaia) Every Czech school child knows the story. Prague was a crowded medieval city bursting at the seams when, in 1348, its problem was solved at a stroke by the brilliance of Charles IV. The greatest of Czech kings ordained that a massive swathe of farmland around the walled city should become a new urban space called Nove Mesto, or New Town. The Prague we know today is said to be largely a product of Charles IV's effort at...

PRAGUE, Sept. 27 - The special police unit arrived in the darkness, carrying submachine guns and taking positions around an unmarked cargo truck parked beside a nuclear reactor. The doors to the reactor swung open and a forklift hurried three large steel casks onto the truck. Each container held several fuel rods of highly enriched uranium, potent enough for use in a nuclear bomb. As the city slept, the truck and its armed escorts slipped away from the reactor, at a Czech Technical University campus on the outskirts of the city, and passed through deserted streets, stopping at last...

The background: On April 21, 2001, the CIA's liaison officer at the U.S. Embassy in Prague was briefed by the Czech counterintelligence service (known by its Czech acronym, BIS) about an extraordinary development in a spy case that concerned both the United States and the Czech Republic. The subject of the briefing was Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the consul at Iraq's embassy in Prague. .... So when al-Ani replaced Salim at the Iraq Embassy in Prague in 1999, both the United States and the Czech Republic wanted him closely watched in case he had a similar assignment. The BIS...

THE ONGOING CONTROVERSY over the Able Danger project deepened this week when two more sources from the U.S. Army data-mining project came forward. Navy Captain Scott Phillpott and civilian contractor James Smith joined Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer in claiming that Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as potential al Qaeda operatives well before the attacks. Phillpott specifically told the New York Times when he went public that Able Danger made that connection between January and February of 2000, 19 months before the attack. --Snip-- Czech intelligence had kept a close eye on Iraqi envoy Ahmed Khalil...

http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm ABC's Four Corners Timeline [This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm] Broadcast Monday, 12 November 2001 Timeline The early years 1968 Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta is born (he gives his birthdate as September 1), in Kafr el Sheikh, a city on the Nile delta in Egypt to a middle class, educated family. His father is a lawyer and he hastwo sisters (also educated, one is now a professor and the other is a doctor).The family moves to Abdeen in Cairo where Atta grows up and attends the Mustafa Kamal Middle School. Those who knew him as a...

We've heard the excuse for not including the Able Danger information in the 9/11 Commission Report before. It's basically the same excuse the commission staff used to discount reports that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official.

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."  U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, CubaFOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or...

Piano Man hunt switches to Prague By David Sapsted (Filed: 30/05/2005) The hunt to establish the identity of the "Piano Man" switched to Prague yesterday on the basis of a 22-year-old picture of a teenager with a stocking over his head. The name Tomas Strnad has came to the fore as a possible identity for the mute man found wandering by a beach on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, almost two months ago who reportedly "comes alive" when he plays the piano. The picture of Mr Strnad, reproduced yesterday in a tabloid newspaper, was supplied by Klaudius Kryspin, a Czech...

Payouts due for Prague victims Soviet tanks remained in Czechoslovakia until 1991 Victims of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia are to receive compensation from the Czech government. President Vaclav Klaus approved a law allowing descendants of those killed to ask for a one-off payment of up to 150,000 koruna (£3,400 or 5,000 euros). Those injured or raped by members of the invading armies between 20 August 1968 and 27 June 1991 can claim around 70,000 koruna (£1,587 or 2,331 euros). The 1968 invasion put an abrupt end to the "Prague Spring" liberal reforms. Moscow feared liberalisation in Czechoslovakia would...

Communists buried legacy of Soviet General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov and his battalion of POWs that helped free Prague from the Nazis Some six decades ago, Prague Castle hosted one of the most extraordinary events in the city's long history. A conference held Nov. 14, 1944, in the Castle's Spanish Hall brought together Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, a Soviet General (indeed the "Savior of Moscow," who had stopped the Nazi armies from taking that city three years earlier) and much of the Nazi upper echelon. Vlasov would convince the Nazis to back a plan he had devised -- a last-ditch effort to...

WASHINGTON, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Mohammed Atta, a suspected pilot in Sept. 11 attacks, discussed plans to blow up the Radio Free Europe building in Prague when he met an Iraqi agent there earlier this year, the Czech Prime Minister said on Friday. "Atta contacted some Iraq agent, not to prepare the terrorist attack on twins (the World Trade Center twin towers), but to prepare a terrorist attack on just the building of Radio Free Europe," Czech leader Milos Zeman told CNN. "There were some plans to use the truck standard explosives to destroy the building," said Zeman, who is ...

We did it... We protested churchill. There was a collection of pro-Churchill moonbats that showed up, and we protested them as well.