It said a jury found nine of them guilty of six murders and one assault.
The group was formed on Adolf Hitler's birthday to "exterminate" non-Russians.
Its participants fatally stabbed Central Asians and other non-Slavs with dark skin or Asian features. They often videotaped the attacks and posted them online.
Russia has experienced a surge of racist assaults, xenophobia and neo-Nazism in recent years.
>In the thick of the Cold War, the Soviet Union built an immense vessel to carry their troops across the seas and into Western Europe.
Equipped with nuclear warheads and able to blast across the sea at 340 mph, the Lun-class Ekranoplane; part plane, part boat, and part hovercraft — is a Ground Effect Vehicle (GEV).
A GEV takes advantage of an aeronautical effect that allows it to lift off with an immense amount of weight, but limits its flight to 16 feet above the waves. Its altitude can never be greater than the length of the wings.
Think of a large seabird, like a pelican, cruising inches from the water and not needing to flap its wings.
The only complete Ekranoplane now sits on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
While there is talk of refitting the Lun-class and getting the GEV back in the fleet, it's now rusting away, and was spotted by aviation blogger Igor113 who posted these pictures to his blog.
ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A new intellectual property enforcement treaty being negotiated by the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan, with Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada recently announcing that they will join in as well.
Why should you care about ACTA? Initial reports indicate that the treaty will have a very broad scope and will involve new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology.”
What is the goal of ACTA? Reportedly the goal is to create new legal standards of intellectual property enforcement, as well as increased international cooperation, an example of which would be an increase in information sharing between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies.
Following the release of the final, legally-verified version of ACTA (dated December 3rd), we have updated our analysis of the most worrying provisions of this dangerous anti-counterfeiting agreement.
ACTA AS A BULLYING WEAPON FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES
By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.
In its article 27.31 the ACTA agreement calls for "cooperation" between rights-holders and the Internet service providers. The very same mechanisms are called by the European Commission as "extra-judicial measures" and "alternative to courts". It means that police (surveillance and collection of evidences) and justice missions (penalties) could be handed out to private actors, bypassing judicial authority and the right to a fair trial.
In article 27.42, ACTA will allow rights-holders to obtain private data regarding the users of Internet service providers, without a decision of a judge. This is a dangerous breach to privacy. The article is non-binding (using the "may" verb), but this could be changed further, by way of amendment (see below). This would generalize a much criticized procedure included in the 2004 IPR enforcement directive.3.
Civil sanctions4 could also weight on technical intermediates and be used to pressure them to accept "cooperation". The “damages” section of the civil chapter5 validates the "lost-sale myth" whereby the industry claims enormous profit losses using biased methodologies. The text requires "pre-established" damages, as well as "additional damages," which means damages not based on any actual proof of harm and akin to a criminal sanction.
Article 23.46: Criminal sanctions for "aiding and abetting" infringement (it sounds just like IPRED27, which is not part of the EU acquis). These could also be used against Internet technical intermediaries and technology providers as a way to force them into accepting "cooperation" with rightsholders.
Article 27.28: This reference to the enforcement of “means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes” is very worrying. It could be interpreted as justifying the implementation of provisions indirectly criminalizing blogging platforms, P2P networks, free software, and other technologies that contribute to dissemination of culture and knowledge on the Internet.
ACTA BRINGS BROAD AND DANGEROUS CRIMINAL SANCTIONS
ACTA imposes new criminal sanctions, bypassing the EU and Member States' standard democratic process. The wording is so broad that many not for-profit actions could be criminalized.
Article 23.49: Criminal sanctions for "aiding and abetting" infringement. It is intolerable that criminal sanctions are included in a "trade agreement". Such measures should only be debated in democratic arenas. Moreover, the limit between "aiding" infringements and linking to or indexing information is blurry.
Article 23.110: ACTA provides that criminal sanctions must be applied for cases of infringement on a "commercial scale". This term is vague, open to interpretation, and just plainly wrong when it comes to determining the scope of proportionate enforcement. Widespread social practices, like not-for-profit filesharing betweens individuals, could be interpreted as "commercial scale". The only acceptable limitation of the scope of enforcement should be "commercial intent" or "for profit".
ACTA WILL ALLOW FOR A DURABLE BYPASS OF DEMOCRACY
An "ACTA committee" will be able to modify the agreement after it has been accepted. Such a parallel legislative process, accounting to a blank check to ACTA, is incompatible with democracy. This justifies that the whole ACTA be rejected.
Article 3611: This article creates the "ACTA committee", and grants it the competence to review amendments to ACTA (art 4212). This paves the way for a durable bypassing of democracy, even after ACTA is voted. No elected representative should tolerate this in a democracy as it opens the door for such processes to be generalized.
