PARIS: Several European leaders have had awkward moments as they called Francois Hollande to congratulate him on being elected as France’s new president. For many of them, including the UK’s David Cameron and Germany’s Angela Merkel, openly backed his rival in the presidential race, Nicolas Sarkozy.
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COPENHAGEN: Demark is the stage of the English Defence League’s first major European rally on Saturday. A teacher who is organising the event has links with racist groups including one named after the Hitler Youth. He co-founded the Danmarks Nationale Front, which argues that people with African and Arab origin have a lower average intelligence.
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Britain paid compensation of less than £2,300 on average for 48 civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the last financial year, Exaro can reveal. One human-rights campaigner condemned the low level of out-of-court settlements, which ranged from £1,300 and £5,200, as treating Afghan victims of UK military action as “collateral damage”.
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Plans to rebuild Libya’s health system are in crisis because of corruption and a chronic cash shortage, according to the country’s former health minister. Dr Nagi Giumma Barakat (pictured), who resigned from the ministry in November, told Exaro that companies are refusing to work with the fledgling health service.
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America could recover $10 billion in overpayments made by the Pentagon to defence contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan – if it hired more auditors. That was the estimate given to Exaro by a US law professor who served on the commission that investigated the American government’s ‘wartime contracting’.
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KABUL: Here in the capital of Afghanistan, traffic wardens do not issue parking tickets. Instead, they puncture tyres with a sharp metal spike. More than ten years since the intervention of American and British forces, and despite billions of pounds of foreign aid, the country still lacks any proper legal infrastructure.
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HELSINKI: As the eurozone debt crisis grips Europe, even Finland is turning increasingly eurosceptic. In this traditionally pro-Europe nation in the northern reaches of the continent, the Finns are becoming ever more restless about having to help bail out debt-laden southern European countries.
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Libya’s new government is planning to double health-care spending to overhaul the country’s war-ravaged hospitals, according to a report leaked to Exaro. It plans to spend €400 million a month, plus an initial injection of €200 million, to rebuild Libya’s health system, according to the blueprint drawn up by the country’s interim government.
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Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told Muammar Gaddafi that he would not “start the Third World War” for him over an American air attack on Libya. The comments were made in the wake of a terrorist attack – blamed by America on Libya – in a disco in West Berlin in 1986, and are recorded in a transcript of a Politburo meeting.
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Egypt was ready to switch its allegiance from the West to the Soviet Union under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, secret documents show. Egypt’s president for 30 years since 1981 assured Moscow that his true loyalty lay with socialism despite being seen as ‘pro-Western’.
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Iran asked the Soviet Union to abandon communism for Islam, newly uncovered documents from a huge smuggled archive reveal. Shortly before his death in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual leader, made the request to the then Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev.
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Secret documents reveal how France helped the Soviet Union apply diplomatic pressure to stop America toppling Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War.
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Up to $30 billion dollars in loans were offered to the Soviets in 1990 in return for sending troops to help remove Iraq from Kuwait. The astonishing offer is revealed in top secret documents unearthed by Exaro from a huge Soviet archive.
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America secretly took part in an audacious Soviet plan to strike a peace deal with Saddam Hussein to head off war with Iraq in 1990. Exaro has unearthed top secret documents – from a huge Soviet archive that has been smuggled to the West – that reveal the plan.
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