Italy violated Germany's national sovereignty by allowing its courts to handle restitution claims for Nazi war crimes, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday.

In 2008, the Italian Supreme Court ruled that Luigi Ferrini, an Italian national, was entitled to reparations for his forced deportation to Germany in 1944, where he worked as a slave laborer in the armaments industry.

The 15-judge ICJ, the UN's highest legal body, said in a 12-3 ruling that the Italian case violated Germany's rights under international law. Rulings by the ICJ are final and binding.

...Germany had filed its case against Italy before the ICJ in 2008, claiming that it enjoyed immunity from being sued in national courts. Berlin argued that the Italian court decision jeopardized the established reparations system, potentially opening a floodgate of restitution claims from individuals around the world.

...The German government signed its reparations treaty with Italy in 1961, which called for a restitution of 40 million D-Mark (20 million euro, $26 million) for Italians who were subjected to "National Socialist persecution due to race, religion and worldview."

An overloaded ferry sank off Papua New Guinea Thursday, with fears rising that up to 100 passengers are still trapped inside. So far, 246 passengers have been rescued in a joint operation by Papua New Guinea and Australia.

AFP - Zambia, Ivory Coast, Gabon and Ghana appear the likely winners of the 2012 Cup of Nations quarter-finals across central Africa this weekend.

The football feast begins Saturday with two fixtures in Equatorial Guinea -- Zambia and Sudan in mainland port city Bata followed by the co-hosts and Ivory Coast in island capital Malabo.

Gabon stages both Sunday showdowns with the co-hosts playing Mali in coastal capital Libreville before Ghana tackle Tunisia in south-eastern city Franceville.

So, when reporting from the frontlines of the economic collapse, journalists have a duty to highlight the breadth of opinion within Greece, within Germany, within Britain, rather than gloss over that diversity opting instead for the comforting, yet potentially destructive, familiarity of national stereotypes. Maintaining a healthy resistance to generalisation is not only the journalist's humanist duty but, also, a prerequisite for accurate reporting of the crisis' causes.

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When visiting a country in economic meltdown (Greece being a useful case in point) it is important to come equipped with a simple, yet counter-intuitive, insight: Recipes for tackling debt do not add up! By this I mean that journalists must always interrogate their instinctual views on the causes of the crisis that they are covering and, in particular, of what `common sense' dictates as the remedy.

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This compartmentalisation of the storyline of an economic meltdown into three distinct types of report causes two failures: First, it weakens the journalist's own analytical capacity to make sense of the crisis. Secondly, it diminishes the value of each of its parts. Let me explain both allegations in the context of the eurozone debacle. Any tale of the trials and tribulations of, say, a Greek family that lacks an analytical connection between their suffering and the anguish of an equivalent German family (whose living standards have been falling less but for much longer) will surely fail to account (as well as it might have) for both: (a) the depth of ill feeling that Greek and German families experience and (b) the crisis' causes. Put simply, when the hardnosed analysis is kept separate from the human interest angle, then the analysis turns `soft-nosed' and the human interest story swaps humanism for melodrama.