24/7/8 -- THE EUROPEAN Union hailed the arrest of ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic after more than a decade on the run, calling it a key step towards lasting reconciliation in the Balkans and for Serbia's hopes of joining the EU.

Karadzic was born in Montenegro in 1945, and moved to Croatia only in 1960 to study medicine, working as a psychologist. He also published several volumes of poetry,

The thought police are haunting Europe, says Eric Walberg

17/4/8 -- A French civil servant was sacked in late March for publishing what has been widely reported as a "violent anti-Israeli diatribe" on the oumma.com website, a crime that was investigated by no less than Interior Minister Michele Alliot- Marie. Bruno Guigue, deputy prefect of Saintes, wrote that Israel was "the only state where snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates." The author of several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Guigue also wrote of "Israeli jails where -- thanks to religious law -- they stop torturing on the Sabbath."

NATO moved eastward, upping the ante yet again with Russia, warns Eric Walberg

10/4/8 -- The big news at the recent NATO meeting in Romania (April 2008) is that Croatia and Albania are now happy members of the family of peace-loving nations conducting a brutal war in Afghanistan. The bad news is that Ukraine, Georgia and Macedonia didn't get the green light, with Russian and Greek revanchism the culprit -- clearly a great setback to the cause of world peace.