A French teaching assistant who spent months in jail in Iran on spying charges arrived home on May 16. Clotilde Reiss was arrested during anti-government demonstrations in Iran last June. She was sentenced to two five-year prison terms but the Tehran court commuted the punishment to a fine of three billion rials (?240,000). Shortly before her release, a Paris court refused a US extradition request for the arrest of an Iranian businessman. Two days after the 24-year-old Frenchwoman arrived home, another french court ordered the release and deportation of an Iranian serving a life sentence in France for the 1991 murder of a former Iranian prime minister.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdoğan made a two-day trip to Athens May 14-15 for historic talks with his Greek counterpart George Papandreou. They signed 21 bilateral agreements on issues ranging from tourism, energy and climate protection, to curbing illegal migration from Turkey. The main focus of the negotiations was mutual defense cuts. The two countries are NATO allies but have been close to war a number of times over the past 50 years in disagreements over the division of Cyprus and territorial rights in the Aegean.

Bavarian state Premier Horst Seehofer (CSU) announced plans on May 24 to visit the Czech Republic. The trip, planned for this fall, would be the first official visit by a Bavarian leader to Prague since the end of World War II. Addressing a gathering of Sudeten Germans in Augsburg, Seehofer said he would discuss delicate issues such as the Bene? decrees, which led to the deportation of about three million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia at the end of the war.