London
Miranda had secrets: British authorities say reporter Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian partner was carrying a staggering number of secret files when he was detained last month at Heathrow airport. Civil liberties activists had criticized the nine-hour questioning of David Miranda as a bullying tactic aimed at cowing Greenwald, the American reporter for The Guardian who broke the story of NSA surveillance. But British intelligence official Oliver Robbins told a U.K. court that Miranda was carrying nearly 60,000 highly classified British intelligence files leaked by ex–NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The material could identify British spies and techniques, Robbins said. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger disputed the claim, saying the government sought only to justify a “dismaying blurring of terrorism and journalism.”
Hagen, Germany
Get the Nazis: As part of a new push to prosecute low-level Nazi officers before they die, a German court has opened a trial against a 92-year-old Dutch-born German who was a border guard in the Waffen-SS. Siert Bruins volunteered for the SS after Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and is charged with killing a captured Dutch resistance fighter by shooting him in the back of the head in 1944. German prosecutors said they are also pursuing charges against some three dozen former Auschwitz guards. The 2011 conviction of Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk, who died last year, showed that death camp guards could be convicted as accessories to war crimes, even without evidence tying them directly to a specific killing.
