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Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a directive on Wednesday to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague. The ICC is meant to be the world's first permanent court and works to prosecute leaders and countries for war crimes, genocide and "crimes against humanity." In 2000, Russia signed the Rome treaty establishing the ICC, but never ratified it. The ICC was established in 1998, and currently has over 100 member states. Like Russia, the US also signed the treaty but declared in 2002 that they had "no intention" of ratifying it. Last Tuesday, the UN General Assembly's Human Rights...

70 Nobel Laureates Endorse Hillary Clinton By ALAN RAPPEPORT OCT. 18, 2016 A group of the world’s leading experts in science, medicine and economics threw their support behind Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, endorsing the Democratic presidential candidate and arguing that her election is crucial for safeguarding freedom and preserving a constitutional government. The forceful endorsement came in a letter signed by 70 Nobel laureates hailing from a variety of fields and making the case that Mrs. Clinton is the candidate who best understands the importance of investing in science and technology at a time when the world faces challenges on...

Russian mercenary Arseniy Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was killed in an explosion in Donetsk, several news agencies reported on Oct. 16. Police in the Kremlin-controlled area were reportedly looking for suspects in the killing. Interfax News Agency, citing a source, said Pavlov was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated in the elevator of his apartment building. Other reports say the Kremlin-backed separatists blame Ukrainian officials for the blast. If his death is confirmed, he becomes the latest in a growing number of assassinations of separatist military leaders in the Donbas. Pavlov was a war hero in the view...

An anti-Israel activist who served as an expert witness on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in a recent terrorism trial was hosted for a meeting with senior White House officials, according to visitor logs released by the Obama administration and media reports.Michael Sfard, an anti-Israel activist who has reportedly been paid by the PLO to serve as an expert witness in terrorism trials against it, met in December 2014 with a senior White House National Security Council (NSC) member for a meeting about the Middle East, according to the logs and reports.Sfard, a lawyer, serves as the legal...

Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad of committing war crimes in their assault on rebel-held territory, including hospitals and aid workers, and called for an investigation. "Russia and the regime owe the world more than an explanation about why they keep hitting hospitals, medical facilities, children and women," Kerry said before a meeting with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. "These are acts that beg for an appropriate investigation of war crimes and those that commit these would and should be held accountable for these actions. They're beyond the accidental now, way beyond, years beyond...

The UN Commission of Experts identified 1,600 actual cases of rape in the Bosnian War that took place in the former Yugoslavia over a period of years. In Germany, 2,000 Muslim migrants sexually assaulted 1,200 women in a single night in cities across Germany. The former was considered one of the worst war crimes of the decade. Its perpetrators were bombed and then faced war crimes trials. The perpetrators of the latter received a slap on the wrist. In Cologne, Hassan and Hussein were handed suspended sentences. Hassan, who had demanded that a man hand over two women to him...

The Rape of Nanking and the evil human experiments done by Unit 731 usually come to mind when we think of Japanese war crimes. Unfortunately, those awful incidents weren’t isolated cases. Fueled by racism, fanaticism, and finally desperation as their defeat seemed inevitable, the Japanese in World War II perpetrated several acts on par with Nazi war crimes. 10Laha Airfield MassacreFebruary 1942 This ghoulish event, which killed more than 300 Australian and Dutch POWs, followed the Japanese capture of the Indonesian island of Ambon. Allegedly as an act of reprisal after the Allies destroyed one of their minesweepers, the Japanese...

A 94-year-old former SS sergeant admitted in court Friday that he had served as an Auschwitz death camp guard, apologizing to Nazi Holocaust survivors looking on in a German courtroom that even though he was aware Jews were being gassed and their corpses burned, he did nothing to try to stop it. Reinhold Hanning told the Detmould state court that he had never spoken about his service in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944, even to his family, but wanted to use his trial as an opportunity to set the record straight. "I want to say that it disturbs...

Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a former Air Force pilot who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said on Thursday that Donald Trump is openly advocating war crimes that would cause the soldiers who obeyed his orders to be jailed. “If you’re a private in the field and your major or your colonel orders you to do something that is a war crime, you actually bear responsibility, you can’t say that the colonel made me do it,” said Kinzinger, who is supporting Marco Rubio. “What Donald Trump, as wanting to be president of the United States is advocating, is a war...

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady. Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord. Now evidence suggests Shearer, working with his partner Blumenthal,...

Bosnian police arrested a wartime Muslim army commander on Tuesday on charges of failing to prevent crimes committed by foreign Islamic fighters against captive Bosnian Serb soldiers during a 1992-1995 war. The arrest of 63-year-old retiree Sakib Mahmuljin was carried out on orders of the state war crimes prosecutor, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "The suspect is under investigation for acting in contravention of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions while serving as a commander of the 3rd Corps of the Army of BiH," it said. Mahmuljin has denied the charges during earlier proceedings. Many Islamic fighters,...

The US reported that North Korea mistreated prisoners of war: soldiers were beaten, starved, put to forced labor, marched to death, and summarily executed. The KPA killed POWs at the battles for Hill 312, Hill 303, the Pusan Perimeter, and Daejeon—discovered during early after-battle mop-up actions by the UN forces. Later, a US Congress war crimes investigation, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities of the Permanent Subcommittee of the Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations reported that "... two-thirds of all American prisoners of war in Korea died as a result of war crimes." Although the...

This is graphic, so warnings needed! But this is what they are teaching their kids.

Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London and member of Britain’s Labour Party, excused the terrorists who were part of the 2005 London terrorist attacks and instead blamed then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.Appearing on BBC Thursday, Livingstone, who was mayor of London at the time of the attacks, said of the suicide bombers, “Go and look what they put on their website. They did those killings because of our invasion of Iraq. They gave their lives, they said what they believed, they took Londoners’ lives in protest against our invasion of Iraq.”He added, “and we were lied to by Tony Blair about...

Critics have begun using the words “war crime” to describe a US airstrike in Kunduz that hit a Doctors Without Borders facility, killing 22 people, including children. The US pushed back against the allegations, claiming that they were responding to a call for close air support from Afghan forces and did not know of any civilian medical facilities in the area: Afghan forces called for U.S. air support while fighting the Taliban in Kunduz shortly before a hospital was struck, killing 22 people, the U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan said on Monday. …“We have now learned that on...

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base. “At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s...

The United Nations Human Rights Council has once again leveled violations of international law against Israel, this time for its incursion into Gaza during "Operation Protective Edge" in July 2014. The report paints Israel as child-abusers for terrorizing Palestinian children. They have the story right but, they've got the offenders reversed. Since its inception in 2006, the UNHRC has obsessed over Israel, criticizing it 27 times--far more than any other country in the world.  Of the body's 47 members, 21 percent have no diplomatic relations with Israel, and several don't acknowledge its right to exist. The 50-day campaign by Israel destroyed hundreds of...

Anne Herzberg, an international law expert and the legal advisor of the NGO Monitor organization, dismissed in an interview with the Arutz Sheva the accusations that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. […] She noted that the IDF has been investigating reports of misconduct and has released the results of many of those investigations. “As an overall policy, do I think the IDF committed war crimes? Absolutely not,” she reiterated. …

The comments follow allegations by Iraqi Kurdish authorities that they have evidence that ISIS used chlorine gas against their peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq. PERTH - Islamic State militants have used chlorine as a weapon and are recruiting highly trained technicians in a serious bid to develop chemical weapons, Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop warned. In a speech to an international forum of nations that works to fight the spread of such weapons, Bishop said the rise of militant groups such as ISIS, also known as Daish, posed “one of the gravest security threats we face today.” “Apart from some...

At least 72 people have been killed in Syria's northern Aleppo province by barrel bombs dropped from government helicopters, activists say. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 60 people died in the strike on al-Bab - a town currently held by Islamic State (IS) militants. It says 12 were killed in a rebel-held quarter of the city of Aleppo. Syria's government has repeatedly denied using barrel bombs - large containers filled with explosives. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which gathers information through a network of activists in Syria, called it one of the worst massacres perpetrated...