BRUSSELS, Belgium, Oct. 6--The European Commission on Wednesday recommended the start of EU membership talks for Turkey but set stiff conditions to prevent it from backtracking on sweeping democratic and human rights reforms, AP reported.
The decision was reached by a "large consensus" among commissioners, one EU official said, but no vote was taken. There was also no recommended date to start negotiations.
"It is a qualified yes," Prodi told European parliament leaders. "It's flanked with a whole series of recommendations for monitoring and verifying what situation is actually like and specific recommendations."
EU Commissioner Franz Fischler said that while Turkey had a long road ahead, there no longer was reason to reject its application.
"There is no more ground to be opposed fundamentally to the start of entry talks," he said.
While the recommendation boosted Ankara's long-standing aspirations to join the European club, the commission warned it would suspend or even halt EU membership negotiations over any serious and persistent failure to respect democracy and human rights.
EU Commissioner Antonio Vitorino said the recommendation included conditions to suspend talks if there is a worsening of human rights. There was no deadline indicated for when talks should end.
If the European Commission's recommendation is approved by the 25 EU leaders at a December summit, entry talks could begin in early 2005, capping years of lobbying by Turkish leaders who say their country could form a bridge between Muslim countries and Europe.
Many Europeans--including some commissioners--are wary of admitting Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim country of 71 million people, into the EU fold. Several commissioners have expressed skepticism about allowing in a secular Muslim nation with a weak economy and a questionable human rights record, whose projected population would be the largest in the EU by 2025.

Tony Blair

LONDON, Oct. 6--Britain's Tony Blair faces fresh embarrassment on Wednesday over his pre-war assertion that Iraq had banned weapons primed for use when US inspectors are expected to say that no stockpiles of arms have been found, Reuters reported.
Charles Duelfer, the CIA-appointed leader of the hunt for weapons, will present the findings of the Iraq Survey Group to the US Congress from 1800 GMT.
While the ISG unearthed no stockpiles, Duelfer will say there was evidence that Saddam Hussein planned to resurrect weapons programs, US government sources said in September.
The British prime minister, whose public trust ratings have plummeted over the war, is expected to seize on that conclusion to support his view that Saddam did pose a threat.
Blair has already taken the sting out of the report by acknowledging intelligence on Iraq was incorrect.
"The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons ... has turned out to be wrong," the prime minister said last week at a conference of his Labour Party.
Blair came his nearest yet to a "mea culpa" over the divisive war but stopped short of a full apology.
"The problem is I can apologies for the information that turned out to be wrong but I can't, sincerely at least, apologies for removing Saddam," he said.
Nevertheless, Blair's political opponents are likely to seize on the document as further evidence to back their claims to the electorate that the prime minister cannot be trusted.
The opposition Conservative Party, struggling to catch up with Labour in opinion polls, plans to play up the issue of trust in the run-up to a general election expected in May.
Blair gave Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the primary motive for backing the US-led invasion of March 2003. His assertion that the weapons were ready for use has dogged him ever since.
He has already weathered two inquiries into the intelligence used to support the case for war.

BEIT-UL-MOQADDAS, Oct. 6--Israel's unilateral plan to evacuate some occupied land and keep the rest will indefinitely prevent a Palestinian state with Washington's blessing, Reuters quoted a senior Israeli official as saying in an interview published on Wednesday.
"The significance of our disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. It supplies the formaldehyde necessary so there is no political process with the Palestinians," said Dov Weisglass, key adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Weisglass told Haaretz daily continuing Palestinian militant violence was to blame for the lack of diplomacy. Palestinians blame Israeli offensives they say frustrate ceasefire efforts as well as Sharon's aim to keep major West Bank settlements.
Officials in Israel's right-wing government have for months privately written off the internationally-sponsored "road map" peace plan and rejected frequent appeals by Palestinian leaders to conduct negotiations.
"When you freeze the process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state ... Effectively this whole package called a Palestinian state, with all it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda," Weisglass told Haaretz. "And all this with ... a presidential blessing," he said, referring to US President George W. Bush's approval in April of Sharon's plan to quit tiny Gaza in 2005 while retaining swathes of the West Bank, superseding the moribund "road map".
"By the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik (Sharon) grasped that (the Palestinians) would not leave us alone ... and time was not on our side," Haaretz quoted Weisglass as saying.
"What I effectively agreed to with the Americans (in talks leading to Bush's endorsement of 'disengagement) was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns."

Mohamed ElBaradei

SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 6--North Korea's two-year-old nuclear crisis has taxed the world's patience, the chief United Nations nuclear regulator said Wednesday, urging communist Pyongyang to return to its disarmament treaty obligations, Reuters said.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), also said there was no comparison between South Korea 's recently reported atomic experiments and North Korea's full-fledged reprocessing program and weapons assertions.
"The six-party talks have been going on for quite a while and the international community is getting impatient to see quick results and to see North Korea turning back to the non-proliferation regime," ElBaradei told reporters.
North Korea has said it would not rejoin the six-party nuclear disarmament talks with South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia until the South's recently disclosed atomic experiments had been fully dealt with.
South Korea revealed last month that its scientists had conducted tests, without government approval or knowledge, to separate plutonium in 1982 and to enrich uranium four years ago.
ElBaradei said South Korean "experiments at laboratory level" were very different from North Korea's "fully operating reprocessing plant" and Pyongyang's repeated claims to have turned some plutonium into a nuclear deterrent force.
"These are not two situations to be compared," ElBaradei told a news conference on the sidelines of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, a private group of experts and officials discussing disarmament.
"The Republic of Korea has been continuously under verification, under safeguards, while North Korea has moved out of the non-proliferation regime for over two years now," he said.
North Korea expelled IAEA monitors in 2002 and quit the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in early 2003. The moves followed US statements that North Korean officials had admitted to pursuing a secret uranium enrichment program.

HANOI, Vietnam,
Oct. 6--Asian and European leaders began arriving in Hanoi Wednesday ahead of a summit aimed at boosting political, economic and cultural ties despite profound inter-regional differences over Myanmar, AFP reported.
French President Jacques Chirac was due to spearhead the European invasion later Wednesday with two days of bilateral meetings with Vietnamese leaders ahead of Friday's formal opening of the fifth Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM).
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Japanese counterpart Junichiro Koizumi were also scheduled to arrive in Hanoi Wednesday ahead of talks between the two regional heavyweights on Thursday.
Other bilateral meetings among the leaders of the 25 European Union and 13 Asian nations have been scheduled over the next few days during which a host of regional and international issues are likely to be discussed.
In particular, China has said it will renew its offensive to persuade the EU to lift an arms embargo in place since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
On Thursday the three most recent additions to the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc--Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar--as well as the 10 new EU states will be inducted into the ASEM grouping.
Symbolically, however, Chirac and some other EU heads of state and government are not expected to attend the ceremony, which comes in the wake of an EU-ASEAN stand-off over Myanmar's entry that almost scuppered the summit.
After threatening to boycott the biennial meeting rather than sit down at the table with the leaders of the military dictatorship, the EU agreed to participate on condition that Myanmar send a lower-level delegation.
But the bloc also warned that it would tighten the tough sanctions already in place unless the junta meets its human rights demands, including the release of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest.

WASHINGTON,
Oct. 6--The United States agreed under pressure from South Korea on Wednesday to stretch out over an additional three years until 2008 the withdrawal of 12,500 US troops from that country, Reuters said.
The joint announcement came after Washington had signaled in June that it intended to remove the troops--representing a third of the 37,000-strong US military presence in South Korea--by the end of 2005.
Under the plan, announced after weeks of negotiations, 5,000 US troops will leave South Korea this year, 3,000 next year, 2,000 in 2006 and the final 2,500 in 2007 and 2008.
While South Korean officials had publicly agreed to the pullout based on assurances from the Bush administration of continued strong military support, a quick withdrawal had raised worries in Seoul because of North Korea's continued nuclear and missile development programs.
A Pentagon statement released early on Wednesday stressed that the bilateral consultations "considered the Korean public's perceptions regarding a potential security gap." South Korea and the United States have been close allies against the Communist North since the 1950-53 Korean War.
"We have worked together closely and there has been give and take," said one Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified. But the official said Washington stood firm on the total number of troops to be withdrawn as part of a global realignment of American military forces after the Cold War.

SYDNEY, Australia, Oct. 6--Prime Minister John Howard came under fire Wednesday for using unsolicited US-style telephone marketing, dubbed "phone spam", to try to gain an edge in Australia's closely-fought October 9 election, AFP reported.
Voters in marginal electorates have answered the phone in recent days to hear a recorded message from Howard urging support for his conservative Liberal-National coalition. "Hello, this is John Howard. I've taken the unusual step in contacting you with this recorded message to support your local Liberal candidate," the message says.
The opposition Labor Party lodged a complaint with the Australian Electoral Commission, claiming the telephone messages contravened election laws because they did not contain the authorization necessary for political advertisements.
The opposition community services spokesman said Howard's adoption of intrusive US-style campaign tactics was "unwelcome, bizarre, and a little bit desperate".
Opposition leader Mark Latham said he would be taking his telephone off the hook to avoid Howard's messages.
"He really shouldn't be trying to scare the kids at this part of the campaign," Latham joked.
Howard said the telephone calls were a legitimate way to get his message across.
"I've thought about it and concluded it was a proper and sensible and modern thing to do," he told ABC television, admitting "many people will appreciate it, others won't".

BELGRADE,
Serbia-Montenegro, Oct. 6--The nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) sought the dismissal of President Boris Tadic on Wednesday after he called on ethnic Serbs to vote in an election this month in the southern province of Kosovo, AFP reported.
The former Yugoslav republic's main opposition party began gathering the 84 signatures required to table a motion in parliament for a referendum on the presidency, according to the Beta news agency.
If they gain the required signatures the motion must be supported by two thirds of the parliament before a referendum can be called.
"All the conditions have been met to launch this procedure. We believe that two thirds (of the parliament) will understand that Boris Tadic is going down a dark political path," said SRS spokeswoman Gordana Pop-Lazic.
Tadic appealed late Tuesday to the ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo to vote in the October 23 election despite a boycott call from Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Kostunica says NATO peacekeepers and the UN administration which have run the southern province since the end of the 1998-99 war there have failed to provide security to the Serb minority.