Jonathan Evans, director of Britain's MI5 internal intelligence agency, said in a rare public speech that dissident Irish Republicans are preparing attacks on the British mainland.
Albanians and Serbs clashed in the divided Kosova town of Mitrovica, apparently triggered by Albanians who were celebrating the defeat of Serbia’s national basketball team in a semi-final against Turkey.
Spain’s Supreme Court unanimously confirmed a lower court finding that judge Baltasar Garzón abused his power in opening an investigation of Franco-era war crimes, and must face trial.
Some 12,000 marched in Paris to protest French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mass expulsion of Roma migrants. Some 1,000 have been summarily deported since the policy was announced last month.
Slovakia commemorated the victims of this week’s massacre in Bratislava with an official day of mourning. The targeted family was of mixed ethnic Slovak and Roma composition.
The Ukraine Security Service (SBU) appears to be targeting the country's anarchist youth following an attack on a leader of the neo-fascist Right Sector. In December, the SBU carried out searches at the homes of seven anarchists in the cities of Kiev, Brovary, Dnipro and Lviv. SBU officers reportedly forced two anarchists to sign a "cooperation agreement," and one of the activists had her passport confiscated. Those targeted were members of the groups Black Banner and Ecological Initiative. The searches were carried out as part of an investigation into an attack on a Right Sector militant Dmytro "Verbych" Ivashchenko, a veteran of the war in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region. (Photo: protest outside SBU office in Kiev, via Zaborona)
A 24-year-old Crimean Tatar was sentenced by a court in Russian-annexed Crimea to 10-and-a-half years' imprisonment for supposed involvement in a volunteer force patrolling the border of Crimea and mainland Ukraine to help enforce a blockade. Video evidence introduced in the trial only showed the suspect from behind. Nonetheless, Fevzi Sahandzhy was convicted of being a member of the Asker Battalion—also known as the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion, in honor of the martyred president of the short-lived independent Crimean Republic of 1918. The Battalion began participating in the blockade of Crimea in 2015 to press demands for the release of political prisoners and restoration of freedom of speech and assembly on the peninsula. (Photo: Human Rights in Ukraine)
The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance joined critics of French mass deportations of Roma and demolition of their encampments. The commission accused France of “stigmatizing migrants.”
Police intervened against a march by the far-right Slovak Brotherhood in front of the castle in Bratislava, amid a controversy about fascist symbols in a new statue of Prince Svatopluk on the castle grounds.
In a move protested by rights groups, French President Nicolas Sarkozy will evict some 300 squatter camps in a sweeping crackdown on Roma immigrants and “travellers.”
The Hague’s ruling that Kosova’s declaration of independence was not illegal is predictably applauded by the US and Kosova and protested by Russia and Serbia—yet it resolves nothing.
World leaders commemorated the 1995 Srebrenica massacre July 11, and genocide convictions have been handed down—but the accused massacre mastermind Ratko Mladic remains at large.
