Reuters – Pakistani government air raids have killed up to 45 militants, their family members and other civilians with no ties to the fighters, officials said on Wednesday. Three strikes on Tuesday night targeted Pakistani Taliban militants in one of their strongholds in the Tirah Valley in the northwestern Khyber region on the Afghan border. Read Article
New York Times – In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers. In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word “majhoul,” or unknown: No. 5060 passed, with a bullet to the right temple; 5061, with a bruised and bloated face; 5062 bore a tattoo that read, “Mother, where is happiness?” The eyes of 5071 were open, as if remembering what had happened to him. Read Article
DailyFinance-The BP (BP) oil spill may be over, but controversy over the company’s use of toxic oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico is still going strong. Although BP allegedly stopped using the chemicals more than a month ago, area residents claim it is still spraying Corexit, a chemical dispersant, from airplanes and boats -Read Article
Washington Post – An exhaustive U.N. investigation into the history of violence in Congo has concluded that the Rwandan military and its allies carried out hundreds of large-scale killings of ethnic Hutu refugees during the 1990s that amounted to war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly genocide, according to a confidential copy of the report. Read Article
BBC – The Independent research organisation Iraq Body Count has called for a full judicial enquiry in Britain into the number of people killed and wounded in the Iraq War. The organisation says the Iraq War Inquiry in London chaired by Sir John Chilcot failed to address the issue. The BBC’s Owen Bennett-Jones has been looking at the research that has been carried out into how many civilians died as a result of the Iraq war. Read Article
UN Dispatch – The sluggish international response to the Pakistan floods emergency is actually not all that sluggish, at least compared to these humanitarian crises. Introducing the five most under-funded and ignored humanitarian crises:
Press TV – Five US soldiers are charged with deliberately targeting Afghan civilians amid growing discontent over the rising civilian causalities in the war-torn country. The troopers allegedly killed three Afghans in Kandahar Province this year and they were charged with murder in June. Read Article
BBC – A draft UN report says crimes by the Rwandan army and allied rebels in Democratic Republic of Congo could be classified as genocide.The report, seen by the BBC, details the investigation into the conflict in DR Congo from 1993 to 2003.It says ten of thousands of ethnic Hutus, including women, children and the elderly, were killed by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army. Read Article
BBC – The United Nations is investigating claims that rebel fighters raped more than 150 women and baby boys in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The attacks happened over four days within miles of a UN base, a US aid worker and a Congolese doctor said. Read Article
Reuters – Amnesty International said on Wednesday the United States appeared to have carried out or collaborated with Yemen in attacks that killed suspected al Qaeda militants, violating international law. Yemen’s killings of al Qaeda suspects, often in aerial bombings, are extrajudicial executions and are unlawful, the human rights watchdog said, and urged Washington to clarify the involvement of U.S. forces and drones in such attacks. Read Article
Daily Mail – Seven years after they arrived, the last U.S. combat troops leave Iraq. But 50 ,000 American soldiers remain to ‘advise and assist’ until New Year’s Eve, 2011. And then? ‘We kick off their training wheels,’ said a US officer. What’s been achieved? Saddam was caught and hanged, but the purported reason for the invasion – his weapons of mass destruction – never existed. The cost to America so far: $736 billion and 4,416 lives (along with 176 British lives) The cost to Iraq, so far: 100,000-plus civilian deaths and a broken nation that may never be put back together. Read Article
NY Times – A judge at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague has ordered an independent inquiry into complaints by defense witnesses and associates of the Serbian nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj, that investigators working for the prosecution in the past had pressured or intimidated witnesses for Mr. Seselj. Mr. Seselj, a former leader of the Serbian Radical Party, surrendered to the court in 2003 to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia. Read Article
Associated Press – The Obama administration has decided to support creation of a United Nations commission to look into alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Myanmar, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. An article on the newspaper’s website quoted unidentified U.S. officials as saying the administration also is considering tightening financial sanctions against the Myanmar regime to perhaps force it to open its political system and free thousands of political prisoners. Read Article
AFP — Sri Lanka’s powerful defence chief Tuesday staunchly defended the government’s human rights record, saying troops suffered heavy losses to avoid civilian casualties during last year’s assault on Tamil Tiger rebels. Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse said foreign diplomats and aid agencies had lauded his measures to protect civilians during the major military campaign against the Tigers, who were crushed in May last year. Rajapakse told a government-appointed Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission 6,000 troops were killed and 30,000 wounded during the “humanitarian mission” to free ethnic Tamil civilians from the grip of the rebels. Read Article
Reuters – Prosecutors of the first Khmer Rouge commander to face a U.N.-backed trial appealed on Monday against his prison sentence which they said was too lenient for a man who oversaw up to 14,000 deaths in Cambodia in the 1970s. Kaing Guek Eav, 67, a former prison chief better known as Comrade Duch, received less than the maximum 40 years sought by prosecutors for his role in the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge regime blamed for 1.7 million deaths in the “killing fields” of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Read Article
ABC _ NATO has acknowledged that five Afghan civilians appeared to have been killed by one of its air strikes which was carried out to help fend off a Taliban attack in the south of the country. The incident occurred on Thursday in the Lashkar Gah district of Helmand province when members of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) came under fire from insurgents and called in aircraft “to provide supporting fire,” ISAF said in a statement. Read Article
BBC – The number of civilians killed or injured in Afghanistan has jumped 31%, despite a fall in the number of casualties caused by Nato-led forces. More than 1,200 civilians were killed in the first six months of 2010 and another 1,997 civilians were injured, the latest UN six-monthly report shows. Read Article
Xinhua – NATO-led forces on Thursday night confirmed killing Afghan civilians during an operation in eastern Afghanistan one day earlier. During a joint operation with Afghan forces to hunt down Taliban leaders in Sherzad district of Nangarhar province Wednesday night, Coalition forces came under attack by insurgents and civilians were killed in the ensuing firefight, said a statement issued by the International Security Assistance Forces ( ISAF) on Thursday. Read Article
ITV – In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes about the “paramount war crime” defined by the Nuremberg judges in 1946 and its relevance to the case of Tony Blair, whose shared responsibility for the Iraq invasion resulted in the deaths of more than a million people. New developments in international and domestic political attitudes towards war crimes mean that Blair is now ‘Britain’s Kissinger’. Read Article
Press TV – Dozens of civilians have been killed and several others injured in Afghanistan after US warplanes bombarded the country’s east, according to witnesses. The American forces launched two airstrikes in Nangarhar province on Thursday morning, witnesses told Press TV. One of the attacks left at least 30 people dead and injured. The other strike, which hit a funeral procession in a separate area, killed 13 civilians including two children. Read Article
ABC-The worst floods in memory in north-west Pakistan have affected more than 3 million people so far and the death toll has climbed over 1,400, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund said. Abdul Sami Malik said 1.3 million people were severely affected by the floods which have brought heavy criticism of the government over its response to the disaster -Read Article
UN News Centre – Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative illicit businesses in Europe, according to a United Nations report launched today at an event where Spain became the first country on the continent to join the UN Blue Heart Campaign against trafficking in people. The report Trafficking in persons to Europe for sexual exploitation, issued by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), shows that criminal groups make around $3 billion per year through sexual exploitation and the forced labour of some 140,000 people at any given time. Read Article
The Age – BRITAIN and the United States should have realised their intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was flawed, the former head of the United Nations weapons inspectors has told an inquiry. Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry in London on Tuesday, Dr Hans Blix said it should have set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall and Washington when the inspectors repeatedly failed to turn up any evidence that Saddam Hussein still had WMD Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Wikileaks, the whistleblowing website, has released 90,000 documents about American and British actions in Afghanistan since the start of the war. Here are its 10 greatest previous scoops. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The Ministry of Defence was last night braced for the release of further sensitive military documents after a whistle-blower threatened to publish thousands more secret memos on the war in Afghanistan. Julian Assange, the founder of the Wikileaks website, said the 92,000 items he had released so far had “only scratched the surface” of what he had in his possession, and claimed he had evidence of possible war crimes. Mr Assange said he had another 15,000 documents which he would release in the coming weeks and which he hoped would result in “prosecutions of those people who have committed abuses”. Read Article
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