Brussels—The European Union is in danger of breaking its promise that Turkey will eventually be granted membership, an influential group has warned. The Independent Commission on Turkey accuses some European leaders of trying to derail Turkey’s membership bid. Behind the carefully balanced language of diplomacy is a hard hitting report, a BBC correspondent. It points the finger most firmly at France, whose President Nicolas Sarkozy is strongly opposed to Turkish entry. “France has publicly declared that it will not allow five key areas

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Port-Gentil (Gabon)—Gabon security forces patrolled second city Port-Gentil on Friday as civilian traffic began to return, after the government threatened to invoke emergency powers to quell post-election violence that killed at least three people. The West African country’s oil hub remains under a dawn to dusk curfew but taxis and some civilian traffic returned to the streets on Monday. Some stores opened for the first time in days, but banks and many shops remained shut. Dozens of fearful residents had fled Port-Gentil aboard motorised canoes

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Male—The Maldives, whose fight against rising sea levels has become a cause celebre for environmentalists, said on Monday it would have to skip UN climate change talks in Copenhagen this year to save money. “We can’t go to Copenhagen because we don’t have the money,” President Mohamed Nasheed told reporters, adding that he was staying away to set an example of cost-saving to the rest of the government. In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that a rise in sea levels of 18 to 59 centimetres

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San Francisco—Some 2,000 students at Washington State University have reported symptoms of swine flu, university officials said, in one of the largest reported outbreaks of the virus on a US college campus. The west-coast school last week instituted a blog to help provide information to students about the sudden and dramatic spread of the A(H1N1) virus on campus just days into the new school term. We estimate that we have been in contact with about 2,000 students with influenza-like illness in the first 10 days of our fall semester,” the latest

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Eric S. Margolis Comment

SEVENTY years ago this week, Germany invaded Poland, marking the beginning of World War II, a conflict that killed over 50 million people. The anniversary has reopened old wounds and ignited an ugly battle of words between Russia and its unloving neighbours, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States. The latter two accuse Moscow of having stabbed them in the back in 1939. The European parliamentary assembly (OSCE) recently stated that the Soviet Union and Germany were ‘equally responsible for World War II.’ It’s taken 70 years to

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Quetta

Muzaffarabad

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