A European investigator Wednesday criticized the Hague Tribunal for destroying evidence on organ trafficking in Kosovo. Swiss senator Dick Marty, rapporteur for the Council of Europe, called the disposal of evidence from the Albanian town of Rripe highly irregular, the Serbian broadcaster B92 reported. Based on Marty's report, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Tuesday called on the international community and Serbian, Albanian and Kosovo authorities to ensure justice for human organ trafficking and other war crimes. Marty said action was long overdue. "That certainly is not normal procedure in any tribunal in the world. When you collect evidence and believe you do not have the necessary evidence, or do not have the necessary jurisdiction to continue with your investigation, you never destroy the evidence, especially when there is no statute of limitations," he told the Belgrade daily Blic. He said he was not accusing the war crimes court of conspiracy, however. The Council of Europe issued a report in December accusing the Kosovo Liberation Army leadership, which now rules the territory, of kidnapping and murdering Serb civilians and selling their organs.
Speaking at a PACE meeting in Strasbourg, the Deputy Head of Russia's delegation to PACE Leonid Slutsky said that the work of the Hague Tribunal should be “more accurate”. He said the not guilty verdict on Kosovo’s former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj was an example of improper work of the Tribunal. Earlier this month Ramush Haradinaj was cleared of war crimes charges committed during the conflict between Serb forces and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority between 1998-1999.
III. AFP - Russia warns NATO of nuclear deployment
Russia wants an unambiguous answer from NATO over Moscow's role in a European missile defence shield and will deploy nuclear weapons if no agreement is reached, President Dmitry Medvedev warned Monday. "Our partners have to understand that we do not want this simply to have some common toys that NATO and us can play with, but because we want adequate protection for Russia," Medvedev said in televised remarks. "So this is not a joking matter. We expect from our NATO partners a direct and unambiguous answer," he said, during a meeting with Russia's NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin. Medvedev said Russia would be forced to deploy its own missile defence shield if it was not given an equal role in the one being deployed by Washington and its allies over Europe. "In either case, we are either together with NATO, or we separately find an adequate response to the existing problem," Medvedev said. "Either we agree to certain principles with NATO, or we fail to agree, and then in the future we are forced to adopt an entire series of unpleasant decisions concerning the deployment of an offensive nuclear missile group."
IV. YNET - Iran censors Ashton's "plunging neckline"
The outfit worn by European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to the nuclear talks in Istanbul this weekend appeared too revealing for the sensibilities of Iranian media - who sought to correct the faux pas by censoring her neckline in front page photographs, British newspaper The Telegraph reported Tuesday. According to the Telegraph, Ashton made an effort to steer clear of any physical contact with Iranian chief negotiator Saeed Jalili during the talks in order to avoid offending the Muslim world. What she did not know was that her seemingly conservative top was enough to appear immodest, prompting the Iranian censors to give her a higher neckline. "She was properly dressed," A spokesperson for Ashton told the Telegraph in response. "It was not low-cut. Many women in Iran are in a complete veil. These were international negotiations in a third country." Such tweaking is not out of the ordinary in Iran; actresses who are photographed in foreign countries in revealing clothing often get digitally covered up, while in 2008 photos of a rocket-launching operation of the Iranian army was proven to be edited – an extra rocket was added to the three that were actually launched. The pictures of Ashton were taken during the meeting that took place between the UN Security Council and Iranian negotiators in Turkey to discuss the Islamic Republic's nuclear technology. The talks were generally regarded as a failure, as the world powers found Iran's demands unacceptable.
IDF Chief of General Staff, Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi on Wednesday said that "extremist regimes and terrorist organizations have introduced high and low quality weapons, exploitation of civilian human shields and misinformation to the current battlefield. Ashkenazi's comments came in a speech he gave at the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue conference in Brussels, Belgium. "All these tactics have altered the battlefield as we know it." He highlighted NATO's current challenges in Afghanistan as an example of a country where NATO members will encounter "complex strategic, tactical, and logistic issues" pertaining to fighting the war. Ashkenazi also thanked the 40 member countries of NATO, complimenting their achievements "against these terrorist threats. These combined efforts ensure that the extremists who wish to destroy our way of life will never succeed in doing so." "If we wish to completely eradicate this phenomenon, we must stand strongly before it and overcome the legal, operational and intelligence obstacles," he added. "We must use to our advantage all possible means in order to avoid the dangerous spread of unconventional weapons." Following his speech, Ashkenazi thanked the NATO Military Committee chairman Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, and his counterparts for their friendship and partnership. NATO'S Mediterranean Dialogue conference was initiated in 1994. Israel, though not a part of NATO, takes place in meetings because of its importance in the region, and expertise in military issues surrounding terrorism and security. Ashkenazi is scheduled to hold work meetings with military counterparts from around the globe while attending the conference. The meetings involve six other non-NATO countries that lie in the Mediterranean region: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia.
VI. FINANCIALMIRROR - Google widens access to Israel's Holocaust archives
Search engine giant Google launched a massive archive retrieval project with Israel's national Holocaust museum on Wednesday with the aim of easing public access to Nazi-era documents and photographs. The project was unveiled on the eve of a global day of remembrance for the six million Jewish Holocaust victims, marked annually on January 27. Officials at Google and Yad Vashem, the Israeli museum founded in the early 1950s, hope the wider use of the Internet to research the greatest tragedy in Jewish history will keep the memory alive and also add to their own knowledge on the subject... To try to prevent that, whenever people search for victims' names on Google they will be encouraged to add their own details about the person to the archived material, for example, by helping to identify photographs. To set the project in motion, Google has indexed some 130,000 photographs and documents ranging from visas to transport lists and testimonials from survivors, and thousands more may be loaded at a later stage... While many of these documents have long been available at the museum, located on a Jerusalem hilltop, and some of them are also on Yad Vashem's own website, access to this information has been limited for the global public. Google's technology is expected to make it easier now to search for clues as to what befell a long-lost relative, while in addition, Yad Vashem hopes that Web browsers will also help fill in the many lingering blanks in its aging archives... The museum was also tapping into social networking sites such as Facebook where a special memorial page was made available this week for the annual remembrance day.
Hundreds of thousands of pro-life demonstrators from across the nation took to the frosty streets of Washington, DC yesterday for the March for Life. The March marked the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a 1973 Supreme Court decision, which held that women have a constitutional right to an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and that the criminalization of abortion violates a woman’s right to privacy. The March for Life has been held annually in Washington, DC since 1974. The majority of this year’s participants were overwhelmingly young... Among the pre-March rally speakers was... His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, Archbishop of Washington and Metropolitan of All America and Canada of the Orthodox Church in America. In his address, Metropolitan Jonah told the crowd that abortion “creates a culture of death, which creates a culture of despair, which condemns a generation of women to self-hatred, to decades of guilt, to decades of despair.”... According to a 2010 report by The Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit organization that works to advance and promote sexual and reproductive health, “the United States has one of the highest abortion rates in the developed world.” A 2011 report by National Right to Life puts the number of abortions performed in the United States in 2008 at 1.2 million.