Free Republic

Holocaust: Sweden's complex legacy On 27th January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz, an event commemorated around the world on Holocaust Memorial Day. David Stavrou looks at the complex legacy of the Holocaust in Sweden, where the battle to promote tolerance still rages. Chavka Folman-Raban is a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who arrived in Sweden a few days before the end of the Second World War. Like many other survivors, she was liberated by the Red Cross and found refuge in Sweden. "I'm not sure I can describe with absolute certainty the transition from being a prisoner in a concentration...

GENEVA - The "Red Crystal" debuts Sunday as an emblem that can be used to protect its relief workers, part of an agreement for Israel's admission to the Red Cross movement after more than half a century of exclusion. During decades of stalemate, stemming from the Jewish state's reluctance to display a cross or crescent, some countries had feared that adding a red Star of David to the list of protective emblems would open the door to proliferation of other such symbols and undermine the recognition that any emblem had to protect humanitarian workers. But it was unlikely that the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal government has fined the American Red Cross $5.7 million for violating blood-safety laws and the terms of a 2003 consent decree. The fine covers quality assurance, inventory management, control of non-conforming blood products, donor screening and blood component manufacturing issues turned up during a 2005 inspection of a Red Cross facility in West Henrietta, N.Y., the Food and Drug Administration said in a Nov. 21 letter. The letter, to Red Cross interim president and CEO Jack McGuire, was posted Monday on the FDA Web site. The fine appears to be the largest single penalty ever...

The Red Cross says Burma's government has ordered it to close five field offices in the country, severely curtailing its humanitarian work there. The offices, some of which deal with victims of conflict in Burma's border areas, now face closure, it said. The Red Cross also says it will remain barred from visiting jails, said to include some 1,000 political prisoners. Humanitarian work for some of Burma's most vulnerable people was now in jeopardy, the organisation said.

GAZA CITY (AP) -- The Red Cross announced the suspension of its operations in the Gaza Tuesday night, after two of the organization's workers were kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen earlier in the day. Iyad Nasr, a spokesman for the Red Cross's Gaza office, said the organization had ceased all field operations and would intervene only "in matters of life and death." Workers have been ordered to stay in their offices because of fears for their safety, he said. The kidnapping of the two Red Cross workers, both Italians, was the latest in a string of abductions of foreigners in the...

GAZA (Reuters) - Gunmen abducted two Italians working for the International Committee of the Red Cross in southern Gaza on Tuesday, the latest in a spate of kidnappings of foreigners in the Palestinian coastal strip. Police said the aid workers were in a car on their way to the town of Khan Younis when they were intercepted by gunmen. "They were taken out of their vehicle and put into another car which then sped away," said one police officer at the scene. An ICRC spokesman in Jerusalem, Simon Schorno, identified the abducted men as Claudio Moroni and Gianmarco Onorato. He...

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously. "I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said. "I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive...

For the first time, the International Committee of the Red Cross met this week with 14 suspected al Qaeda operatives held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the reputed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, said sources with direct knowledge of the visit. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of planning the 2001 attacks and former No. 3 leader of al Qaeda, and Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be September 11 hijacker, were among the 14 prisoners to meet with Red Cross officials. International Committee of the Red Cross members had planned to meet with each of the suspects privately and...

<p>Fox News reporting a new video is out. It shows two dead american soldiers burned and being dragged through the streets.</p> <p>There is a belief that they are the bodies of troopers Tucker and Menchaca.</p>

TYRE, Lebanon - The International Red Cross said on Saturday its officials had met three captured Hezbollah fighters in Israel and urged the Jewish state to declare the number of Lebanese guerrillas in its jails. Andreas Wigger, head of the international committee’s delegation in Lebanon, also asked Hezbollah’s top official in southern Lebanon, Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, to allow his group access to the two Israeli soldiers snatched by the guerrilla group, ICRC spokesman Hisham Hassan said. Hezbollah’s capture of the two soldiers in a July 12 cross-border raid triggered a 34-day war that killed nearly 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly...

AHMED FAWAZ sits in a wheelchair in a sweat-stained hospital gown, smoking a cigarette in the sweltering heat. He was discharged from a Beirut hospital this week, after losing his leg when a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance he was in with his family came under an Israeli air attack in south Lebanon on July 23. The incident near the village of Qana left his son Mohammed, 12, scarred by shrapnel. The attack on two ambulances ferrying the injured between Tibnin and Tyre was widely reported by the international media. Yet the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has condemned press coverage of...

THE International Committee of the Red Cross has rebuked Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for relying on an unverified internet blog to claim an Israeli missile strike on one of its ambulances in southern Lebanon was a hoax. A spokeswoman for the ICRC in Geneva said yesterday there was no evidence to support Mr Downer's assertion that the international media had been duped in reporting that Israel had deliberately targeted the ambulance. An image of the roof of the ambulance showed what was purportedly an entry hole allegedly made by an Israeli rocket which had pierced the centre of the red...

by Mark Finkelstein August 10, 2006 - 08:52 That truth is the first casualty of war has been borne home by the proliferating scandal of photographs of the current Middle East crisis doctored so as to portray Israel in the worst possible light. At this point, can we look at any image from the area without a good dose of doubt? Take this morning's report on the Today show. NBC's Richard Engel, in Tyre, Lebanon, reported that: "The fighting has made humanitarian relief efforts almost impossible. Israel has cut roads and attacked vehicles, isolating Hezbollah and everyone else." This was...

Humanitarian Aid Organization Israel La'ad Comes to Kiryat Shomena Is the UN and the International Red Cross Discriminating Against Israel? By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Kiryat Shmona ---August 9.....The supermarket in Kiryat Shmona, Israel was empty. No lines, no loudspeakers announcing sales, no sound of cash machines opening and closing. Breaking this silence was the wail of air raid sirens as an endless line of shopping carts filled to the brim with everything from milk and cheese to washing detergent and shaving cream waited by one cash register. Driving in large, green and blue pickup trucks, flying Israel flags...

Hamas did not allow representatives of the Red Cross to visit kidnapped soldier, Gilad Shalit, sources said Saturday. The humanitarian organization had requested last week to see Shalit in order to assess his health condition, and were denied the visit by Hamas. "We will not allow visitors to see the soldier while the families of thousands of jailed Palestinians cannot see their loved ones," Hamas officials said.

Israel La'ad To Provide Humanitarian Aid To Northern Towns By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Tel Aviv----August 3......Since the war in Lebanon began three weeks ago with the Hezbollah terror organization, the Israel civilian populations of Haifa, Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya, Metulla, Rosh Pina, Nazareth and Tiberius have suffered numerous casualties, hundreds of injuries, emotional trauma and economic devastation. According to the Israel police over 2,000 rockets and Hezbollah missiles have slammed into Israel from Lebanon as a result of terror rocket attacks. Over 70 Israelis, including babies and children, have died with more than 1,700 Israelis injured. Lebanon has totally...

REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala. (Army News Service, July 10, 2006) – Having volunteered with the Red Cross, Cindra Smith knew there was something wrong when she arrived home from work late one night and had a Red Cross message on her machine. “When I called them back I was told to wait by the phone and expect a call,” she said. “When I got the phone call they said my daughter had been shot in the back during an IED attack in Iraq.” Pvt. Tracy Branton, Smith’s oldest daughter, was a heavy wheel mechanic on a convoy in Iraq when it...

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Blood supplies across the state are at critically low levels, the BloodCenter of Wisconsin said while urging donors to step forward. The summer and holidays are traditionally slow periods for donations, but supplies of blood are about a third of the supply normally stocked at this time, said Jerry Gottschall, the center's vice president of medical services. "It's been a while since we've had an appeal because of shortages at this level," he said Wednesday. The center typically collects at least 800 units a day, six days a week. The shortage means for at least a week,...

In accordance with its induction to Red Cross organization, Magen David Adom to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians. Chairman of MDA's executive committee: We won't put up with woman who has to deliver baby at checkpoint Magen David Adom will provide the Palestinians with six ambulances bearing the Red Crescent symbol and Israeli vehicle license plates, MDA officials said Sunday at a press conference detailing the induction agreement of MDA into the International Red Cross. The ambulances which will be provided to the Palestinian Authority will be allowed to cross IDF checkpoints with a minimum security check, provided that the...

snip…Privates Tucker and Menchaca were not simply ambushed, taken prisoner and killed. "The torture was something unnatural," said Major General Abdul Azziz Mohammed Jassim of Iraq's Defense Ministry, hinting at the state of the soldiers' remains. The corpses were so mutilated that they could be positively identified only through DNA testing. Here, then, is the enemy we face in Iraq: not nationalists or extremists or even fanatics, but something like a band of real-life Hannibal Lecters for whom human slaughter is both business and religious fulfillment. Following the killing, an Internet statement said to be from the Mujahadeen Shura Council...