On Friday, April 13, 2012, the 66th U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered remarks at the Heritage Foundation on the topic of "Leadership: America´s Critical Foreign Policy Role."

Fifty-four members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a bipartisan letter to President Barack Obama, strongly urging his Administration "to make sure that NATO finally offers the Republic of Macedonia its well-deserved formal invitation to join the Alliance during the Chicago Summit," on May 20-21, 2012.

In March of last year the six Special Ops Army members volunteered for an extremely difficult and dangerous mission during which they extracted the body of deceased worker Vlatko Iliovski from the mine "Buchim".

Frankly, I'd rather put my money in a Macedonian bank than in any west-European bank. Macedonia's banks have acted far more prudently than their brethren abroad, partly because they derive handsome profits from arbitrage between government bonds and deposits and partly because, accustomed as they are to bad borrowers and defaults, they are hypervigilant and laudably cautious. Macedonian bankers are, thankfully, not sophisticated and so avoided the pitfalls of derivatives, securitization, swaps, and other miracles of western financial engineering.

The Greek fascist terror in Greek occupied Macedonia forced many Macedonian families to leave their native homes and find shelter and peace abroad. My family was one of those families at the forefront of Greek terror. Because of war and because of political turmoil in the region, my father fled the village in 1946 and crossed the border to Yugoslavia.

On October 16th, 2007 at 6:30 a.m. Toshe Proeski died in a tragic car accident on the Zagreb-Lipovac highway near Nova Gradiskka, Croatia. His car collided with a lorry on the motorway. He was only 26 years old when he died. Born on January 25th, 1981 he rose to stardom in the Republic of Macedonia but was very popular in the entire Balkans both for his artistic merit and for his humanitarian work. Proeski started his career at aged 15 and released his first album at age 18.

In the article "Australia's official stance on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)" from September 13, sent to the American Chronicle by the so-called Australian Macedonian Advisory Council and written by certain Paul Kiritsis, their Executive Director, we find the following advice given to the Australian community in advance of the Republic of Macedonia's Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's visit to Australia scheduled for late October.

The Macedonian denar is pegged to the euro. A collapse in the exchange rate of the euro versus other major currencies will enhance the competitiveness and attractiveness of Macedonian goods in non-Eurozone markets in Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, and Asia. Tourism – being an export – will also benefit.

On Thursday September 8th the Republic of Macedonia marked its 20th year of independence in grand style with many celebrations taking place the world over but the grandest celebration of them all took place in downtown Skopje where hundreds of thousands of people attended. It was a celebration like no other.

Recently American writer, historian and Latin teacher Celeste Benjamin Tracy published the novel "In the Theater of the World", available on Amazon as an e-book Kindle edition, later to be available in paperback. Ms. Tracy is American of Spanish and Hungarian-Czech descent, teaches Latin in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, New York, and holds degrees in Latin, English and Education.

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) would like to express its disappointment at the decision of VCAT Member Noreen Megay to dismiss AMAC´s racial vilification complaint against the ´Australian Macedonian (sic) Weekly´ (AMW). Last week Ms. Megay handed down her judgment on the matte...

Macedonia is undergoing a worrisome change of character. If not reversed, these malignant processes will backfire and Macedonia's hopes will be cruelly dashed. Under Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia, for the first time, stands a chance of becoming a prosperous member of Europe and the international community. Its history of self-destructive self-defeating behavior can be avoided.

Pendarovski: I have no doubts that, as far as the daily political routine goes, the Albanian party in the Macedonian Government - DUI - will remain committed to the local constitutional context, but if strategic challenges arise, than all Albanians in the region will reconsider their status in an integral way. Whenever it deals with ordinary political issues the ruling coalition is going to be strong, in line with the combined numbers of its MPs in the Parliament, but, when faced with strategic challenges each of the coalition´s constituents will look exclusively to their ethnic kin. In the former situation politicians will think about their individual and political gains, in the latter one, they will always make wider calculations about their peoples´ gains in the historical perspective.

On August 30, 2011, Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal Senior Member Ms. Noreeen Megay dismissed the complaint brought against the Macedonian newspaper by the Greek political lobby group AMAC, ending a two-year legal dispute.

In the secluded Byzantine monastery of Philanthropinon, which is perched mutely on a small hill on the island of Lake Pamvotis in Ioannina, counting both the vicissitudes of time and nature, there is a most singular iconographic depiction. For once one enters the exonarthex and casts their eyes to t...

He wrote that only a small minority of the population had a pure Greek consciousness. He described the Slavophone population as being divided among 3 groups: (1) those with a fanatic Greek morale (Ellinofrones) (2) those with a fanatic Bulgarian morale (Voulgharofrones) and (3) those who were indifferent to nationality. The last group, the ones who were indifferent to nationality, he said called themselves Makedhones (Macedonians) and comprises the bulk of the Florina´s region population making up one-half to three-quarters of any given village´s population.

The Greek Prime Minister Venizelos, in order to counterbalance the negative impression about Greece, after the publication of the Carnegie Report, hired/invited the Swiss law professor Rudolph Archibald Reiss to come to Greece and visit/travel in the new Northern provinces and investigate the conditions of the local population. Professor Reiss produced a report quite favorable to the Greek side. The report was written in French and published in 1915, stated the following: "Neither were the locals Bulgarian nor was their language Bulgarian. They were just Macedonians."

On Thursday, August 18, 2011, the Australia Macedonia Parliamentary Friendship Group in partnership with the Embassy of the Republic of Macedonia hosted a series of events at Parliament House in Canberra to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Macedonian Independence.

The International Crisis Group report lacks credibility due to its blatant bias -- evidenced by its partisan demands, selective and misleading presentation of information, and inconsistency with its own positions set forth in a prior ICG report.

The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) is appalled at recent events in Lerin/Florina, where Greek national security officers and police detained two Macedonian journalists on suspicion of "photography in a public place."

Calling oneself an "ethnic Macedonian" does not make anyone an "ethnic" anything as long as there are others who live in Macedonia, with long established cultural, historical and linguistic roots in Macedonia proper, the Macedonia of Philip, Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and the Macedonia St. Paul visited, who steadfastly refuse to accept that pretension, no matter how many statues of Philip and Alexander the pretenders build. Calling oneself Napoleon does not make one Napoleon and surely the world does not have to go along with that silliness just for the sake of supposedly avoiding hurting the feelings of the pretender. The word "silliness" is taken within context from the Letter to Obama sent to the US president by the over 360 Classics and History Scholars from the the most renowned Universities worldwide, where among other things we read: "Macedonia and Macedonian Greeks have been located for at least 2,500 years just where the modern Greek province of Macedonia is. Exactly this same relationship is true for Attica and Athenian Greeks, Argos and Argive Greeks, Corinth and Corinthian Greeks, etc." (http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html)

"The superiority of Macedonians as lords of Asia, symbolized by the spear—the sign of conquest—and the shield—the sign of Macedonian ethnicity—was driven home again and again in every conceivable medium: literary works, works of large scale public art, coinage, tombstones, paintings." (Richard A. Billows, King and Colonists – Aspects of Macedonian Imperialism p.55).

I have taken the liberty to borrow a fitting phrase from B. Baruch: "Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong on his facts." And on this note, I would like to mention that even though some people believe that their broom is newer and sweeps cleaner, I can assure you that, even though mine is older and worn out, it knows where the dirt.

By the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest, August 10th, 1913 became the darkest day in the history of the Macedonian people. August 10th, 1913 was the day when the Great Powers of Europe approved Macedonia´s permanent partition, done against the will of the Macedonian people. This was the day our Macedonia was handed over to Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria; a gift from the Great Powers, hand delivered by their delegates in Bucharest.

Until now, they had thought that time is on their side. More and more countries were recognizing FYROM under its pseudonym ROM, and they had thought that the issue will fade into a solution in their favor. Two NATO summits later, the EU doors shut closed and an increasingly restive Albanian minority unwilling to put up with all this nonsense, plus the fact that Greece is bound to have weak governments for some time to come, therefore unable to compromise and be sen as traitor to long term Hellenic national interests and now the bleak realization is finally sinking in: Time is not on the pseudo-Makedonist's side after all.

..."unashamedly"... "conceivable"... "treacherous"... "preposterous undertaking"... "manipulations" … "buttressed subjects of all times"... Is anyone day dreaming here? Greeks are not claiming Julius Caesar, Cyrus the Great or Tutanhamon, after all, we are talking about Alexander the Great here...and who is pointing the finger on "the Greeks"? Someone whose name rhymes with that of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, or the Russian composer Pyotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky, great Slavs in their own right, who would never claim a Hellenic-Macedonian decent. Names ending in "-ovski" did not appear in Macedonia for at least a thousand years after Philip and Alexander had met their destiny. Let's keep our feet on the ground when we put ink on paper, and claim to be writing history, or, rather, polemics on history, more specifically. It is unfortunate, but this is indeed the reason why Greeks have been lately holding their bellies, lying on the floor and laughing, finding this whole archaeo-Makedonist circus taking place in Skopje (with supersized bronze statues of Boukephalus and all) immensely amusing, if anything. On a more serious note, the challenge facing the claimants of everything "Macedonian", as far as modern Greeks are concerned, is obvious: If you are Slavs, you cannot be Macedonians, NOT in an ethnic sense, anyway. Claiming to be Macedonians in a very limited, partially geographic sense (since everyone accepts that the bulk -to the tune of 80%- of Ancient Macedonia and more than 50% of Ottoman Macedonia lies today in Northern Greece) is debatable, but we can definitely talk about it. Claiming the exclusivity of the names "Macedonia" and "Macedonian" in an ethnic sense, is not debatable, no matter how many of the 135 odd countries in the world are ready to endorse it. Greeks are ready to concede that Malvides belong to Argentina and Faulklands to England, it is too far from them...who cares! In the same way, who in the Republic of Cape Verde, in the Federated States of Micronesia or in the Republic of Nauru cares how Slavic speaking citizens of ex-Yugoslavia's southernmost republic call their country. The southern Balkans is an exotic locale for them. For the Greeks, it is a whole different story. They are the violated party in this dispute, being told to relinquish their culture and history to a relative late comer who is aggressively pursuing ownership rights over EVERYTHING "Macedonian" To be continued. BIBLIOGRAPHY:   "The Genius of Alexander the Great", N.G.L. Hammond, The University of South Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1997 "Who's who in the age of Alexander the Great", Waldemar Heckel, Blackwel, 2006 "An introduction to Alexander Studies", Eugene N. Borza, in "Alexander the Great" by Ulrich Wilcken, English translation, NY, 1967 J.R.Hamilston, "Alexander the Great", University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974 Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great, Vintage, NY, 2005 Aeschylus - Agamemnon http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=700&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0003 Arrian – Anabasis http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a2008.01.0530 Isocrates – To Philip http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0143%3Aspeech%3D5%3Asection%3D1 Plutarch – Alexander http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0243%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D1 Ralated articles by MEB: The Alleged differences between Macedonians and other ancient Greeks: http://www.scribd.com/doc/44674218/The-Alleged-Differences-Between-Macedonians-and-Other-Ancient-Greeks The satrapal appointments in Alexander's empire and FYROM's Slavomacedonians http://macedonianissues.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

The United Macedonian Diaspora sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to bring up Greece's misdeeds vis-à-vis the Republic of Macedonia and Macedonians during her upcoming Greece visit on July 17-18, 2011.

When the Western-philhellenes came to Greece to begin their project, they found this mass of befuddled individuals completely immersed in their struggle for survival and oblivious to the significance of their immediate surroundings. Out of them, they were supposed to create a link between the ancient Greeks and the envisioned new Hellene.

But will the Albanians be placated by these concessions? Can they be bought off? Is their long-term strategy of an incremental takeover of the state and its institutions paying off?

The attempt to distort Ancient Greek history, making a total mockery out of it in the service of a 20th century forged ethnic identity of a mainly Slavic and Albanian but truly multi-ethnic state in the south of ex-Yugoslavia, and all of it based on the grossly inaccurate interpretation of isolated quotes, comes at a cost. The price tag is blaring academic derision (http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html ) and manifest self exposure to worldwide ridicule. Make him whatever you want, but any Badian or Borza, Wilcken, Errington, Hammond, Heckel, Tarn or Cartledge would fall on the floor laughing their heart's content out if someone would suggest to them that Basileus Alexandros Philippou o Makedon was some sort of proto-Slavic Czar Alksandar Filipov Makedonski. At the time Philip was busy unifying the Greeks under his leadership and Alexander was conuering the then known world for Hellenism, the Slavs, respectfully, had not even entered the world arena and had no concept of what or where Macedonia was, leading quiet lives around the Pripjet swamps at the convergence of Modern Poland, Ukraine and Byelorussia. And no pharaonic sized, 60ft bronze horse with "Aleksandar Makedonski" on top of it, in the middle of "Makedonija Square" in Skopje, the capital of the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Makedonija" is ever going to change this sober fact.

THE ENTRY OF armed foreign bands into Macedonia, particularly after the suppression of the 1903 Ilinden Rebellion, was an extension of the religious struggle in its most extreme form. By itself, religious and educational propaganda failed to achieve desired outcomes. Paramilitary armed bands became a far more effective tool to mould Macedonian villages into a particular nationality through forced church adherence.

According to Article 2 of UNESCO´s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, "it is essential to ensure harmonious interaction among people and groups with plural, varied and dynamic cultural identities". 5 million people live in the modern region of Macedonia, and more than half of the...

We will let others ponder at the mind bungling puzzle Plutarch threw at Gandeto's lap. I, for one, would think it incomprehensible if I had read, for example, that the Roman general Scipio Africanus (the one who defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zema) would have rejoiced being "encouraged by this prophesy" if, while attacking Carthage, he had found a tablet prophesizing that the hegemony of the Carthaginians "would one day be destroyed by the Greeks"...and not by the Romans! So, then, what was Alexander thinking?

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) has exclusively interviewed Prof. Marcus Templar, an expert on issues relating to the region of Macedonia and the Balkans at large. AMAC: Professor Templar, last year, in October 2010, you presented a number of lectures across Australia on the Ma...

But since this dichotomy of "Greeks" and "Macedonians" in most texts on ancient Macedonia is a fact that fuells the Skopjan ultra-nationalist flames about "Aleksandar Makedonski" being a Slavonic Czar of the Ancient "Makedonci" (and the equally Slavonic Filip Makedonski, the good slayer of the bad Greeks), both, supposedly unrelated to Greeks, let's hear from professor Ian Worthington, whose biography Philip II of Macedonia was recently (2008) published by Yale University. It is under the chapter "Ethnicity and Social Snobbery, page 8: "However, let me say that I believe there is enough evidence and reasoned theory to indicate that the Macedonians were Greek and so Greek-speaking: they simply spoke a local dialect, just as there were different dialects in different parts of Greece. It was the Macedonian dialect that Greeks could not understand. Let me repeat from Chapter 1 that when I refer to "Greeks" in this book, I mean the people who lived south of Mount Olympus, and when I refer to "Macedonians" I mean those living to its north. I do so only for the sake of convenience."

Gandeto has said before, and stands by his assertions, that Macedonia was never a part of any ancient Greek city-state, nor were the ancient Macedonians ever considered, by the ancient Greeks or by themselves, to be Greek. Macedonia was never a member of any Hellenic League. Macedonia was not a member of the Greek Amphictyonic League.

"Alexander conquered the world," he added. "Would you ever give up something like that? I don´t think so." As a Greek Macedonian, from historic Macedonia, in northern Greece, the homeland of Macedodians, of Philip II, Aristotle and Alexander the Great, not Yugoslav Dardania, the land of Illyrians, Triballi and Dardanians, I can't help but somehow and wholeheartedly agree with him...

How it is possible for today´s Greeks to unashamedly claim something that never belonged to them? How is it conceivable for them to embark on such a treacherous and preposterous undertaking to use manipulations in order to secure and appropriate a historical figure of no less stature and magnitude than one of the most studied and the most buttressed subjects of all times, like Alexander the Great? It seems to me that either they have grossly overestimated their literary prowess or they have greatly and contemptuously underestimated the wisdom of the rest of the world. I shall leave the verdict in your hands.

By the late nineteenth century, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria had either gained full independence or were self-administered in a semi- autonomous capacity. As such they were able to utilize a range of State resources to support and promote their position in Macedonia. European patrons and national churches were also of crucial importance in the independence struggles of the Balkan States. Prior to the abolition in 1767 of the Archbishopric of Ohrid by the Ottomans (at the instigation of the Constantinople Patriarchate), there were numerous examples of Macedonian archbishops traveling to the royal courts of Europe seeking support for rebellions and other assistance against the Ottoman Turkish rulers.

The PCL – formed in August 2010 – came with few strings attached. Its main aim was to signal to the markets that the recipient economy is soundly managed and that the Fund´s resources are fully behind it. This type of commitment, so went the received wisdom, would prevent contagion.

In the course of World War II, the Bulgarian Fascists collected over 7,200 Jews in Macedonia and surrendered them to the Germans at the Nazi Concentration Camps in Treblinka. This was indeed a sad time for Macedonia. Sadder and stranger however is the fact that in "Yad Vashem", the largest Jewish Museum in Jerusalem, these Jews are recorded as "Bulgarian Jews".

State propaganda poisoned the brains of a whole generation of Germans who committed the horrible crimes of the second world war. State propaganda in communist Yugoslavia was used to force a Macedonian identity on the Bulgarian population living in the Southern Republic Tito created and named ...

Thessaloniki was a princess; daughter of King Philip II, half sister of Alexander the Great. She was given this name because she was born on the day of the Macedonian victory at the Battle of Crocus Field. Her name literally translates to "Thessalian Victory", in Greek. The city of Thessaloniki, tod...

Once again, the forefront for dissemination of the Greek version of history in Australia, the so-called Advisory Council, who are neither Macedonians nor have any clue about advising, have managed to show their ugly head by attacking Victor Friedman, a prominent and well respected academic scholar from University of Chicago, for speaking the truth about the Macedonian language.

It has been drawn to my attention that in a recent publication by the United Macedonian Diaspora (a lovely Greek word) an attack has been made on what I have written about the erection of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje. I have also received a number of e-mails on this subject, some applau...

Slavic Macedonian propagandists continuously disseminate a lie: that the Slavs who live in the Republic of Macedonia are not Slavs but they are descendants of the ancient Macedonians! This falsification of history is promoted in spite the fact that the Slavs appeared in the Balkan Peninsula ...

Last year I learned that a statue of Alexander the Great was to be erected in Skopje. I knew enough about modern history to be sure that the choice of this subject was not simply, as in some places (for example in Edinburgh), the result of a desire to commemorate a heroic figure of the past. I reali...

IT WAS NOT a sense of ethnicity or nationalism driving the Ottoman Empire, but religion. ´Their law was a religious code, their army a force which conquered in the name of a faith.´ Basic categories in the Ottoman Empire were based on religious groups. There were Muslims, the ´believers´, and others, the ´non-believers´. Ottoman society was organized according to religion, and as everyone necessarily belonged to a religious community, all citizens were considered to be a part of a 'nationality' known as millet.

Can you tell from a person's name whether they are Italian, French, or Russian? I can say for sure; my ancestry is European and I can determine pretty easily a European person´s ethnicity just from his or her first name. Similarly, I can easily tell by a person´s name wh...

Prime Minister Orban referred to the name dispute between Macedonia and her southern neighbor Greece as "absurd;" effectively, saying that it should not preclude Macedonia´s EU membership. He pledged that Hungary will raise the issue of opening Macedonia´s EU accession negotiations at the next European Council meeting.