The German government said yesterday that it will firmly oppose a "groundless" bid by a group of Germans expelled from present-day Poland at the end of World War II to win restitution for lost property through a European court.
The Prussian Claims Society, which represents a small group of expelled Germans, said on Friday that it had filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights. It accused Poland of violating the human rights of those driven from their prewar homes as borders were redrawn in 1945.
"For us, the complaint of the Prussian Claims Society is groundless," government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters. "The government emphatically does not support such restitution claims."
Steg said Germany would "make its legal position clear" to the Strasbourg court.
He emphasized that the Prussian Claims Society finds itself "isolated" in Germany, with no political support.
The claims stem from the long-standing territorial rearrangements reached after the war by the US, Great Britain and the Soviet Union at the 1945 Potsdam conference.
The Potsdam agreement gave large parts of eastern Germany to Poland, and the Germans living there were forced to leave. Meanwhile large parts of eastern Poland ultimately went to the Soviet Union.
Although the government in Berlin has long made clear it will not support restitution claims by Germans, threats of such claims have caused great anger in Poland and weighed on relations.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS