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When the United States and its key European allies ignored Russia’s protests and recognized Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blithely insisted that the Kosovo situation was unique and set no international precedent whatsoever. Prominent members of the foreign policy communities in Europe and the United States echoed her argument. Moscow’s August 26 decision to recognize the independence of Georgia’s separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia demonstrates the arrogant folly of that position. In just a matter of months, the Kosovo precedent has backfired on the United States and generated dangerous tensions...

DENVER — As Democrats arrived here Sunday for a convention intended to promote party unity, mistrust and resentments continued to boil among top associates of presumptive nominee Barack Obama and his defeated rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.One flashpoint is the assigned speech topic for former president Bill Clinton, who is scheduled to speak Wednesday night, when the convention theme is “Securing America’s Future.” The night’s speakers will argue that Obama would be a more effective commander in chief than his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).The former president is disappointed, associates said, because he is eager to speak about the economy...

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbia's foreign minister said the link is clear — U.S. and Western support for Kosovo's secession from Serbia has helped fuel tensions in Georgia's separatist province of South Ossetia. Minister Vuk Jeremic was quoted by the Vecernje Novosti daily on Thursday as saying the recognition of Kosovo's independence on Feb. 17 by the United States and its NATO allies has "destabilized" other parts of the world. "We have pointed out to the international community from the very start that the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo could present a dangerous precedent," Vuk Jeremic was quoted as...

Over the past few years, perhaps no film controversy has inspired more outrage from conservatives than the Walt Disney Company’s handling of the ambitious 2006 miniseries “The Path to 9/11.” In the wake of Michael Moore’s 2004 anti-Bush documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the 2003 CBS biopic “The Reagans,” the Disney censorship fiasco has been a frequent bone of contention on right-wing blogs, AM talk radio and other media outlets. In addition to making cuts in its ABC-TV telefilm after complaints from political forces, the company also shelved plans for a subsequent DVD release. --snip-- Now the imbroglio has been revived...

In Hollywood docudramas, when the phrase "miscarriage of justice" is employed, it usually applies to the film's subject, not its creators. But a new documentary called "Blocking the Path to 9/11," to be given a screening tonight, makes the case that former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton have pressured television and studio executives into quashing the DVD release of ABC's 2006 miniseries “The Path to 9/11." The privately financed documentary argues that the Clintons, who decried the original miniseries as a right-wing hatchet job, are out to salvage their political influence and legacy at the expense of...

DENVER (AP/CBS4) An advocacy group for Somali immigrants has cautioned against linking terrorism to a man found dead in a Denver hotel with a pound of highly toxic sodium cyanide in his room. U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Thursday terrorism couldn't be ruled out, but that it was not indicated in the investigation. Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, of Ottawa was found dead Monday, and police say a powder found in his room was cyanide. The cause of death hasn't been established. Police say they don't suspect foul play and the FBI says there's no apparent connection to terrorism. The...

During the recent Tyson Chicken controversy, I published an article at FrontPage in which I argued that Tyson and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) should not have agreed to make Eid al-Fitr a paid day off for employees at the Tyson plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, on the grounds that it set a bad precedent for accommodation of Islamic practices at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood is pressing forward a stealth jihad agenda of trying to impose Islamic Sharia law bit by bit and make American businesses and individuals grow used to the idea that Muslims must...

It has the makings of international intrigue. Less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention a man has been found dead in a Denver hotel room with a container of what authorities initially suspect to be the deadly poison cyanide. Adding to the intrigue is that the dead man, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, appears to be from outside the U.S. No passport was found on Dirie, who is believed to have entered the country from Canada. A large container of a white powdery substance was found in the man's room on the fourth floor of the Burnsley Hotel at...

New York (AP) -- No criminal prosecutions are planned for former Justice Department officials accused of allowing politics to influence the hiring of prosecutors, immigration judges and other career government lawyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday. Mukasey used his sharpest words yet to criticize the senior leaders who took part in or failed to stop illegal hiring practices during the tenure of his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales. But, he told delegates to the American Bar Association annual meeting, "Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only...

Belgrade, 11 August (AKI) – The deadly conflict between Russia and Georgia in the breakaway province of South Ossetia is an indirect result of Kosovo's declaration of independence in February, Serbian analysts and politicians said on Monday. “If there wasn’t a ‘Kosovo precedent’, as the greatest world powers headed by the United States called the secession of a part of Serbian territory, there wouldn’t have been a war in South Ossetia,” Oliver Ivanovic, Serbian government official in charge of Kosovo told the Belgrade daily Blic. Ivanovic said that Kosovo's example was “inspiring to South Ossetia, so they wanted to strain...

WARSAW -- Polish analysts and a part of the political scene are linking the South Ossetia crisis to that in Kosovo, Beta says. The current armed conflict in the breakaway Georgian region is seen as the Russian answer to the western recognition of Kosovo Albanians' unilateral declaration of independence, the Polish media are saying. "This is the Russian answer to the recognition of Kosovo. That recognition was in fact a gift to Russia," Polish People's Party European MP Janusz Wojciechowski told TVN24. Wojciechowski, whose party is a partner in Donald Tusk's cabinet, warned that the case of Kosovo, where a...

The Italian police has arrested four Tunisians and a Moroccan on suspicion of recruiting Islamic fighters for Iraq and Afghanistan. ... Police say the recruits were trained in Bosnia.

A roadside explosion in Mogadishu on Sunday killed at least 13 people, most of them women who were sweeping a street, witnesses said. Residents said a remotely detonated device exploded in Waberi district along a main road leading to the presidential palace. Nearly 50 people were wounded... Four people died in the emergency room at the main Madina hospital... Insurgents have launched near-daily attacks on the transitional administration and its Ethiopian military allies. Somalia has not had a functioning central government since 1991. On Friday a roadside bomb killed a Ugandan member of a small African Union peacekeeping force based...

National Post, April 08, 2004 We bombed the wrong side? by Lewis MacKenzie Five years ago our television screens were dominated by pictures of Kosovo-Albanian refugees escaping across Kosovo's borders to the sanctuaries of Macedonia and Albania. Shrill reports indicated that Slobodan Milosevic's security forces were conducting a campaign of genocide and that at least 100,000 Kosovo-Albanians had been exterminated and buried in mass graves throughout the Serbian province. NATO sprung into action and, in spite of the fact no member nation of the alliance was threatened, commenced bombing not only Kosovo, but the infrastructure and population of Serbia itself...

BEIJING (AFP) - The Beijing Olympics were plunged into another controversy on Wednesday as China announced a backflip on Internet freedoms for the thousands of foreign reporters covering the Games. China's decision to reverse a pledge on allowing unfettered web access proved an embarrassment for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which had repeatedly said foreign press would not face any Internet curbs in Beijing. It was also the latest in a long line of issues to have tarnished the run-up to the Olympics, which start on August 8, following controversies over pollution, human rights and terrorism threats. Beijing Olympic organising...

A friend of mine once said, "Sincerity is a wonderful thing. Once you learn to fake that, you've got it made." So true about Obama's humble, religious gaffe at the Holy Wall. (IsraelNN.com) Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's campaign seems to have purposely leaked the contents of the note that he placed in the Kotel, web magazine Israel Insider wrote Tuesday. While Israel's Hebrew newspaper Maariv came under fire for publishing the note, "it now appears that Maariv had collaborated with the Obama campaign in getting the 'private' prayer, with its 'modest' supplication to the Lord, out to the public,...

Lord Ashdown's warning about the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina � which was intended to rouse Europe's capitals from their "comfortable slumber" � certainly dampened the optimism that accompanied last week's arrest of Radovan Karadzic. However, in attributing the problems facing Bosnia and Herzegovina to the actions of Bosnia's Serbs, Lord Ashdown overlooked � intentionally or not � several broader issues that continue to undermine the state's viability. From the fiscal frailty of one of Bosnia and Herzegovina's two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to persistent discord amongst Bosnia's Croats, the country is beset by a number of...

A Hellenic Case Against Hillary by Theodore G. Karakostas The following critique is not motivated by partisanship. I am a critic of the anti-Hellenic and anti-Orthodox policies of both major political parties. However, the focus now is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. In 1992, then Presidential Candidate Bill Clinton promised the Greek-American community he would not recognize Skopje with the name Macedonia. In 1994, the Clinton administration broke its promise and subsequently recognized Skopje under the Hellenic name of Macedonia. The Clinton administration subsequently tried to pressure Athens to lift the embargo that had been justifiably imposed by Greece...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — In his seventh of month of U.S. captivity, Osama bin Laden's driver told a pair of FBI agents that it was America's fault that the al Qaida leader was alive. The message was, ''You had these opportunities, America. You didn't do anything,'' FBI agent George Crouch Jr. testified Friday at Salim Hamdan's war crimes trial. The United States could have killed bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, before he moved to Afghanistan in 1996, Hamdan told his interrogators. They could have killed him after al Qaida's 1998 twin bombings at the U.S. Embassy bombings in...

24 July 2008 Pristina _ The Islamic Community of Kosovo says that many Muslim states are to recognise Pristina’s independence from Serbia in the very near future. Naim Ternava, the head of Kosovo’s Islamic Community, said Thursday that this organisation is lobbying for the further recognition of Kosovo’s independence. “We are working hard, together with Kosovo’s institutions, to make sure many Islamic countries recognise Kosovo,” Ternava said. He made the comment after meeting Kosovo’s Parliament speaker Jakup Krasniqi. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on February 17, an act that has been recognised by 43 countries so far. However recognitions have...