Soccer Extremist Arrested With Homemade Bomb (Italy)

A man suspected of leading the notorious extremist fans of the Italian soccer club AC Milan was caught with an arsenal of deadly weapons Saturday, hours before the team was set to face its archrival Inter Milan, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Marco Righetto, 35, was caught with a "potentially lethal" homemade bomb, along with four knives, a baseball bat and a can of pepper spray when he was arrested close to the clubs' shared San Siro stadium.

Italian police found the bomb kit and weapons in his car.

Righetto, the presumed leader of the violent Ultra Tiger Commando, was arrested in connection with "possession of explosives and violation of the Arms Act."

His arrest came hours before the eagerly-awaited meeting between the clubs with AC Milan, which leads Serie A, facing reigning champion Inter as both teams chase the Italian league title.

MY Fox.NY

Brighton marchers promise to ban far right groups (UK)

Patriotic demonstrators have vowed to ban far right supporters from their march.

The March for England is planned to march through Brighton on Easter Sunday.

Organisers of the nationalist event have in the past been linked to the far right extremists the English Defence League (EDL), however orgainsers have said EDL supporters will be banned from the event.

Former march organiser and chairman of another far right group the English Nationalist Alliance (ENA) Bill Baker has been told he is also barred from attending.

March for England organiser Matt Silva (COR) said: "We are not a far right group. “We are a family event.

“If any EDL supporters turn up they will be turned away."

Last April more than 100 police officers chaperoned 150 marchers through the streets of Brighton and separated them from a similar number of counter demonstrators form Unite Against Fascism, at a cost of about £100,000.

The event was criticised as a front for the English Defence League, but the event passed peacefully and police said there was no EDL presence.

However a similar March For England last August Bank Holiday ended with EDL supporters making Nazi salutes outside Brighton station.

The Argus

White supremacist David Duke settles copyright lawsuit (USA)

White supremacist David Duke has agreed to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against him by Las Vegas company Righthaven LLC.

Duke and his nonprofit Louisiana-based group, the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), were sued by Righthaven on Feb. 4 in U.S. District Court in Denver.

Righthaven sues website operators and message-board posters — typically without warning or takedown requests — over alleged infringements involving copyrights it obtains from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post.

Righthaven alleged in the Duke lawsuit that a Denver Post TSA pat-down photo was posted on Duke’s website, whitecivilrights.com, without authorization.

Duke hasn’t responded to requests for comment about the lawsuit and neither he nor EURO ever filed a response in court to the lawsuit.

Righthaven filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit Friday, saying the case had been settled by written agreement. The terms weren’t disclosed.

While Righthaven typically sues for $150,000 and forfeiture of defendants’ website domain names, it’s been known to settle for under five figures and allows settling defendants to keep their websites.

While some Righthaven defendants are fighting back in court, many have found it less expensive to settle than to put up thousands of dollars for legal fees to fight the Las Vegas company on fair use or other grounds.

It wasn’t clear from the lawsuit or court exhibits who posted the photo at issue on Duke’s website. The photo accompanied a column by James Buchanan complaining about the “highly intrusive” enhanced TSA screening and pat-down procedures.

Read the full article at the Las Vegas Sun

FISTICUFFS IN EDL DEMO CHAOS

A violent demo by far right group the English Defence League descended into chaos yesterday when thugs on the march began fighting each other.

Police in Blackburn, Lancs, had used shields and steel barriers to keep apart more than 2,000 EDL marchers from a counter demo of 500 supporters from Unite Against Fascism.

But violence flared when EDL supporters turned on a splinter group calling themselves the North West Infidels. Some marchers wore gas masks to hide their identity.

“They seemed determined to fight someone and because they couldn’t get to the other demonstration they just fought one another,” said one witness.

Seven protesters were arrested.

Dailt Star

BNP's opposition to AV exploited by Yes campaigners

Voters keen to distance themselves from the far right are courted by advocates of voting reform

It's that time of the political season when everyone agrees with Nick. But which one?

A year ago, the phrase was coined by Gordon Brown and David Cameron to align themselves with Nick Clegg during the leaders' television debates. Twelve months on, the Liberal Democrats' leader's plunge in popularity means his image has been appropriated by opponents of his plan to adopt the alternative vote for electing MPs.

Now a new Nick has entered the fray. Mr Griffin, the leader of the British National Party and political hate figure, is to feature in a series of posters for the Yes campaign highlighting the BNP's opposition to AV.

The billboards have aligned Mr Griffin with David Cameron, who last week launched his strongest attack yet on replacing first past the post with AV. He said the system of ranking candidates in order of preference was "crazy" and "undemocratic".

The decision to place Mr Griffin at the centre of the next stage of the Yes campaign came after research suggested the BNP's opposition to AV produced overwhelming support for reform. Katie Ghose, chair of the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign, said: "We have been speaking to voters across the country. The minute they hear that Nick Griffin is campaigning for a No vote they say Yes. Griffin is voting No and encouraging BNP supporters to do the same. He knows his party has no future with AV."

But the image appeared to be at odds with the politician-free campaign launch yesterday in central London. Instead, comedian Eddie Izzard, writer Rowan Davis, gold medal winner Kriss Akabusi, journalist Martin Bell and fashion designer Amisha Ghadiali lined up to explain why AV would stop MPs from becoming complacent. Greg Dyke, former BBC director-general, said: "Once nominated, you've got a job for life, which is why we've got rather average politicians. AV will begin to change that." More than 100 rallies were held across the country.

Writing in The Independent on Sunday, Mr Clegg hails the vote as an example of long-held Lib Dem policies which are "becoming reality". He adds: "Electoral reform had felt like an unattainable goal for decades: now voters are being given their first chance ever to get rid of the broken system that helped produce the expenses scandal."

The referendum takes place on 5 May, with both sides anxious about the level of public awareness. Under AV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Those performing least well are eliminated in reverse order with their votes distributed to others until one candidate has 50 per cent of the support.

However, Mr Clegg once described AV as a "miserable little compromise" because it is it not a proportional system. According to a YouGov poll of 2,391 people carried out last week, 19 per cent of people want to see a proportional voting system – STV – while only 16 per cent backed AV.

Lord Alton, a former Lib Dem MP backing the No to AV, Yes to PR campaign, said: "Rejecting AV will make bringing in real reform more likely. If the wrong change is made now, it will be years before the debate will be reopened.".

The Independant

Earliest eyewitness account of the Holocaust finally to be published in UK

Story of Catholic who infiltrated Nazi death camp and brought report to Allies could become new film.

The extraordinary memoir of a Polish resistance fighter who gave the first eyewitness report on the Holocaust to the Allies is to be published for the first time in Britain, and is to be made into a film by the producer of The King's Speech.

The Story of a Secret State, by Jan Karski, was published in 1944 in America. Karski, a devout Catholic, risked his life with the Polish underground and was involved in high-level secret missions to the Polish government-in-exile in London. A prisoner of the Russians and Nazis, and brutally tortured by the SS, he escaped from Poland and in 1943 was sent to London with a hidden microfilm revealing conditions under the Nazis and in particular the relentless persecution of Europe's Jews by the Third Reich.

As a member of the resistance and to learn the fate of Polish Jews, Karski was smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw ghetto and infiltrated the Belzec death camp dressed as an Estonian guard. He travelled across occupied Europe to England, and eventually to America. Karski personally reported to the Polish prime minister in London, General Sikorski, Britain's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, and many other prominent figures. His description of the systematic annihilation of Jews was met with incredulity.

The drama of Karski's story has inspired the producer of The King's Speech, Iain Canning, to immortalise his role in another historic epic. Canning is believed to have just acquired the rights to the memoir from Penguin, who will publish the book next month. Film insiders said that Ralph Fiennes, who was Oscar-nominated for Schindler's List, was a likely contender for Karski.

The Story of a Secret State sold 400,000 copies in three months in the United States while the war still raged. In the postwar period, having been traumatised by memories he described as "my permanent possessions", Karski preferred silence, rather than to relive the horrors. But he revised his book before his death in 2000, expanding it with material he could not reveal during the war.

Given its historical importance, it is astonishing that the harrowing record of brutality and courage was not published in the UK. In the Warsaw ghetto, Karski said he saw "a cemetery" with living bodies. "Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children." He witnessed two "rosy-cheeked" Nazi youths laughing before taking pot-shots at inmates: "The shot rang out… Then the terrible cry of a man in agony. The boy who had fired… shouted with joy." Karski, a man used to Nazi brutality against Poles, remained frozen in shock.

In Belzec, a camp east of Warsaw, he found "squalor" and a "mass of sheer death". Horror-struck, he watched a train being loaded "hermetically", filled with naked bodies "to bursting" — a "quivering cargo of flesh". The floor was covered with quicklime to burn the bodies, "the flesh eaten from their bones," death coming slowly, but taking up to four days.

Before his mission to Britain, Karski agonised over what action the Allies could and would take to stop the murders in the ghetto and camps – if they believed him. "I know that many people will not believe me, will not be able to believe me, will think I exaggerate or invent. But I saw it," he said at the time.

The Jews he spoke to – most of whom knew their fate was probably sealed – begged him to convey the desire for vengeance and "merciless" bombing and executions of Germans.

Having hoped to meet Winston Churchill, Karski had to make do with Eden, who presented a report to the war cabinet, but no direct action was taken as a result of Karski's testimony.

Commenting on whether the Allies could have done more once they knew about the death camps, the historian Andrew Roberts said that the issue was "a huge bone of contention… among historians". There were "major problems" with bombing – the risk to inmates "wouldn't look good for Allied propaganda". He also pointed out the huge distances that aircraft had to fly and their inability to pinpoint targets.

He added that Karski reported on killings, but did not know about the gas chambers.

Karski described Gestapo brutality and the "sheer pain of the first rubber truncheon" in terms we can all understand: "Something like… a dentist's drill [when it] strikes a nerve, but infinitely… spread over the entire nervous system."

Roberts added: "Karski, for all his amazing bravery shown in this wonderful book, was not able to provide… details of the gas chambers... It's heart-rending to think so little was done, but then Eden and others argued at the time that they were in fact helping the Jews by trying to defeat the Germans."

The Guardian