Free Republic

When Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) met online to elect a new party leadership in January, hackers carried out a series of massive attacks aimed at throwing the summit into chaos. The attacks picked up speed every time delegates were about to vote. According to CDU spokespeople, the assailants, operating mostly from abroad, bombarded the party’s website with internet traffic to overwhelm its server. At some point, they succeeded. The site collapsed and the livestream of the event cut out. In the end, the CDU managed to push the intruders out […] Yet the thwarted attack illustrates the...

SENIOR Eurocrats are secretly plotting to create a super-powerful EU president to realise their dream of abolishing ­Britain and other nation states, the Daily Express can reveal. A covert group of EU foreign ministers has drawn up plans for merging the jobs currently done by Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. The new bureaucrat, who would not be directly elected by voters, is set to get sweeping control over the entire EU and force member countries into ever-greater political and economic union.

FOURTEEN suspected al-Qaeda terrorists were detained in Brussels today before Gordon Brown was due to meet EU leaders. The sweep came just hours before a summit brought together the heads of the 27 EU countries in Brussels. One of the suspects is believed to be a suicide bomber mounting an operation "from which he was not expected to come back". It is thought a terror attack was being planned – but the target has not been revealed. Nearly 250 police officers raided 16 locations in the capital and one in the eastern city of Liege overnight. Computers, data storage equipment...

For Europe's Social Model to survive, the EU has to become economically more dynamic, European Commission President José Manuel Durão Barroso has said... Several of the comments from MEPs concerned a services directive which proposes to liberalise a range of services, including healthcare. A principle contained within the directive meaning that service providers are subject to the laws of their country of origin rather than where the service is actually provided has caused concern among left of centre politicians... Replying to these concerns, Mr Barroso said, "I do not think it is impossible to make the requirements of economic efficiency...

There is no longer supposed to be an American establishment. It is popularly believed to have died away circa 1965 though a few elderly WASPs can still be seen sunk in leather armchairs in New York clubs lamenting the state of the world. Such impressions are, however, misleading. It is in the nature of establishments that they are fully recognized and accurately classified only in retrospect. While the old WASP establishment was still a functioning conspiracy along the East Coast, everyone was publicly maintaining that unlike Britain (where the establishment is known by the slightly derisory term "the Great and...

Spain's new Socialist government will be quickly put to the test as Ireland makes a big push for the European Union to share more intelligence, beef up co-ordination on security issues and make fresh efforts to stem the flow of funds to banned terrorist organisations in the wake of last week's attacks in Spain that killed over 200 civilians. Bertie Ahern, Irish prime minister and current president of the EU's rotating presidency, has written to his European counterparts requesting much closer co-operation on counter-terrorism. Otto Schily, Germany's interior minister, yesterday called for a special meeting of EU interior ministers over...