| 2008-10-06 15:12 Stern and Ostrosky were married on Friday night |
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Howard Stern and Beth Ostrosky were married in New York City on Friday night. 
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Conflicts between the US and Russia erupted once again · 2007-06-12 13:40
The show of harmony between the leaders of the G8 states, which was publicly celebrated at their summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, lasted less than 24 hours.
The participants were still making their way home when conflicts, particularly between the US and Russia, erupted once again, World Socialist Web Site informs.
On his return flight to London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave an in-depth interview to three journalists from Der Spiegel magazine. The first thing he said was that the conflicts with Russia remained unresolved.
“Of course, there is the desire to overcome mutual difficulties,” Blair said, “but the existing differences remain.” He continued, “Naturally, good relations with Russia are important, but there are now deeply different views in Europe about how to reestablish them.”
Shortly after the conclusion of the summit on Friday, President Bush visited Polish President Lech Kaczynski in near-by Gdansk and assured him that the US would stick to its original plan of stationing the missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
From Poland, Bush flew onto Rome, where he showered “my dear Romano” (Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi) with compliments and repeatedly thanked him for Italian military deployments in Lebanon and Afghanistan. Not long before, relations between Washington and the centre-left Prodi government had been tense, in part because Prodi withdrew Italian troops from Iraq immediately upon taking office. Against a background of intensified conflict with Russia, however, Bush had reason to win the Italian government to his side.
On Sunday, Bush turned up in the Albanian capital of Tirana, where he promised independence for Kosovo to a jubilant crowd. He was opposed, he said, to an “endless dialogue” over the future of Kosovo, and stated, “Sooner rather than later it has to be said: enough is enough. Kosovo is independent.”
The Serbian province of Kosovo, whose inhabitants are mainly ethnic Albanians, was forcibly detached from Serbia in 1999 by the military intervention of NATO. It is currently under a United Nations administration. While the parties of the Albanian Kosovars demand complete independence, Belgrade is strongly opposed to ceding Serbian national territory and prepared only to grant Kosovo broad autonomy. Serbia is supported by its traditional ally, Russia.
After a year of negotiations over the status of Kosovo, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari put forward a plan in February that envisages an internationally supervised process leading to Kosovan independence. The Ahtisaari plan was met with reservations not only from Serbia and Russia, but also from China and a number of European countries, including Spain, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Cyprus, Romania and Austria.
Bush has now threatened to recognise the independence of Kosovo unilaterally, i.e., without the agreement of the UN Security Council, in which Russia has veto powers. If the efforts to secure a UN resolution fail, Bush suggested, the US is prepared to circumvent Russia’s veto power by moving independently of the UN.
The provocative character of this suggestion is underscored by the fact that the future status of Serbs and other national minorities living in Kosovo (many were forced to flee after the NATO war) remains to be clarified. In the 1990s, the German and American governments abruptly recognized the independence of Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina, under conditions in which the rights of national minorities had not been settled, sparking bloody ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. A renewed eruption of such ethnic warfare would be the likely result of a push for Kosovan independence—all the more so were it done without international legal sanction.
It would also establish a potentially explosive international precedent. This is why European states that are contending with separatist tendencies regard the Ahtisaari plan with a combination of scepticism and alarm.
Russia has repeatedly threatened to recognize the rebel Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as Moldavian Transnistria, as independent states, should Kosovo be hived off from Serbia as an independent entity. All three of the above regions are closely allied with Russia. The probable result would be new regional conflicts or, in the case of Georgia, which is closely tied politically and militarily to the US, a direct confrontation between Moscow and Washington.
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