The New York authorities have returned this Wednesday seven works by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish couple who were victims of the Holocaust to their living relatives.. The works were located thanks to an investigation that spanned several American collections, including that of Jewish magnate Ronald Lauder.

The works belonged to Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish-Austrian comedian, radio host and cabaret artist who had a collection of hundreds of works, including more than 80 Schieles, and who was captured by the Nazis after the invasion of his country and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died in 1941.

Grünbaum was forced to grant power of attorney over his property to his wife Elisabeth, and the Nazis forced the latter to hand over her entire art collection before sending it to a camp in Minsk, where she died in 1942, he explained to the media on Wednesday. media Judge Timothy M. Reif, a relative of the Austrian couple, who had no children.

The Manhattan Prosecutor's Office (New York) held a ceremony this Wednesday to hand over Schiele's works to Reif, who is one of Grünbaum's legal heirs.. Reif thanked the authorities and institutions for their cooperation in achieving justice, in some way, eight decades after his murder.

According to prosecutor Alvin Bragg, the investigation was directed by the head of his antiquities trafficking unit, Matthew Bogdanos, who has scored several victories in this type of investigation and who managed to locate the seven pieces in important collections such as Ronald's. Lauder, the MoMA or the Morgan Library.

The expert pointed out that Schiele's art, an expressionist, was described as “degenerate” by Adolf Hitler's regime, which led to its auction or sale abroad to finance the Nazi party.

Trace of these works was lost until 1956, when they reappeared in Switzerland, coming from Eberhard Kornfeld, a dealer associated with Hitler's personal art curator, who that same year sold the pieces to Otto Kallir, owner of a gallery in New York but without making the slightest indication of its origin.

However, Kallir knew that they had belonged to Grünbaum because he saw them in the cabaret artist's own apartment in Vienna, a city where he also had a gallery called Neue Gallery, where he had exhibited those works by Schiele in 1928, according to one note from the Prosecutor's Office.

In total, Schiele's seven paintings and watercolors, which portray the painter and his wife Edith, are valued at 9.5 million dollars (about 8.9 million euros) and the most notable is I love antithesis, which was in the collection of Ronald Lauder, heir to cosmetics entrepreneur Estée Lauder and president of the World Jewish Congress.

Lauder, who is co-founder of the Neue Gallerie in New York, a gallery specializing in Austrian and German art, voluntarily handed over the work to the Prosecutor's Office, like the other institutions, and said through a spokesman that he had acquired it decades ago from through a dealer, according to CNBC.

Reif said this Wednesday that the Nazis killed the “majority of Grünbaum's relatives,” but assured that their “dynasty” lives on in the art that the couple collected and hoped that whoever sees the works – he did not specify their destination – can “imagine Fritz and Elisabeth in their bustling Vienna apartment singing, dancing and telling jokes.”

Likewise, he highlighted the importance of returning the works and considered that the American justice system has given an “example” to follow in this type of case.

According to the Human Rights Office of Arstaj – the name by which the separatist region is officially known – in its official profile on the social network X, the number of civilian deaths amounts to 200.. Among these are 10 civilians, five of them children, while more than 40 civilians have been injured, 13 of them minors.

The Azerbaijani authorities have recognized two civilians killed during the anti-terrorist operation, while the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliev, spoke of several dead soldiers, without specifying.

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed in a telephone conversation with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian that “the most acute phase of the conflict” had been overcome and agreed to hold negotiations between Baku and Karabakh representatives on Thursday. “These negotiations will be held through the mediation of the commanders of the Russian peacekeeping contingent,” he stressed.

“Ethnic cleansing”

The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected Armenian complaints of “ethnic cleansing” at the hands of Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh following the agreement reached between both sides to cease hostilities. “For now there are no reasons to talk about ethnic cleansing,” Peskov said in statements to Russian public television.

Armenian diplomats denounced that the international community tolerates “military ethnic cleansing” carried out by the Azerbaijani army. For this reason, thousands of Karabakhis gathered this Wednesday at the airport of the capital of the enclave, Stepanakert (Jankendi in Azerbaijani), with the aim of being evacuated.

Aliev, who had demanded that the Karabakhs accept Azerbaijani citizenship, promised in his television address that he will guarantee the rights of Armenians living in Karabakh, a territory inhabited by some 120,000 people.

The Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, repeatedly denied this Wednesday that he had interfered in the investigation of Hunter Biden and insisted that he is not receiving orders from US President Joe Biden to save his son.

Garland, who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, defended the work of David Weiss, who was appointed a few weeks ago as special prosecutor and who has accused Hunter Biden of lying about the purchase of a revolver in 2018 by denying that he used drugs.

The attorney general noted that “the Department of Justice works for the American people” and that what they are doing is following “the facts and the law.” “I am not the president's lawyer and I would like to add that I am not the prosecutor of Congress,” he explained.

“Distract” attention

Jim Jordan, the Republican who chairs the committee, accused the Department of Justice of treating Hunter Biden and former United States President Donald Trump (2017-2021) differently, who is being investigated and has been charged with several crimes.. Among them are attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “Four in five Americans believe there are two standards of justice,” Jordan said in his opening statement.

For his part, Democrat Jerry Nadler reproached Republicans for trying to create “an absurd impeachment trial” against President Biden to “distract” attention from Trump's growing legal problems.

Garland also declared that attempts by some Republicans to withhold or reduce funding for the FBI would be “catastrophic” for the United States, leaving it vulnerable to possible attacks from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and acts of domestic terrorism.

The case of the Almendralejo minors is the first case of mass reporting of non-consensual porn creation among teenagers in Spain, but not the one in the world.. At least there is another precedent, very recent, and it is the case that occurred at Saint George's private school in Lima (Peru), where two students sold sexual photos online faked with artificial intelligence with the faces of a dozen of their classmates.

The group of parents from the Saint George's private school denounced at the end of August of this year the manipulation of photos that their daughters had posted on social networks to make them appear naked and be able to sell them on the Internet.

A student at the center discovered on a school computer the open session of one of the two content creators with doctored photos in which her classmates' faces appeared.

The alleged perpetrators, two 14-year-old teenagers, inserted their faces with a fake naked body and then sold them to students at the same center, as revealed by the local press.

The Peruvian Prosecutor's Office immediately announced the opening of an investigation and as part of the proceedings, the prosecutor's team went to said school to collect relevant documentation and hold a meeting with representatives of the center, who defend that the events occurred outside of school hours.. The day what happened was revealed, classes were canceled and then both students under investigation were separated and have since received their education remotely.

According to the Peruvian press, the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations of Peru asked the Prosecutor's Office to speed up the investigation of the case.. And they indicated that they reject all forms of violence, wherever it occurs, and demanded that “those who falsified and edited images of students from an educational institution in (the Lima district of) Chorrillos be investigated and punished to give them sexual content, disseminate and commercialize them.” “.

Never before has hell been so close to heaven as when, on October 13, 1972, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 occurred, in which 40 passengers were traveling: 19 players from the Old Christians Club rugby team and their friends and family. When they were rescued, 72 days had passed, and for the sixteen survivors, life would never be the same.

The clouds that covered the Andes: a door to hell

It was Friday the 13th. The young people were euphoric, because for many, that was probably one of their first airplane flights, “I was in the cockpit, taking photos of that impressive mountain range, all white, it was extremely snowy.”. It had been one of the years with the most snowfall in Chile. And suddenly you see a storm front coming toward where the plane was heading,” says one of the survivors in the documentary Castaway of the Andes.

In effect, those concentrated clouds were the door to hell for the Fairchild FH-227D, the four-year-old plane piloted by Julio César Ferradas, of the Air Force, and Dante Héctor Lagurara, lieutenant colonel, who by the time they were able to realize After what had happened, they were already lost: confused by the clouds, they had turned towards what they thought were the surroundings of Curicó (Chile), to land in Santiago, and which in reality was the Andes mountain range, against which they crashed. .

Extreme cold, an avalanche and cannibalism

From tragedy, the greatest of sanity was born. There was no other, we had to survive. Therefore, despite having lost everything, and many of them having fractures and pieces of metal stuck in their bodies, the young survivors organized themselves and created a community of solidarity to help each other. “The first rule, which was never written, but could not be broken, was that it was forbidden to complain. “You didn't talk to the one who complained, you didn't give him water, you didn't feed him, you didn't massage his feet… We were all cold, we were all hungry, we were all afraid, we were all waiting for our mother.”

To protect themselves from the cold and snow blindness, the young people had to use their ingenuity: they used luggage, seats and snow to build a shelter in the wreckage of the plane, and devised a way to obtain water by melting the snow.. Additionally, using the cockpit sunshades, they constructed sunglasses to protect themselves from the white light and used the seat cushions as snowshoes.

The food thing was more complex. The little food they had, they rationed, and even took food from where there was none: they made a 'tobacco tea' with cigarettes and “We opened the seat cushions in the hope of finding straw, but we only found non-upholstery foam.” edible,” said Nando Parrado, one of the survivors, in his memoir, Miracle in the Andes, but soon, it was not enough.

The situation was only getting worse.. Ten days after the accident, they heard on the radio that they were considered dead, they were no longer looking for them.. And shortly after, at midnight on October 29, when it seemed like hell couldn't get any worse, a snow avalanche rocked the plane where the survivors were sleeping, killing eight of them.

Locked for three days inside the plane, with the corpses of their dead companions, and after a long debate, the survivors decided to eat the flesh of the corpses and put their own bodies at the service of others if any of them died.

Ten days of walking to seek help

The world had given them up for lost and there, among the mountains, hope was scarce. Two months had passed since the accident and the only way out was to find it themselves, so on December 12, 1972, the young survivors Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio José undertook the hardest route of their lives.

They prepared to survive the cold that would await them – which always exceeded their expectations, despite the beginning of summer – and made sleeping bags with the insulation from the plane's fuselage.

Vizintin soon returned to the shelter, but Nando and Canessa continued the route in search of help, convinced at times that, in reality, they were walking towards death, “We may be walking towards death, but I would prefer to walk to meet my death.” “I have to wait for it to get to me,” Parrado told Canessa.

After traveling 38 kilometers, climbing a 4,650-meter peak and walking for ten days, on December 20, encouraged by signs of human presence, they met Sergio Catalán, a Chilean muleteer, on the other side of the river, who sent them a note with a pencil tied to a stone to be able to communicate in the distance. Thanks to him, the first survivors were rescued a day later.. The day before Christmas, the rescue of the remaining eight was completed. In total, sixteen men survived the worst air tragedy in history.

Azerbaijan confirmed this Wednesday the suspension of the military operation that it had launched on Tuesday against the separatist territory of Nagorno Karabakh after the authorities of the self-proclaimed republic populated by Armenians agreed to surrender and completely disarm their armed formations.

“Taking into account the appeal of the representatives of the Armenian residents of Karabakh, which was received through the Russian peacekeeping contingent, an agreement was reached to suspend anti-terrorist measures on September 20, 2023 at 13:00” said the Azeri Ministry of Defense.

“Thanks to the mediation of the command of the Russian peacekeeping contingent deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh, an agreement was reached on the complete cessation of hostilities,” the Karabakh Information Center said in a statement.

He explained that “an agreement was reached on the withdrawal of the remaining units and military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia from the zone of deployment of the Russian peacekeeping contingent and the disbandment and complete disarmament of the armed formations of the 'Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army'”.

According to Nagorno Karabakh, the issues “raised by Azerbaijan and concerning the reintegration, guarantees of rights and security of Nagorno Karabakh Armenians” will be discussed at a meeting between representatives of the Baku and Nagorno Karabakh authorities in the town of Yevlaj on September 21 and “at subsequent meetings.”

According to the latest data from the Armenian side, at least 32 people died and more than 200 were injured in the Azerbaijan offensive.

The cessation of hostilities comes 24 hours after the Azerbaijani Army began bombing Nagorno-Karabakh in order to restore “constitutional order” in the separatist territory, populated by some 120,000 Armenians.

The enclave had little chance of resisting the new onslaught from Azerbaijan, which began the offensive three years after the last war for control of the enclave and after subjecting it to a blockade for more than nine months.

In December 2022, it cut the Lachin corridor, the only communication route between Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh.

In the 44-day war in 2020, Armenia lost two-thirds of the territory in the Karabakh region that it controlled after the 1992-1994 conflict, including part of the self-proclaimed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, but not the capital, Stepanakert.

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced this Tuesday the downing of two Ukrainian drones, one over the Oryol region and the other over Belgorod, both close to the border with Ukraine.. “On September 19 of this year, at 10:30 p.m. Moscow time, an attempt by the Kiev regime to carry out a terrorist attack using an unmanned aerial vehicle over the Oryol region was stopped,” he said. the ministry on its official Telegram channel. Just over an hour later, Russian authorities reported the neutralization of another drone over the Belgorod region.