Free Republic

France has said it will ask Turkey to acknowledge the mass killing of Armenians from 1915 as genocide when it begins EU accession talks. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said Turkey had "a duty to remember". Armenians say 1.5 million of their people died or were deported from their homelands under Turkish Ottoman rule. France is among a group of nations that class the killings as genocide. Turkey denies any organised genocide, claiming they were quelling a civil uprising. Mr Barnier said France did not consider Turkish acknowledgement a condition of EU entry, but insisted his country would raise the...

Files show a stubborn North Korea Communist bloc archives reveal that aid to North Korea gave its old allies little influence. By Jasper Becker | Special to The Christian Science Monitor BEIJING - New material emerging from secret archives opened in Moscow and Eastern bloc capitals is shedding light, mostly unfavorable, on the question of whether handing out aid to North Korea can buy any meaningful compliance. A multinational group of scholars trawling through the Czech, Hungarian, Soviet, and East German archives is now producing the first clear picture of North Korea's relationship with its key allies. "It shows how...

With the war in Iraq virtually over, "now comes the hard part" has become the cliche of the moment. Given the looting of Baghdad, who can argue? But I have something else to add: Now comes the best part. That best part will be to show the best part of America. I doff my hat to the once-scorned Clinton military (whose Army do you think this is?), which the Bush administration used with dash. But I expected nothing less. The surprise to the rest of the world - particularly the Arab world - will come when the U.S. establishes some...

Despite being in a bear market, hedge funds struggle to do well A YEAR ago hedge-fund managers were hailed as the new masters of the universe. One even made a cameo appearance in “Sex and the City”, a New York television series, as an over-confident suitor. (He got the girl, of course.) Hedge-fund managers once talked about a “special skill-set” that distinguished them from mere fund managers. They promised “absolute returns irrespective of market directions”. They put big chunks of their own money into their funds and, as well as annual management fees, took a reward of some 20%—and sometimes...