The trial – which opened on Monday in Stuttgart – is the first to open in relation to the purported conspiracy, which came to light in late 2022. It is focused on those defendants of the Reich Citizens group who allegedly were part of its so-called military arm, German news agency dpa reported.

Federal prosecutors in December filed terrorism charges against a total of 27 people, one of whom has since died.

Nine other suspects, among them a self-styled prince and a former far-right lawmaker, will go on trial on 21 May at a Frankfurt state court in the most prominent of the three cases. The other eight will go on trial in Munich on 18 June.

On trial in the Frankfurt case includes Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, whom the group allegedly planned to install as Germany’s provisional new leader; Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, a judge and former lawmaker with the far-right Alternative for Germany party; and a retired paratrooper.

The proceedings of the three cases are expected to last well into 2025.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on public broadcaster ZDF that the trial “shows the strength of our rule of law that the largest terrorist network of Reich Citizens to date… has to answer for its militant plans to overthrow the government.”

Prosecutors have said that the accused believed in a “conglomerate of conspiracy myths,” including Reich Citizens and QAnon ideology, and were convinced that Germany is ruled by a so-called deep state.

Adherents of the Reich Citizens movement, or Reichsbuergerbewegung in German, reject Germany’s postwar constitution and have called for bringing down the government, while QAnon is a global conspiracy theory with roots in the US.

According to prosecutors, the group planned to storm into the parliament building in Berlin and arrest lawmakers. It allegedly intended to negotiate a post-coup order primarily with Russia, as one of the allied victors of World War II.

The nine defendants at the Stuttgart trial are accused of membership in a terrorist organisation and “preparation of a high treasonous enterprise.” One of the defendants is also on trial for attempted murder, dpa reported.

Most of the nine suspects in the Frankfurt trial are also charged with membership in a terrorist organisation and “preparation of high treasonous undertaking.” The other eight alleged members of the group have been charged in separate indictments at the court in Munich.

As turmoil continues to surround the future of Paramount Global, details surrounding interim leadership and its proposed Skydance deal are coming to light, multiple sources told Variety.

Sunday was a consequential day in Shari Redstone’s ongoing exclusive bargaining window with David Ellison‘s Skydance, one that would see the Hollywood scion take majority ownership of Paramount Global and its owner National Amusements Inc. Skydance offered its “best and final” offer to Redstone on Sunday, sources added.

On the eve of its quarterly earnings call, two insiders familiar with Paramount Global said the board is expected to announce a new leadership committee to replace ousted CEO Bob Bakish. Expected to be named to these leadership roles are Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins, CBS chief executive George Cheeks and MTV Entertainment Group President Chris McCarthy, the sources said.

Multiple insiders close to Paramount’s ongoing sales process said that letting Bakish go was the right move, but the new leadership structure is problematic at this fragile moment. There will not be a sole leader guiding the corporation through a potential sales process, said the insiders, and Cheeks, Robbins and McCarthy are not accustomed to collaboration across their portfolios. All details that are raising internal and external anxiety. There is, of course, Redstone — who is being closely watched by Wall Street and the media sector.

A third source familiar with the company said Redstone has been resolute in preferring the Skydance bid, which promises to keep her family media empire in tact and on track to provide future shareholder value. Or, she could appease some of her shareholders and evaluate a competing offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment — a deal that would call for major structural changes, with asset liquidation and job losses likely. And that’s if that scenario could survive inevitable regulatory scrutiny.

Heading into earnings, the company has yet to disclose whether its network carriage deal with Charter, the country’s second largest cable operator next to Comcast, has been renewed. It is set to expire April 30.

The flurry of weekend activity is sure to weigh heavy on Paramount Global’s share price on Monday, and change the economics of any potential sale. Paramount Global is scheduled to report first quarter 2024 results tomorrow after market close. The earnings call with analysts — sans Bakish but possibly with the new leadership team — is set to start at 4:30 p.m. ET.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers marked the two-year anniversary of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment by calling for his immediate release. 

Kara-Murza, who lives in solitary confinement in a Siberian maximum-security prison, was sentenced to 25 years last April for treason and other related charges as Russian authorities continue their crackdown on domestic dissent.

The Moscow City Court claimed Kara-Murza was guilty of “high treason“ for “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces” when he delivered a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2022 that criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

His sentence is the longest term handed down to a political prisoner in the post-Soviet era.

Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., co-led a group of 80 bipartisan lawmakers urging the Biden administration to declare the Russian dissident as “unlawfully and wrongfully detained.”

Fox News Digital obtained a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Cardin and other lawmakers demanding Kara-Murza’s release and the aforementioned designation.

“There is little time left to end the ongoing and unjust detention of U.S. Legal Permanent Resident and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza,” the letter read in part. “Mr. Kara-Murza’s family has grave concerns that he may not survive much longer. His situation is even more perilous following the killing of Alexei Navalny. Mr. Kara-Murza is the most prominent imprisoned democracy activist still alive in Russia.”

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., left, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and James Roscoe listen as Evgenia Kara-Murza, human rights advocate and wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, speaks about her husband. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The State Department referred Fox News Digital to spokesperson Matthew Miller’s remarks on Kara-Murza’s two-year imprisonment anniversary but did not provide specifics when asked about efforts to give the Russian opposition leader the designation sought by U.S. lawmakers.

“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful. When making assessments, the Department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks into the totality of the circumstances for each case individually,” a spokesperson said.

Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Fox News/Getty Images)

Russian human rights lawyer and the Center for European Policy Analysis’ Democracy Fellow Grigory Vaypan told Fox News Digital that Kara-Murza is now Russia’s “prisoner number one.” 

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“He’s definitely political prisoner number one on Putin’s list, and his life is certainly in danger now that we see with the murder of Navalny that Putin’s regime demonstrates to the world that it’s willing to kill political prisoners in Russia,” Vaypan said. 

He added that Kara-Murza, who was reportedly poisoned twice in 2015 and 2017 by agents of the Russian state, is essentially on “Putin’s death row.” 

A flower and a picture are left as a tribute to Russian politician Alexi Navalny, near to the Russian Embassy in London on Sunday, Feb. 18, 2024. Navalny, who crusaded against Russian corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died Feb. 16, 2024 in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

“His health is deteriorating. He has never fully recovered from the effects of those two poisonings. Now, he is not only in prison, he’s on solitary confinement, which is basically indefinite. He can be in his tiny prison cell for many months, and with the effects of those two poisonings, his health is getting worse,” Vaypan explained. “This is why it would be fair to say that he’s essentially on Putin’s death row now.”

Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, counts roughly 700 political prisoners in Russia today. 

Political prisoners are further isolated and punished in an effort to prevent them from continuing to speak out against the Russian authorities. They can be put into solitary confinement, deprived of food, mail, phone calls with relatives or family visits. 

RUSSIAN POET SENTENCED TO 7 YEARS IN PRISON FOR RECITING VERSES AGAINST WAR IN UKRAINE

“There’s a wide array of those measures that the Russian prison authorities can resort to. And we’re increasingly seeing that, especially after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion [of] Ukraine, we’ve seen more people jailed for exercising their right to free speech,” Vaypan told Fox News Digital. “And we’ve seen an increasing number of people being further harassed and pressured even while in prison.”

Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, reflected on the deaths of other Russian opposition figures like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov at the hands of the Putin regime.

“[They] target the most courageous, the most principled, those Russians who risk not only their freedom but very often their lives to show you that Russia can be different,” she said at an event on Capitol Hill.

Evgenia Kara-Murza, human rights advocate and wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, listens during an event calling for the immediate release of her husband, who is a Russian opposition leader and journalist imprisoned by the Russian government, on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

“As my husband put it, and I quote, ‘It is my hope that when people in the free world today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only the war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who are standing up to them because we are Russians too.’”