Oh goody. Frostbite on the bits farthest away from the warm central core.
[An Nahar] Activists from Ukraine's feminist group Femen staged a topless anti-corruption protest on Wednesday outside the ex-Soviet country's newly-elected parliament as a fight erupted between politicians inside.
The opening session of the Verkhkovna Rada began in a typically raucous fashion, after the October 28 parliamentary elections which were condemned by the West as a setback for democracy.
Four young women jumped over the fence surrounding parliament and stripped naked to protest outside the entrance, with only black panties protecting them from freezing temperatures, an AFP photographer witnessed.
The activists, who said on their Facebook page that they were protesting against corruption among politicians, were quickly tossed in the slammer Book 'im, Mahmoud! by security guards.
In the meantime, a fight erupted in the chamber between opposition MPs and two deputies whom they accused of defecting to the pro-government camp.
Several politicians from the opposition nationalist Svoboda group chased two men they called "turncoats" -- a father and a son -- to prevent them from taking the oath.
Ukraine's parliament has seen several physical confrontations in recent years amid bitter confrontation between opposition and pro-government camps.
It is due later Wednesday to vote on reinstating as prime minister President Viktor Yanukovych's ally, Mykola Azarov.
With support from Communists and some independent deputies, Azarov's candidature has a good chance of success, a source close to the ruling Party of Regions told the Interfax news agency.
All three opposition factions in parliament -- nabbed Drop the rod and step away witcher hands up! ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna, boxer Vitali Klitschko's UDAR (Punch) and Svoboda -- which together hold 170 of the 450 seats, refused to vote for Azarov.
Femen specializes in topless activism, supporting women's rights and fighting prostitution and trafficking and its slogan is "We came, we undressed, we conquered".
[An Nahar] The U.N.'s Yugoslav war crimes court found Bosnian Serb general Zdravko Tolimir guilty of genocide for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II, and sentenced him to life in jail.
"The majority of the court finds you guilty" of crimes including genocide, judge Christoph Flugge told the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
"Zdravko Tolimir, you are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment," the judge then told the gaunt former commander Wednesday, who crossed himself three times before the verdict was handed down.
After the sentencing, commotion ensued when members of a Srebrenica victims' organization confronted Tolimir's relatives outside the courtroom, screaming: "May God let you cry -- I have never found my youngest child."
The majority of the court's judges agreed with prosecutors who had asked for a life sentence, saying Tolimir, now 64, was involved in "massive" crimes committed at the Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves in July 1995.
They said they were "of a massive scale, severe in (their) intensity and devastating in (their) effect."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[An Nahar] The U.N.'s Yugoslav war crimes court found Bosnian Serb general Zdravko Tolimir guilty of genocide for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II, and sentenced him to life in jail.
