At least one police officer was injured in Berlin on Saturday when about 500 people shouting “Nazis out” clashed with an equal number of far-right demonstrators marking the 31st anniversary of the prison suicide of Nazi convict Rudolf Hess.
Many of the far-right activists, clad in red and white, hoisted the red, white and black flag of the Third Reich.
One group carried a sign that read: “I regret nothing: National Socialists Berlin.”
“There were reports of injuries when some stones and bottles were thrown by counter-demonstrators at the far-right demonstrators,” Berlin police spokesman Thilo Cablitz told reporters.
“At least one police officer was injured, but the event is still going on and we’re still compiling the numbers,” Cablitz said.
The clashes took place about 65km south of the town of Meseberg, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel was meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday evening.
About 2,300 police officers were on duty to prevent violence at the Berlin event and a separate march by less than 50 people in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, where Hess, a former deputy of Adolf Hitler, served a life sentence handed down at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
A mix of counter-demonstrators staged non-violent sit-ins at intersections along the march route in the Berlin neighborhood of Lichtenberg, while others gathered to shout at the neo-Nazi demonstrators.
Germany has tough laws that ban use of symbols of the Nazi regime, such as the swastika flag, but the far-right has grown stronger in the past few years after the arrival of more than 1 million mostly Muslim migrants beginning in 2015.
While far-right activity remains a fringe phenomenon in Germany, it has been behind high-profile crimes, most recently 10 murders committed by the so-called National Socialist Underground, whose sole surviving leader was last month sentenced to life in prison.
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS