Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
EU vote result adds to Turkey’s membership woes
The results of European Parliament election have caused deep concern in European Union candidate Turkey, where gains made by conservatives and some far-right parties have been read as a clear win by the “No to Turkey” camp” and thus a blow to Ankara’s already troubled EU membership quest.
Trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the vote as a “futile effort by those who cannot digest Turkey’s enormity and strategic importance”. He said politicians who vilified Turkey to win votes in the short term would be judged by history.
Erdogan was probably referring to anti-immigration parties that have openly campaigned against predominantly Muslim Turkey’s accession bid, among them the Dutch Freedom Party of Geert Wilders who promised that Turkey would not join the union: “Not in 10 years, not in a million years.”
But last week’s results certainly don’t bode well for Erdogan’s European dreams and come as pressure is mounting for Ankara to push ahead with long-delayed reforms.
Britain prepares to leave Iraq
BASRA – It may not be the end-game Britain was hoping for when it ventured into Iraq, but it’s the end of the game nonetheless.
By the end of next May, almost exactly six years after 42,000 British troops joined the U.S.-led invasion and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Britain’s remaining 4,100 troops will be out of Iraq and his country’s role in the war over.
Britain’s 42-day detention: draconian or necessary?
So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has succeeded – by the skin of his teeth — in getting Britain’s House of Commons to approve new police counter-terrorism powers that were condemned by civil liberties groups, a former prime minister, a U.N. human rights investigator and several dozen of Brown’s own Labour MPs. The Guardian newspaper writes about ‘Liberty, security and an anxiety over lost rights’.
And even the government admits the power to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days before charging or releasing them has never been needed until now: it wants it as an insurance policy against future attacks or plots in which the police may need more than the 28 days they now have in order to investigate tangled international links, false identities and masses of encrypted computer files.
