Word: soldier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...flexing its own muscles while Fatah held the spotlight, Hamas has renewed talks through the Egyptians over the release of captive Israeli soldier Corporal Gilad Shalit in exchange for several hundred Palestinian prisoners. If Hamas pulls off the deal, it would undermine Abbas' own credibility, since his years of negotiating with the Israelis in U.S.-sponsored peace talks yielded few positive results hailed by ordinary Palestinians. Over 11,000 Palestinians remain in Israel captivity, and Abbas has long demanded that Israel free many of them, but to no avail...
Sixty-five years after 11 men were massacred in the central Italian village of Falzano Di Cortona, a German court convicted former Nazi soldier Josef Scheungraber of ordering the killings and sentenced him to life in prison. Scheungraber, 90, looked frail but alert as the verdict was read out in the Munich courthouse on Aug. 11, at the close of one of Germany's last Nazi war-crimes trials...
...this latest judgment has come too late, and Scheungraber's trial has sparked debate in Germany over why prosecutors took so long to press charges. But most Germans are relieved that the pensioner has finally been called to account for the crimes he committed while he was a young soldier. The ruling has symbolic significance in Germany, which feels a collective sense of moral responsibility toward victims of Nazi massacres. Norbert Frei, a historian at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, summed up the nation's mood when he said during an interview with radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk: "Even...
...past, a nationally drafted militia kept the cantons from raising armies against each other. But it quickly became enshrined as the ultimate symbol of solidarity and subsidiarity. As Dr. Sabine Mannitz at the Peace Institute Research Frankfurt (PRIF) writes, “the Swiss concept of the citizen-soldier aims at the lowest possible degree of institutionalising military structures and at a maximum of immediate democratic control.” Compulsory militia service, the obligation to defend the polity on equal share, is the other side of the coin of semi-direct democratic participation rights. If you have equal decision...
...anachronism, most Swiss still highly regard (nearly) universal conscription. For many who have served, the militia is a school of life, and teaches invaluable lessons. One former soldier noted that Swiss middle-class men cannot rise in the corporate world without a good show in the army...