It took a special brand of cruelty to stand out amid the horrors of the Holocaust, but "Ivan the Terrible" was no ordinary sadist. As a Nazi guard, Ivan earned his sobriquet by ushering thousands of prisoners — sometimes hacking them with a sword as they passed — into the gas chambers at Poland's Treblinka death camp. After the war, he vanished. Decades later, in the late 1970s, U.S. authorities fingered a suspect: John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker residing ...

An Austrian man who participated in a Nazi massacre of Jews during World War II and later gained U.S. citizenship has been deported to Austria, U.S. officials said. Josias Krumpf, 83, lived for years after the war in Racine, Wisconsin. The United States revoked his citizenship in 2005 after the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sought to denaturalize him. Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita Glavin announced Krumpf's deportation Thursday. It was not clear when he arrived in ...

The Czech prime minister canceled a vote to allow the United States to put a key part of its planned missile defense system in the Central European country, the government announced late Tuesday. Prime Minister Miroslav Topolanek said he called off the vote for fear his government would lose but added he could still put the two treaties up for a vote in parliament at a later date. U.S. plans to put components of the planned missile defense system in ...

The Obama administration has been talking about "pressing the reset button" with Russia after relations "crashed" when Russia invaded Georgia last August. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she presented him a small green box with a ribbon. Insclide was a red button with the Russian word "peregruzka" printed on it. "I would like to present you with a little gift that represents ...

Germany's Nazi past continues to unsettle its present. Privileged clans and mighty industries alike have subjected themselves to public scrutiny and painful mea culpas over activities and associations before and during World War II. But the latest controversy links the poisoned mementos of Auschwitz to the ongoing global financial crisis in a still unraveling tale of leveraged buyouts, corporate hubris and financial humiliation. At the center of the drama is Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, 67, the grande dame of one of ...

Iran poses a threat to Europe and Russia, both from Tehran's direct efforts and its support of terrorist groups, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday. The Tehran government is intent on interfering in the Middle East, she told reporters aboard her flight to Brussels from the region. "There is a great deal of concern about Iran from the entire region," she said. "I heard it over and over and over again in Sharm el Sheikh, in Israel, in Ramallah. ...

Twenty years after revolution swept communism from Eastern Europe, the region is in the middle of another maelstrom. The global economic crisis has hit countries like Latvia, Hungary and Poland particularly hard. Eastern Europe's boom over the past few years was fueled in part by heavy borrowing from Western banks and easy access to foreign currency denominated loans. Now, with credit dried up, huge debt loads to pay and Eastern European currencies in free fall, the good times are ...

President Barack Obama will ask Congress for more than $200 billion to fund U.S. war efforts for the next year and a half, according to defense officials. The Arizona senator, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that while he approved of President Obama's recent decision to send 17,000 more troops to the country, he believed an additional allied military and civilian surge would be necessary to prevent it from once again becoming an al Qaeda safe ...

The judge has been dead for 15 years, and no one has been able to find the criminal case file since 2004. Yet a 1977 sex scandal involving famed director Roman Polanski and a 13-year-old girl continues to stalk the courts of Los Angeles. Attorneys for the 75-year-old Academy Award-winning director will ask a judge Tuesday to put the matter to rest once and for all. Lawyers Douglas Dalton and Chad Hummel last month filed a 239-page dismissal "request," citing ...