An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under toppled leader Bashar al-Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013. Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters: “We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine…I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves….We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” said Rapp, who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals and is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials. “From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing,” Rapp said - Reuters
Russia’s security service says a 29-year-old Uzbekistan citizen has been detained over the killing of senior general Igor Kirillov and his assistant in Moscow. Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, head of the Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Defence Forces (NBC), was outside a residential block early on Tuesday when a device hidden in a scooter was detonated remotely. Russian security services said the suspect was recruited by Ukrainian intelligence, according to state media agencies. A Ukrainian source told the BBC on Tuesday that the killing was orchestrated by Ukraine’s security service - BBC
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A September power outage at a California facility of SpaceX, the space venture of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, caused a loss of ground control for at least an hour during a mission that included the first private spacewalk in history, according to three people familiar with the problem. The spacewalk, part of SpaceX’s five-day Polaris Dawn mission, was carried out by private astronauts including Jared Isaacman, a fellow billionaire and longtime Musk partner who is now nominated by incoming President Donald Trump to be administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The outage, which has not previously been reported, meant that SpaceX mission control was briefly unable to command its Dragon spacecraft in orbit, these people said. The vessel, which carried Isaacman and three other SpaceX astronauts, remained safe during the outage and maintained some communication with the ground through the company’s Starlink satellite network. “Not having command and control is a big deal,” one of the people familiar with the problem told Reuters. “The whole point of having mission operators on the ground is to have the ability to quickly respond if something happens.” - Reuters
Russia’s Rosatom is selling its stakes in uranium deposits in Kazakhstan to Chinese-owned companies as the Central Asian nation looks to avoid any international sanctions against Russian-linked assets and a sign of China’s growing influence in the region. Kazatomprom, the world’s largest producer of uranium, said Uranium One Group -- a unit of Rosatom -- had sold its 49.98 percent stake in the Zarechnoye mine in the Turkistan region to Astana Mining Company, which is owned by China’s State Nuclear Uranium Resources Development Company. Kazatomprom maintains its 49.99 percent stake in the venture. Kazatomprom chief Meirzhan Yussupov told The Financial Times in September that sanctions imposed on Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine made it difficult to sell uranium to Western buyers - RFE/RL
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