Germany riveted at start of neo-Nazi murder trial

By Alexandra Hudson

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - The surviving member of a neo-Nazi cell blamed for a series of racist murders that scandalized Germany and shamed its authorities goes on trial on Monday in one of the most anticipated court cases in recent German history.

The chance discovery of the gang, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which had gone undetected for more than a decade, has forced Germany to acknowledge it has a more militant and dangerous neo-Nazi fringe than previously thought, and exposed staggering intelligence failings.

The trial in Munich will focus on 38-year-old Beate Zschaepe, who is charged with complicity in the murder of eight Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000-2007, as well as two bombings in immigrant areas of Cologne, and 15 bank robberies.

"With its historical, social and political dimensions the NSU trial is one of the most significant of post-war German history," lawyers for the family of the first victim, flower seller Enver Simsek, said in a statement.

The case has profoundly shaken a country that believed it had learned the lessons of its past, and has reopened an uncomfortable debate about whether Germany must do more to tackle the far-right and lingering racist attitudes.

Four others charged with assisting the NSU will sit with Zschaepe on the bench.

DOUBLE SUICIDE

The existence of the gang only came to light in November 2011 when the two men believed to have founded the NSU with Zschaepe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, committed suicide after a botched bank robbery and set their caravan ablaze in the eastern town of Eisenach.

In the charred vehicle, police found the gun used to murder all 10 victims. They also found a grotesque DVD presenting the NSU and claiming responsibility for the killings. In it the bodies of the murder victims are pictured while a cartoon Pink Panther tots up the number of dead.

After her companions' suicides, Zschaepe is believed to have set fire to a flat she shared with the men in Zwickau, 180 km (110 miles) away, and gone on the run. Four days later she turned herself in to police in her hometown of Jena, saying "I'm the one you are looking for."

For the victims' families the trial will be the first chance to come face to face with Zschaepe, a woman whose troubling, blank expression and resolute silence since her arrest has left people struggling to make sense of her motives.

The trial offers a chance for the woman dubbed "Nazi bride" in the media to break her silence, but few think she will.

Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, wrote to Zschaepe in May 2012, addressing her as "Dear Sister" and urging her to use the trial to spread far-right ideology, according to German media.

Hearings are scheduled into early 2014, and witnesses due to appear include Zschaepe's estranged relatives and the parents of Mundlos and Boehnhardt.

FAMILIES' GRIEF

Prosecutors say the gang chose people running small businesses or shops as easy, vulnerable targets, in an attempt to terrify migrants and hound them out of Germany.

Some of the relatives even came under suspicion themselves because police simply did not consider a far-right motive.

"All the relatives have the huge problem that they were never treated as victims. During the investigations they were either considered suspects, or as relatives of criminals," said lawyer Angelika Lex.

The start of the trial comes as a relief to families, after it was postponed by a fortnight due to the court's poor handling of media access. It initially did not guarantee any Turkish media a courtroom seat, despite the number of Turkish victims.

This prompted a successful complaint by a Turkish newspaper and the Munich court was ordered to redistribute seats, which it did via a lottery.

While judges try Zschaepe and the NSU's suspected accomplices, Germany's lower house of parliament is conducting its own inquiry into the institutional failings.

Germany's patchwork of intelligence agencies are set to undergo reforms, after the inquiry found they failed to share information and neglected the far-right threat. The head of domestic intelligence resigned last July.

The trio had been known to authorities during their teenage years in Jena, for their racist hate crimes and bomb making, but had managed to escape arrest and assume new identities.

(Additional reporting by Reuters television in Munich; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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Jurors start deliberating in Arias murder trial

PHOENIX (AP) — The murder case against Jodi Arias in the death of her onetime boyfriend has gone to the jury, which is weighing weeks of evidence and the defendant's ever-changing version of events.

After closing arguments, the panel deliberated for just about an hour Friday before concluding for the day. Deliberations resume Monday.

Arias says she killed Travis Alexander in self-defense, but prosecutors say it was an act of premeditated first-degree murder that could carry a death sentence or life in prison.

The eight men and four women on the jury have the option of finding Arias guilty of second-degree murder, too, if they don't believe she planned the attack but think it occurred in the heat of the moment. If convicted on that charge, she could face up to 25 years in prison. A manslaughter conviction carries a sentence of seven to 21 years.

The final statements wrapped up with Arias' lawyer imploring jurors to take an impartial view of his client, even if they don't like her, and prosecutors describing the defendant as a manipulative liar who meticulously planned the attack and is still lying.

"It's not about whether or not you like Jodi Arias. Nine days out of 10, I don't like Jodi Arias. ... But that doesn't matter," defense attorney Kirk Nurmi told jurors. Arias smiled as he made the remark, then returned to an unemotional gaze.

Nurmi told jurors the entire case was about "fear, love, sex, lies and dirty little secrets" and repeated over and over that the prosecution's theory of a planned attack "doesn't make any sense."

The trial has become a tabloid and cable TV sensation and has attracted spectators from around the country who line up as early as 2 a.m. for a chance to score a few open seats in the courtroom.

Authorities say Arias, 32, planned the attack on Alexander in June 2008 at his suburban Phoenix home. They say she was enraged because he wanted to end their affair and was preparing for a trip to Mexico with another woman.

Arias initially denied any involvement and later blamed it on masked intruders. Two years after her arrest, she said she killed Alexander in self-defense when he attacked her after a day of sex.

"Fear, love, sex, lies and dirty little secrets," Nurmi repeated several times Friday. "Each one of these aspects of the human condition plays a prominent role in the relationship that Jodi Arias shared with Travis Alexander."

On Thursday, prosecutor Juan Martinez delivered the state's closing arguments, displaying autopsy photos of Alexander's body covered in stab wounds and bruises, a bullet wound to his forehead.

He described Arias as a liar who planned the savage attack. Martinez said Arias lied from the start and is still lying.

The images displayed Thursday, one after another, of Alexander's decomposed body and the bloody scene of the killing were too much for Alexander's friends and family members. They sobbed and buried their faces in their hands.

Alexander suffered nearly 30 knife wounds, was shot in the head, and had his throat slit. Arias' palm print was found in blood at the scene.

Arias said Alexander grew physically abusive in the months before she killed him, but there was no evidence or testimony during the trial to corroborate her allegations.

The defense has portrayed Alexander as a womanizer who used Arias for sex and abused her physically and emotionally. Prosecutors depicted Arias as an obsessed ex-girlfriend.

Arias' grandparents had reported a .25 caliber handgun stolen from their Northern California home about a week before Alexander's death — the same caliber used to shoot him. Arias was staying with them at the time, and the burglary occurred two days after the two exchanged text messages that indicated Alexander no longer wanted anything to do with her. Arias denies taking the gun, but prosecutors say she staged the burglary to get the murder weapon.

Martinez told jurors that Arias had been stalking Alexander and arrived armed and unannounced on the day she killed him, sneaking into his home at about 4 a.m. The two went to sleep together, then awoke and had sex.

At some point, Martinez said, Arias decided it was time to carry out her plan.

Nurmi told jurors on Friday that the state's theory is "nonsensical."

He pondered out loud: If Arias had planned the attack in advance, why not kill him right when she arrived at Alexander's home? Why leave a paper trail, starting with the police report from the burglary? Why rent a car instead of borrowing one from friends or family? Why use her debit card for gas and other purchases instead of cash?

"It doesn't make sense if you're on a covert mission," Nurmi said, adding Arias had numerous other opportunities to kill Alexander.

"But she didn't," he said.

Nurmi acknowledged his client is a liar. But he explained she isn't on trial for lying.

"Nowhere, nowhere in your jury instructions are you asked to convict Jodi Arias of lying," he said.

Arizona criminal defense lawyer Benjamin Taylor, who sat in on closing arguments, said the defense did a good job at raising reasonable doubt about premeditation.

"Nurmi showed she had plenty of time if she really wanted to kill him," Taylor said. "After today, it's going to be hard to get 12 jurors to agree unanimously on premeditation."

The judge previously instructed jurors that if they couldn't unanimously agree on premeditation but believed the killing was carried out with malice and not in self-defense, they could settle on a second-degree murder conviction.

Arias said she recalls Alexander attacking her in a fury on the day he died. She said she ran into his closet to retrieve a gun he kept on a shelf and fired in self-defense but has no memory of stabbing him.

___

Follow Brian Skoloff at https://twitter.com/bskoloff

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Pentagon urged to stop stalling, start planning defense cuts

By David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon needs to stop stalling and start figuring out how to cut its budget by $50 billion annually for the foreseeable future in a way that preserves national security, defense analysts from across the political spectrum said on Thursday.

Warning that the department appeared to be clinging to the hope that Congress and the White House would eventually reverse the cuts, the analysts said the Pentagon needed to focus on factors that drive long-term cost growth, including overhead, compensation and acquisition.

"We are not getting the bang for the buck for the dollars we should in the Pentagon," said retired Marine Corps Major General Arnold Punaro, who led a task force that reviewed Pentagon overhead costs for then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2010.

"If we don't make some fundamental changes ... in about 15 years, we will not have the strongest military ... because these three ticking time bombs are eating away at the core of our defense capability," he told a round-table at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

The Pentagon is scrambling to reduce spending by $46 billion this fiscal year after a law requiring $500 billion in defense spending cuts over the next decade took effect on March 1. The cuts came as the department was implementing a $487 billion cut over the same period that went into force last year.

The Pentagon's 2013 budget has also been under stress because of Congress' failure to appropriate funds for the government this year.

Congress alleviated some of those issues on Thursday when it approved funding for the government for the rest of the year. But it left in place the budget cuts required under the automatic reductions, known as sequestration.

The Pentagon welcomed the measure and postponed for two weeks a decision on how many of the nearly 800,000 civilian defense employees would have to be placed on unpaid leave for as many as 22 days during the rest of the fiscal year.

'DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE'

The 2014 budget proposal the Pentagon sent to the White House last month did not include the $50 billion in automatic cuts scheduled for that year and the Defense Department has not been asked for revised figures, officials said.

The White House posted a plan on its website this week that seeks to avert the automatic cuts through budget cuts and revenue increases. The White House plan would replace the $500 billion of defense cuts over the next decade with a $100 billion cut, to be implemented over five years beginning in 2019.

The defense analysts expressed skepticism about the plan, which likely faces stiff resistance from Republicans who have vowed to oppose more tax increases.

"That's a scenario that doesn't make any sense at all except in la-la land because those aren't real cuts," said Gordon Adams, an analyst with the Stimson Center who worked on defense budgets while at the White House during the Clinton presidency.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the White House and Defense Department approach to the budget cut was to "deny it, put it off, assume it's going to go away at some point."

"The reality is they need to start planning for this staying in effect, and even if they start right now it's a little too late," he said, noting the department would have to begin laying off personnel next year when more cuts go into effect.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, urged the Pentagon to tackle the tough issues of compensation, overhead and base closures, some of the thorniest issues politically but factors that have been driving up defense costs for years.

Punaro said the cost of the Defense Department's "massive and inefficient overhead," at $218 billion a year, was greater than the economy of the entire state of Israel.

"If you just look at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the combatant commands and the defense agencies ... there's over 250,000 people, $116 billion a year," he said.

"There's not a trigger-puller in that lot. There's nobody with a sharp bayonet in that group," said Punaro, adding that of the top 12 defense contractors, half were agencies of the Pentagon.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

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Jury selection to start in NYC therapist killing

NEW YORK (AP) — A mentally ill man is set to go on trial on charges of murdering a psychotherapist with a meat cleaver in her Manhattan office.

Jury selection is due to start Monday. It's prosecutors' second effort at trying David Tarloff. Jury selection got under way in 2010, but then Tarloff began behaving strangely and was declared unfit for court. He's schizophrenic.

Tarloff's lawyers don't dispute that he killed Kathryn Faughey (FAW'-hee) in 2008. But they argue that his schizophrenia made him unable to understand that what he was doing was wrong.

Prosecutors and Faughey's family say Tarloff carried out a considered, criminal plan.

Tarloff has said he aimed to rob Faughey's office mate to get money to whisk his mother out of a nursing home and escape with her to Hawaii.

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Papal vote preparations start in earnest at Vatican

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Preparations for electing Roman Catholicism's new leader begin in earnest on Monday as the College of Cardinals opens daily talks to sketch an identikit for the next pope and ponder who among them might fit it.

The idea is to have the new pope elected during next week and officially installed several days later so he can preside over the Holy Week ceremonies starting with Palm Sunday on March 24 and culminating in Easter the following Sunday.

The general congregations, closed-door meetings in the interregnum between a papacy and the conclave to choose the next one, will hold morning and afternoon sessions in an apparent effort to discuss as much as possible in a short time.

The list of challenges facing the crisis-hit Church could take weeks to debate, but the Vatican seems keen to have only a week of talks so the 115 cardinal electors -- those under 80 -- can enter the Sistine Chapel for the conclave next week.

High on the agenda will be Church governance after last year's Vatileaks scandal exposed corruption and rivalries in the Vatican's Curia bureaucracy. Cardinals expect to be briefed on a secret report to the pope on the problems it highlighted.

"We should know about some things we don't have enough information about because of our work or the distance (from Rome)," Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga told Italian television.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston in Texas, noted more than half the cardinal electors had been named since the now retired Pope Benedict was chosen in 2005 and had to find out how this most secretive of elections is conducted.

"Part of this is learning," he told journalists. Cardinals over 80 can attend the general congregations and discuss issues with the electors, but not take part in the conclave itself.

SIZING UP CANDIDATES

The meetings are also a time for sizing up the undeclared candidates by watching them closely in the debates and checking discreetly with other cardinals about their qualifications.

"I don't think any of us will go in saying 'this is who I will vote for'," Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley said. "You're faced with a number of choices."

One urgent decision the cardinals must take is when to go into the conclave. Only all 115 electors can make the decision and not all are in Rome yet, so it may take a few days before the actual date is set.

Cardinals never reveal publicly who they prefer but drop hints in interviews by discussing the identikit for their ideal candidate. The most frequently mentioned quality here is an ability to communicate the Catholic faith convincingly.

Several strike a note of nostalgia for the charismatic late Pope John Paul after eight years of his shy successor Benedict, who shocked the Catholic world by becoming the first pope in almost 600 years to resign last month.

Most cardinals say the new pope could come from outside Europe, but it is not clear if the conclave, which has a slight majority of European cardinals, will break the long-standing tradition of choosing only men from the continent.

SEXUAL ABUSE CRISIS

The sexual abuse crisis haunting the Church should also play a role, especially since one elector - Cardinal Keith O'Brien - quit as Edinburgh archbishop last week and pulled out of attending the conclave because of abuse accusations against him.

O'Brien initially denied the allegations but issued a statement on Sunday evening apologizing because "my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal."

Two cardinals mentioned as possible candidates added other issues to the discussion list in interviews with Reuters.

Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, an Argentine who heads the Curia department for Eastern Catholic Churches, said the Church must give women more leadership positions in the Vatican and beyond.

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said the growing phenomenon of people believing in God but rejecting organized churches, known among sociologists of religion as "believing without belonging," was a major challenge for the Church in future.

(Reporting By Tom Heneghan; Editing by Stephen Powell)

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