AMSTERDAM: Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right anti-immigrant maverick, scored big gains in yesterday’s local elections in the Netherlands, according to projections last night, indicating he may dominate the political scene in the run-up to the general election in three months. Yesterday’s poll, 10 days after the centrist coalition government collapsed, was seen as a gauge [...]
March 4, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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PARIS: Hurricane-force winds, surging seas and driving rain lashed western Europe on Sunday, leaving at least 53 people dead and more than a million households without power, reports AFP. President Nicolas Sarkozy was on Monday to visit France’s storm-battered Atlantic coast where some 45 people were killed in flooding and violent winds. Dubbed Xynthia, the [...]
March 1, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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ROME: Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has released an audio message from one of two Italians kidnapped in Mauritania in December, US-monitoring agency SITE said on Sunday. The message is a plea from Italian captive Sergio Cicala and is entitled “Call from the kidnapped Italian to the Berlusconi government,” said SITE, which monitors Islamist [...]
February 28, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE,
TERRORISM & CRIME |
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LONDON: Labour’s record on tackling asylum faces a fresh onslaught today over figures that show a new backlog of 30,000 cases and a warning by the government’s immigration watchdog that its targets are currently “unachievable”. John Vine also makes clear that a special five-year exercise which began in 2006 to clear the legacy of 450,000 [...]
February 26, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE,
IMMIGRATION NEWS |
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ANKARA: Once they were untouchable. Some were members of Turkey’s elite military class known as “pashas,” a title of respect harking back to Ottoman times. For decades, Turkey’s senior officers, self-appointed guardians of the country’s secular tradition, called the shots. But Monday, the balance of power in this EU candidate appeared to have undergone a [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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WASHINGTON: The NATO military alliance and Russia face a common threat emanating from the Pak-Afghan border and have agreed to make joint efforts to deal with it, says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In a speech at an international seminar in Washington on revising NATO’s mission for the 21st century, Secretary Clinton also urged [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
AMERICAS |
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MADRID: Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Spain last night in the biggest test of the country’s Socialist Government, which is under pressure. With a general strike threatened in the summer, the two biggest Spanish unions staged protests in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Alicante. The Union General de Trabajadores (UGT) and [...]
February 24, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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LONDON: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will appear before the Iraq war inquiry on March 5, the inquiry said in a statement Monday. Brown was Britain’s finance minister at the time of the 2003 US-led invasion, and is being called to give his account of the conflict several weeks after then prime minister Tony Blair [...]
February 23, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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BERLIN: German police have arrested three people suspected of helping a radical Islamist group whose followers have confessed to planning attacks on US targets in Germany, prosecutors said on Monday. The federal prosecutor’s office said it suspected two men whom it identified only as Alican T. and Fatih K., and one woman, Filiz G., of [...]
The hit squad that killed a senior Hamas official in Dubai may have entered the country using diplomatic passports, officials in the Emirates said yesterday as they called on Britain and other European countries whose documents were forged to launch a full inquiry. “There is still information that Dubai police will not make public for [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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FUNCHAL (Portugal): Rescue workers dug through heaps of mud, boulders and debris on Sunday on the Portuguese island of Madeira, searching for victims buried by flash floods and mudslides that had already killed at least 42 people in the popular tourist area. More than 120 others were injured and an unknown number were missing, possibly [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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LONDON: David Cameron today called for an inquiry into allegations that Gordon Brown bullied staff at Downing Street. The Conservative leader said that Sir Philip Mawer, Downing Street’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, should look into the allegations made by the Observer journalist Andrew Rawnsley and subsequently amplified by the National Bullying Helpline charity. However, [...]
February 22, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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AMSTERDAM: NATO was left in fear of further troop withdrawals from Afghanistan yesterday after the Dutch Prime Minister conceded that he could not prevent his forces being pulled out this year after the collapse of the Government in The Hague. The Dutch coalition government collapsed Saturday over whether to extend the country’s military mission in [...]
February 21, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE,
FEATURED NEWS |
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LONDON: The Metropolitan police is investigating allegations that MI5 was complicit in the torture of Shaker Aamer, the last remaining British resident in Guantánamo Bay, it was revealed today. Investigating officers have applied to the high court for the release of classified government documents relating to the case. They are already investigating claims of MI5 [...]
February 20, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE,
MUSLIMS NEWS |
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LONDON: Britain has flatly denied any foreknowledge of a Mossad plan to assassinate a top official of the Palestinian group Hamas, in Dubai, amidst angry accusations in Whitehall that Israel is seeking to deflect blame from itself by implicating others. British government sources dismissed as “nonsense” a report claiming the Israeli secret service had given [...]
February 20, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE,
FEATURED NEWS |
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LONDON: Britain last night fired the first shot in a potentially explosive diplomatic row with Israel by calling in the country’s ambassador to explain the use of faked British passports by a hit squad who targeted a Hamas official in Dubai. The Israeli ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office to “share information” about [...]
February 18, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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BRUSSELS: An unexpected “protocol mismatch” risks endangering the planned Pakistan-European Union summit in April, following suggestions by Islamabad that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani rather than President Asif Ali Zardari would attend the meeting. EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who will speak on behalf of the 27-nation [...]
February 18, 2010 | Posted in
SOUTH ASIA |
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LONDON: Gordon Brown stepped into the growing international row over the alleged use of fake passports by the assassins of a Hamas leader in Dubai by promising a full investigation. As demands were made for the Israeli ambassador to be summoned to the Foreign Office to answer allegations that the Mossad security service was behind [...]
February 17, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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BRUSSELS: Police are waiting to interview the driver of the train blamed for the Belgian rail disaster who survived the crash by jumping from his cab moments before the collision, which claimed at least 18 lives. The driver was said to be in a serious but not life-threatening condition in hospital after apparently trying to [...]
February 17, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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ROME: Pope Benedict XVI yesterday condemned the sexual abuse of children and young people by clergy as “not only a heinous crime but also a grave sin which offends God and wounds the dignity of the human person” as he ended a two day crisis summit with Irish bishops. The Pope said although “significant measures” [...]
February 17, 2010 | Posted in
EUROPE |
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