RALEIGH, N.C. -- A North Carolina man sentenced to prison recently as part of a homegrown terrorist ring has been accused in a federal court document of plotting to kill witnesses who testified against him at trial. An affidavit unsealed in federal court Monday accuses Hysen Sherifi of plotting against the witnesses from his jail cell. Authorities say an FBI informant posing as a hit man met with Sherifi's brother and a female friend and accepted $5,000 and a photo of an intended victim. FBI agents have arrested the brother, Shkumbin Sherifi, and Nevine Aly Elshiekh, a school teacher. No...

The end of the Cold War removed the most important constraint on Washington's tendency towards empire. Since then no country has gone to war more often than America. Yet the only conflict with any degree of necessity was Afghanistan -- initially going after al Qaeda. And none of these adventures has turned out particularly well. One of Washington's great failures has been the Balkans. The region is of no geopolitical significance to America and should have been left to NATO's European members. If they, like Otto von Bismarck, did not view the Balkans to be worth the bones of a single Pomera...

BELGRADE, Serbia – The young man wore a long beard and pants that stopped above his ankles. He sprayed the U.S. embassy in Bosnia with machine gun fire. Friday's incident in Sarajevo, in which the gunman and a police officer were wounded but no one died, was the latest in a series of incidents in eastern Europe involving Wahhabis — followers of an austere brand of Sunni Islam promoted by radicals, including the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. The recent rise of militant Wahhabis and other Islamic radicals across the Balkans — including in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Monten...

In the three years since Kosovo, urged on by the United States, declared its unilateral independence, there has been no final resolution of this long-festering wound in the heart of the Balkans. After the expulsion of the Serbian military from Kosovo in 1999 there was a systematic purging of the non-Albanian population and a rampage of revenge killing, and destruction. In March, 2004, the Albanian mobs burned or dynamited more than 204 Christian churches and monasteries - some of them heritage structures dating back to the 14th century. This veritable orgy of devastation was accomplished...