Irmgard Furchner 97, a former secretary who worked for the commander of a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people. Irmgard Furchner, 97, was taken on as a teenaged shorthand typist at Stutthof and worked there from 1943 to 1945. Furchner, the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades, was given a two-year suspended jail term. Although she was a civilian worker, the judge agreed she was fully aware of what was going on at the camp. Some 65,000 people are thought to have died in horrendous conditions at Stutthof, including...
Friday, 16th December 2022, Japan's cabinet approved a new national security strategy for the first time in nine years, which includes doubling the country's military budget. The move has been commented on as the 'biggest military build-up since World War 2'. The new plan stands at odds with the country's pacifist constitution, which renounces the use of force to settle international discord. However, changes made in 2015 allow the use of force when Japan's security is threatened by attacks on other countries. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute , in 2021, Japan...
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić met with his national security council amidst rising tensions between authorities in Kosovo and ethnic Serbs. Unknown attackers in Northern Kosovo exchanged gunfire with local police and threw a stun grenade at European Union officers. Ethnic Serbs set up roadblocks in response to Kosovan police being deployed in a dispute over car license plates. On Sunday, hundreds of ethnic Serbs gathered at the roadblocks in an outrage over the arrest of a Serbian former police officer. Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia after a war in 1998-99, consists of a primarily...
Guinea’s former dictator Moussa Dadis Camara denied responsibility when he took the stand Monday at a trial of officials implicated in a 2009 massacre. Camara and 10 other former military and government officials are accused of the killing of 156 people and the rape of at least 109 women by forces supporting the military government at a political rally in a Conakry stadium in September 2009. They face charges ranging from murder to sexual violence, kidnappings, arson and looting. Camara himself is charged with “personal criminal responsibility and command responsibility”. The United Nations...
A court in Argentina has sentenced Vice-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to six years in jail and have disqualified her from holding public office after being found guilty in a $1bn fraud case related to public works. Fernández de Kirchner, 69, was found guilty of "fraudulent administration" after arranging for 51 public work contracts to be awarded to a company belonging to Lázaro Báez. Báez is a friend and colleague of both Fernández and her husband Nestor Kirchner. According to prosecutors the Báez company was established to embezzle revenues via a false bidding process for...
The civilian death toll from what it calls a massacre by the March 23 movement, known as M23 rebel group, has risen to 272, said the Democratic Republic of Congo. The increased death toll was announced at a press briefing Monday in Kinshasa by Minister of Industry and former governor of North Kivu province, Julien Paluku. The Congolese army last week accused the March 23 movement rebels of killing at least 50 civilians in North Kivu’s Kishishe village. The rebel group rejected these accusations, and claimed that eight civilians were killed in the village by "stray bullets" on 29 November. The...
Al Jazeera Media Network has submitted a formal request to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and prosecute those responsible for killing veteran Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh . Abu Akleh, a television correspondent with Al Jazeera for 25 years, was killed by Israeli forces on May 11 as she was covering an Israeli military raid on a refugee camp in Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank. The request includes a dossier on a comprehensive six-month investigation by Al Jazeera that gathers all available eyewitness evidence and video footage, as well as...
More than half of Tigrayan forces have been withdrawn from the frontlines, a month after a ceasefire agreement was signed. Following last month's ceasefire agreement which sought to bring an end to the two-year conflict, Tadesse Wereda commander-in-chief of the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF) has said, "We have accomplished 65% disengagement of our army" Reuters, report that he made the comments in a video posted late on Saturday on the groups official Facebook page. The fighting has killed thousands, displaced millions and left hundreds of thousands facing famine. In a surprise...
Sweden deported a Kurdish man with alleged ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to Turkey. Mahamut Tat had sought asylum in Sweden in 2015 after being sentenced in Turkey for six years and 10 months for alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). His final application was denied last year by the Swedish migration agency.
On Wednesday, the District Court of The Hague concluded that the 2007 airstrike mounted by the Dutch armed forces on an Afghan residential compound violated international humanitarian law. The attack in question took place on the 17th of June, 2007, when twenty-eight guided bombs were dropped by Dutch fighter jets over the central Afghan province of Uruzgan. Twenty civilians were killed during this night-time attack. Four unnamed survivors of the attack brought a civil suit to the Dutch courts seeking compensation. Almost two years ago, a war veteran submitted a report calling into question...