February 5, 2009 Middle Orient News, Palestina News
CAIRO – The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas is expected to give Egypt its response to proposals to reach a truce with Israel Saturday, Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported Thursday. Talks between Egyptian intelligence officials and a Hamas delegation ended Wednesday without a deal. Hamas said Israeli proposals …
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February 5, 2009 Middle Orient News
BASRA, Iraq – Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim voters chose nationalism and security over religion in local polls, backing allies of the prime minister in a vote that could give them the upper hand in parliamentary elections later this year. Results from Saturday’s election are due later on Thursday, and early signs …
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February 5, 2009 Balkan News, Eurasia News
Kosovo named a former senior police officer as the chief of its new Intelligence Service on Wednesday, after months of delays blamed on clientelism and political horse-trading with foreign intelligence agencies. The Intelligence Agency is one of the central security institutions of the new country, that declared independence from Serbia …
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February 5, 2009 Balkan News, Eurasia News
Croatia and Iceland have a chance of joining the European Union in 2011, while Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia may enter all together as a bloc sometime between 2015 and 2020, the Financial Times says in an editorial this week. With the global economy in crisis, the bloc’s leaders …
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February 5, 2009 Balkan News, Eurasia News
The European Commission wants Croatia and Slovenia to find a negotiated solution to their border dispute so that Croatia could join the European Union, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in Brussels on Tuesday evening. “There is a Croatian-Slovene bilateral issue and we would like the two countries to …
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February 5, 2009 Middle Orient News, Palestina News
JERUSALEM – Israel admitted Wednesday that one of its tanks killed three girls whose father’s cries on live television shocked viewers in the final days of the Gaza offensive, but said the action was “reasonable.” An Israeli army (IDF) investigation found that two tank shells were fired at a building …
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February 5, 2009 Eurasia News, Iran News
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian foreign ministry summoned EU countries’ ambassadors to Tehran on Wednesday to condemn the block’s double-standards and political approach towards terrorism. At the meeting, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Mehdi Safari, expressed Iran’s deep concern regarding EU action on delisting the anti-Iran terrorist group, the …
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February 5, 2009 Eurasia News, Iran News
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran and the US are not scheduled to attend bilateral talks on the sidelines of a security conference due to be held in Munich, Germany on Feb. 6-8, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said on Wednesday. “As some sources in the Iranian parliament have noted, no Iran-US negotiations have …
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February 5, 2009 Iran News
TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran dismissed formation of the Group of 20 to end the global financial crisis as an “inefficient policy”. “Nobody has authorized these 20 countries to make decisions for 190 countries. This rationale which is based on a number of countries’ decision-making for the world according to their own …
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February 4, 2009 Balkan News, Eurasia News
A Kosovo parliamentary commission has recommended that the government implements an embargo on Serbian and Bosnian goods as a tit-for-tat response to Serbia and Bosnia blocking and taxing Kosovo’s exports. Serbia rejects the secession by Kosovo’s Albanian majority last February and has vowed never to accept it as an independent …
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