Free Republic

The new think tank the European Council on Foreign Relations hopes to steer the European Union back onto the center of the world stage. Its 50 founding members include leading European intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash, Joschka Fischer, Brian Eno and Rem Koolhaas. The European Union is 50 years old this year, and two years into its mid-life crisis; ever since the resounding French and Dutch "no" votes against the European Constitution, the bloc has languished in stagnation, paralyzed by indecision and a lack of confidence. "The EU continues to underperform on the world stage," wrote former German Foreign...

“Trust in Trump’s America is gone.” The coronavirus crisis has caused a dramatic deterioration in the European public perception of the US and left many believing the EU had become “irrelevant”, new polling finds. The new survey by the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) says the pandemic has traumatized Europeans and left them “feeling alone and vulnerable”. The survey studied the views of Europeans towards the EU and notably its response to the coronavirus crisis and the results did not make for positive reading. “There is a powerful sense among citizens of almost all surveyed member states that their...

      Aktuell   China's participation in atomic smuggling Fissionable material for the coalition by  Matthias Gebauer The new dislosures about China's role in the sale of nuclear know-how has the discussions over the export of the Hanau fuel element plant boiling up again. Some Greens are threatening openly with the end of the coalition if Chancellor Schröder allows the deal to go through. MARCO-URBAN.DE Governing-Team Schröder/Fischer: Looking for a solution without losing face. Berlin - Green party leader Angelika Beer didn't want to say much about the Hanau topic during her press conference on Monday. "There isn't any new position",...

IRAN is facing an "international conspiracy" to over throw the Khomeinist re gime with a "velvet revolution," the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) claimed yesterday. The latest mascot of the plotters is supposed to be Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota now charged with espionage in Tehran. A US citizen with an Iranian father and a Japanese mother, the 31-year-old Roxana has worked in Iran on and off for years as a freelance reporter. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for Saberi's immediate release and safe return to the US. IRNA claims that the plot was first...

Wednesday morning, August 27, between 11 am and 1:30 pm EST or 9 am and 11:30 am mountain time, I'll be chairing a New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force event in Denver at the Colorado History Museum. The keynotes are Senator JOHN KERRY (D-MA), Obama National Security Adviser GREG CRAIG, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, former Congressman and Obama Adviser MEL LEVINE, former German Foreign Minister JOSCHKA FISCHER, and Aspen Institute President (and former CNN Chairman and CEO and TIME Managing Editor) Walter Isaacson. Our panel will be former Israeli negotiator and New America Foundation Senior Fellow...

Jan. 24, 2005 19:31 Germany's Fischer reaffirms commitment to Israel By JPOST.COM STAFF At the special session of the UN to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer began by saying, "The Shoah is the ultimate crime against humanity of the Twentieth Century." He said, "Democratic Germany has learned its lessons the Holocaust has left an indelible mark." Explaining one aspect of this indelible mark, Fischer reiterated Germany's commitment to the State of Israel. "The State of Israel's right to exist and its people to security will always remain nonnegotiable fixtures of German...

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer arrived in Washington on Monday for a three-day visit expected to focus on developments in Iraq as criticism mounts in Germany over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces. In a further sign of warming transatlantic ties in recent months, Fischer became the latest German leader to pay a visit to the U.S. capital on Monday evening. His visit -- expected to focus on developments in Iraq and the planned handover of power next month to an interim Iraqi administration in Baghdad -- however comes at a tense time. As the scandal over the...

GERMAN authorities overnight pardoned and released Hans-Joachim Klein, a former terrorist who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2001 for the killing of three people in a 1975 attack on an OPEC oil ministers' meeting. The Hesse state Justice Ministry said its decision to pardon Klein followed requests from "several citizens", whom it didn't identify. Klein was convicted on three counts of murder and three of attempted murder and hostage taking by a Frankfurt court in February 2001, following a trial at which German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer - an acquaintance of Klein during his youthful antiestablishment days...

Statement by Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom following meeting with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer Berlin, October 22, 2003 (Communicated by the Foreign Minister's Media Adviser) Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom with German FM Joschka Fischer in Berlin (Oct 22, 2003) I have just concluded a very constructive and important meeting with my good friend, Foreign Minister Fischer. Our discussions covered the full range of issues, including bilateral relations between Israel and Germany, the Middle East peace process and other regional issues of mutual concern. The Foreign Minister updated me on his visit to Tehran this week. I reiterated the cardinal importance...

BERLIN - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer asserted Wednesday that US policy in Iraq had failed while calling for German-American ties to be redefined on the basis of equal partners. "The American domino theory under which a liberated Iraq was supposed to stabilise the Middle East and democratise one country after another has not proven right," said Fischer in an interview with the news magazine Stern. He added: "The decisive question now is whether a strategy which has not worked will be replaced by one that can." Fischer said Germany wanted a swift handover of sovereignty in Baghdad to Iraqi...

BERLIN - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Wednesday he hoped Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s government would collapse quickly, marking a stark turnaround from Germany's previous opposition to regime change as a goal of the U.S.-led war. We hope the regime will collapse as soon as possible and we'll have no further loss of life — civilians or soldiers," Fischer said before a meeting with his British counterpart, Jack Straw, at a hotel in Berlin's Grunewald suburb. Both foreign ministers stressed common ground in Europe on Iraq (news - web sites) — a position that would seem hard...

...and I missed it. Yesterday, in his presentation in the Security Council, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said something at which everyone laughed. Can anyone tell me what it was? At the moment he said it, I was busy explaining to my girlfreind that Joska Fischer is a COMMUNIST THUG WHO ONCE BEAT A POLICE OFFICER NEARLY TO DEATH (or so I heard on Hugh Hewitt's show).

Berlin’s New Anti-American Axis -- Lead by East German Joschka Fischer Fischerism spreads.By Ion Mihai Pacepa In February 10, 2003, the government of Germany began building a new, anti-American Berlin-Moscow-Paris Axis. As one of the former Soviet bloc experts on German matters (and chief of a bloc intelligence station in West Germany), I had been waiting for something like that to happen ever since October 1998, when Joschka Fischer became Germany's foreign minister. Fischer is an indirect product of the old anti-American intelligence community to which I once belonged. In 1975 Libya's dictator, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, informed Romania's tyrant, Nicolae...

<p>"Excuse me. I am not convinced."- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.</p> <p>MR. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal: The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of who we have failed to convince. Sometimes "who" explains "why."</p>