President Obama's rally in Philadelphia on Sunday was certainly an eventful one -- someone threw a book at him (it missed), and someone streaked through the crowd (he was not missed). The streaker did it for $1 million. But now the billionaire who made the offer is hemming and hawing about paying off. Alki David offered the big money to anyone who would run naked within sight and earshot of the president in an effort to publicize his web site, Battlecam.com. David's people tell ABC News a decision will be made Wednesday on whether Rodriguez did indeed earn the money. They are looking at video from various different angles to "to see if he was in eyesight or ear shot" of the president, spokesman Jason Magner said. They are also checking to make sure Rodriguez shouted the name of David's site six times as he streaked, which was also required. "One million dollars is a lot of money and I think it's one of those things -- there were stipulations involved and he wanted to make sure they were met," the spokesman said. Rodriguez said he got to within ten feet of Obama before stopping and being arrested for indecent exposure, open lewdness and disorderly conduct. The 24-year-old Rodriguez said he did it to get money to provide for his children and to pay for an operation for his sister. "I didn't do anything that hurt anybody," Rodriguez told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "My family needs the money." But he might not get that money. David almost immediately began citing technicalities that could allow him not to pay Rodriguez. "It's still not confirmed," David told the New York Daily News on Monday. "Whether he was in earshot and eyesight of the president is what's being debated right now." David also questioned whether Pennsylvania law would permit him to give money to someone for committing an illegal act. "It's not like he was being hired to murder somebody," said Michael Risch, associate professor at Villanova University School of Law. Risch said whether Rodriguez gets his money or not could boil down to a "contract question." "It's on the Internet," he said of David's offer. "But it's no different -- other than being illegal -- than any other challenge where somebody offers an award for some act that was done." David's hesitance in paying has many calling him a villain, such as New York Magazine: "Seriously, David, just give the man his prize. You already have the wealth and accent of a Bond villain. You don't need the cruelty of one as well." http://www.opposingviews.com/i/obama-streaker-juan-rodriguez-still-waiting-for-his-1-million
Obama Streaker Juan Rodriguez Still Waiting for His $1 Million
'The Party." That is the commonest phrase in Germany today. It denotes that all-powerful organization, NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) which dominates, energizes, and directs the Third Reich. Just what is the Party, and what are its relations with the Nation, the State Administration, and those numberless organizations characteristic of German life? That was one of the first questions I put when I got to Germany ... One thing seems certain: The National Socialist upheaval that has created the Third Reich goes far deeper than the Fascist regime in Italy, and is perhaps a more defiant breach with the historic past than even the Communism of Soviet Russia. 
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the 20th century is often cited as the most famous example of unethical medical research. Now, evidence has emerged that it overlapped with a shorter study, also sponsored by U.S. government health agencies, in which human subjects were unknowingly being harmed by participating in an experiment. Research from Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby has uncovered evidence of an experiment in Guatemala that infected people with sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to explore treatments. The U.S. government apologized for the research project on Friday, more than 60 years after the experiments ended. 
The CIA used a secret prison in Europe to torture its most important terrorism suspect, according to an official who first uncovered a secret network of prisons for holding suspects. He told the BBC there was now reliable evidence that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks, was tortured in Poland in the months before that country joined the European Union. 
An 81-year-old German woman was convicted of Holocaust denial and fined. The woman, identified as Ursula H. [Ursula Haverbeck] on Wednesday was given a suspended sentence of six months and fined nearly $1,400 by a Munich judge. Ursula, the former president of a banned right-wing extremist group, admitted to distributing a text among schoolchildren that she had written in which she denied the Holocaust. Her 91-year-old co-defendant had allowed his name to be used on the pamphlet and was fined more than $800, the German news agency DPA reported. 
Nearly 130 years after his death, Richard Wagner still provokes a maelstrom of emotions. Katharina Wagner, the German composer's great-granddaughter, has pulled out of a trip to Israel where she was to announce that the Israel Chamber Orchestra would be invited to open the next season of the prestigious Bayreuth festival, the annual celebration of Wagner's music. Ms. Wagner canceled the trip after the orchestra's participation was leaked to the Israeli media, prompting a hostile reaction in Israel. Wagner is widely shunned there for his anti-Semitic writings, which drew admiration from Adolf Hitler. Israeli orchestras have largely honored a seven-decade boycott of Wagner's work ... 
Joe Sobran, who left this world on Sept. 30, was perhaps the most brilliant man I have ever known. Not brilliant in all ways, of course, and even obtuse in some, but in his power to see the essential, to lay bare hypocrisy, to capture an idea with a turn of phrase, to mock with gentle humor, and to treat the heaviest subjects with the lightest touch, I have never met his equal and never expect to. 
Staring out from their air-conditioned bus, the tourists pass tattooed gang members, bullet-marked buildings and homeless drug users / Only a few miles from the celebrity mansions of Hollywood, they are getting their first glimpse into the gang heartland of America on a guided tour with a big difference. Passengers embarking on the "Los Angeles Gang Tour" sign release forms acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of a group of former gangsters who act as guides and protection. 
Politicians, lobbyists, and propagandists have spent nearly two decades pushing the lie that Iran poses a nuclear weapons threat to the United States and Israel. After a brief respite in the intensity of the wolf cries over the past two years, the neoconservative movement has decided to relaunch the "Must Bomb Iran" brand. The fact that Iran is not and has not been a nuclear threat to either nation is rendered irrelevant by a narrative of universal "concern" about its nuclear program. 
US President Barack Obama is under pressure to consider a military strike on Iran, according to the Financial Times. Both Senator Joe Lieberman and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have urged the president to consider setting a time limit of just a few months on the effectiveness of the most recent sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic for its nuclear advances. 
The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis. In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic. "The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. 
CNN newscaster Rick Sanchez has been fired. The news comes one day after Sanchez appeared on Pete Dominick's Sirius radio show, where he called "The Daily Show's" John Stewart a "bigot" (he later amended the term to "prejudicial") and suggested that "everybody who runs CNN" was Jewish. 
Joseph Sobran, a hard-hitting conservative writer and moralist whose outspoken antipathy to Israel and what he saw as the undue influence of a Jewish lobby on American foreign policy led to his removal as a senior editor of National Review in 1993, died on Thursday ... "Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew," he said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. "My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous 'ally' to the United States. As of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct." 
With the resumption of settlement construction in the West Bank yesterday, Israel's powerful settler movement hopes that it has scuttled peace talks with the Palestinians. It would be misleading, however, to assume that the only major obstacle to the success of the negotiations is the right-wing political ideology the settler movement represents. Equally important are deeply entrenched economic interests shared across Israeli society. These interests took root more than six decades ago with Israel's establishment and have flourished at an ever-accelerating pace since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. 
The base line in Europe for what politicians say and do about immigration and the role of Islamic communities in their countries is moving. It is shifting in a way that mainstream politics now permits its leaders to say flatly that immigrants, Muslims in large part, must accommodate the rules and traditions of the societies they enter, rather than vice versa. In recent weeks, there have been paroxysms of controversy in Germany over a critical book on the place of immigrants there, which found substantial public support. 
... Without a common foe and without agreement that the Atlantic alliance is an overwhelming priority, politics in Europe has lost its moorings. The politics of Gemeinschaft (community) is replacing the politics of Gesellschaft (society). New communities of true believers are forming all over Europe. Those who trace their national woes to immigrants -- or nuclear power, or the EU, or Muslims, or Jews, or market economics, or the United States -- are uniting in new political communities, all of them harmful to society. To its splintering communities behind a vision that can say more than no. 
In 1974 Richard Nixon, the US president, was ready to support the release on humanitarian grounds of prisoner number 7, but his efforts were thwarted by unwavering Soviet opposition. So Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, dubbed "the loneliest man in the world" as sole occupant of Spandau prison, remained locked up, according to secret documents released today by the National Archives at Kew. The files cover a period when there was an international campaign to free Hess as his 80th birthday approached. It included an application to the European commission of human rights by his wife, Ilse, and public demands by his son, Wolf. 
.... He spent 46 years -- half his life -- behind bars, a victim of a cruel victor's justice. More than any other man, Rudolf Hess symbolizes the vindictiveness and hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Tribunal ... Known as the "conscience of the party," he often used what power and influence he had to intervene on behalf of victims of persecution by extremists in the National Socialist party. In his detailed study, Justice at Nuremberg, which is generally very critical of the German defendants, historian Robert E. Conot called Hess a "decent and honest" man and "a pacifist at heart." ... Rudolf Hess was a prisoner of peace and a victim of a vindictive age. 
After controversially declaring last April as Confederate History Month Virginia's Republican governor Bob McDonnell has decided to cancel the event for next April. McDonnell made his announcement at a conference titled "Race, Slavery, and the Civil War," which was being held at Norfolk State University. 
Ever wonder what happened to your high school valedictorian? He or she might just have wound up in Washington, D.C. That metro area has the nation's highest percentage of residents with college degrees. Call it America's brainiest place to live. In the District and surrounding suburbs, 47.3% of people 25 years or older have bachelor's, master's, professional school or doctorate degrees, according to new Census Bureau data released Tuesday. The national average barely tips 25% ... In second-place San Francisco, 43.5% of residents have college degrees or better; San Jose, Calif., the hub of Silicon Valley, ranked third at 43.2%. 
If Israel's stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy is to be broken, Americans will need to be informed about the harm that Washington 's unconditional support for the Jewish state is doing to American interests, say leading analysts of U.S.-Israeli relations. ... Philip Giraldi , executive director of the Council for the National Interest, believes that Tel Aviv's stranglehold over Washington can be broken "only by directly challenging the power of the Israel lobby and the false narrative about how it is of value to the United States ." ... "The American people must learn that Israel is and always has been a strategic liability that has done immense damage to the United States and its worldwide interests," ... 
... If ever a foreign country has stuck its thumb in the eye of Uncle Sam, it is Israel in its willingness to take the United States for a ride while always demanding still more. And when it demands more it is invariably given more, with US politicians and mainstream media ever willing to genuflect and do what is right for the kleptocracy in charge in Tel Aviv ... That means that the congressmen in question, who actually took an oath to uphold the US Constitution, know that they are doing nothing but throwing yet another bone to Israel. 
Some of the critical players in President Obama's national security team doubt his strategy in Afghanistan will succeed and have spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf, according to a new book. The book, "Obama's Wars," by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama's top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work. 
In his farewell address, delivered to the American people on national television, Jan. 17, 1961, President Eisenhower spoke firmly, and in carefully chosen words, to warn against the dangers in the years to come of the great "military-industrial complex." Excerpt. Runtime: 1:54 mins. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." 
Almost 92 years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front, the final act of the First World War will be played out on Sunday when Germany pays the last chunk of reparations imposed by the victorious allied powers. The payment of 59.5 million pounds ($96.9 million Canadian) ends the crippling debt that was the price of one world war and laid the foundations for the next. Germany was forced to pay the reparations under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead. 
These are the maps that show the racial breakdown of America's biggest cities. Using information from the latest U.S. census results, the maps show the extent to which America has blended together the races in the nation's 40 largest cities ... The resulting maps may not represent what many might expect Barack Obama's integrated rainbow nation to look like, as many cities have clear racial dividing lines. Detroit, for example, is infamous for its divide between black and white. 
... . Adjusted for inflation, we have spent more on Iraq and Afghanistan than on any war in our history except World War II. They have cost more in real dollars than the Korean and Vietnam wars combined . ... We should have learned from these experiences that money and military force are not enough to redesign the world to suit us. The record also indicates that ambitious interventions abroad are more likely to erode our security than enhance it, bankrupting us in the process. 
... Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew J. Bacevich. His engaging and insightful book, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," is a timely analysis and critique of contemporary and historical defense policies ... He argues that the country would be better off if its military policy adhered to three principles: Our military's main goal isn't to combat evil or remake the world but to defend the country and its interests; the main "duty station" of military personnel is at home; the nation should use force as a last resort and only in self-defense. 
A controversial new movie telling the story behind an anti-Semitic film made in 1940 has been released in Germany. Jud Süss - A Film Without Conscience looks at why the earlier film, also called Jud Süss [Jew Süss], was a huge success under the Nazi regime. It focuses on the leading actor's decision to join the cast, suggesting he was forced into it by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The original movie was banned in 1945 ... The real-life Joseph Süss Oppenheimer was a Jewish financier executed in Stuttgart in 1738. 
Joseph Sobran died peacefully on Thursday afternoon, Sept. 30, age 64. The 20th century produced many great conservative writers, but none brought together wit, erudition, and humanity on a single page so well as Joseph Sobran. He was a remarkable man: even seeming quite frail at a gathering in his honor last December, he had a mind as accurate as precision clockwork, able to recall Shakespearean verses he had memorized decades earlier. He lived T.S. Eliot's dictum that there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes, and he hated cant and injustice. News of his death today is a terrible shock, despite his long illness. He will be missed. 
... Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste -- an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again. Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian -- i.e., unattainable -- and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence. ... The beginning of wisdom is to recognize this world as it is, not as what we would wish it to be. 
How much of a freeze has there actually been on West Bank Jewish settlement building by Israel? Very little, an Associated Press analysis of the numbers suggests.... The [Israel] government's own figures -- and the assessments of Israeli peace activists monitoring construction -- show building has barely slowed down. ... That means that even months into the halt, the number of homes under construction had declined by only about ten percent. 
In this scholarly article, excerpted from his book, The Forced War: The Origins and Originators of World War II, Dr. Hoggan examines the secret war aspirations of President Franklin Roosevelt. Hoggan also shows how Poland's leaders, bolstered by assurances from London of military backing, sought to provoke war with Germany. During the months prior to the outbreak of war in September 1939, he explains, Poland's provocation of Germany was frequent and extreme. Hitler had more than sufficient justification to go to war with Poland. 
The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos. The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground. 
Citizens of the world's richest countries are getting fatter and fatter and the United States is leading the charge, an organization of leading economies said Thursday in its first ever obesity forecast. Three out of four Americans will be overweight or obese by 2020, and disease rates and health care spending will balloon, unless governments, individuals and industry cooperate on a comprehensive strategy to combat the epidemic, the study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said. 
In this You Tube video, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who runs a government-funded Jewish study group in Sweden, makes the following remarkable statement -- remarkable because she does not attribute anti-Jewish attitudes to irrational prejudices or even Muslims who hate Israel. Instead she says that it's because of the "leading role" played by Jews in the movement toward multiculturalism .. Her comment is an example of the age-old Jewish self-concept of a "Light Unto the Nations": Jews saving Europe by leading it to multiculturalism. One wonders why she thinks Europe could not survive as a set of monocultural societies. 
Before the "International Military Tribunal" at Nuremberg, defendant Julius Streicher tells how he was brutally mistreated by his American captors. His only official position during the Third Reich was governor (Gauleiter).of the region of Franconia. He had no role whatsoever in making or carrying out German national policy. He was sentenced to death by the Allied Tribunal for publishing a weekly anti-Jewish newspaper, "Der Stuermer," one that would have been legal in the United States. Video Runtime: 8:01 mins. 
... The Nuremberg enterprise violated ancient and fundamental principles of justice. The victorious Allies acted as prosecutor, judge and executioner of the German leaders. The charges were created especially for the occasion, and were applied only to the vanquished. Defeated, starving, prostrate Germany was, however, in no position to oppose whatever the Allied occupation powers demanded. As even some leading Allied figures privately acknowledged at the time, the Nuremberg trials were organized not to dispense impartial justice, but for political purposes. 
Although the CIA has long been known to run clandestine militias in Afghanistan, including one from a base it rents from the Afghan president Hamid Karzai's half-brother in the southern province of Kandahar, the sheer number of militiamen directly under its control have never been publicly revealed. Woodward's book, Obama's Wars, describes these forces as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qa'ida and Afghan Taliban havens there. 
... Here's a simple reality: the U.S. is an imperial power in decline -- and not just the sort of decline which is going to affect your children or grandchildren someday. We're talking about massive unemployment that's going nowhere and an economy which shows no sign of ever returning good jobs to this country on a significant scale, even if "good times" do come back sooner or later. We're talking about an aging, fraying infrastructure -- with its collapsing bridges and exploding gas pipelines -- that a little cosmetic surgery isn't going to help. 
... The Arabs were always the bad guys. We [Jews] were the absolute righteous, or the exclusive victims - or so we were told ... If you want to understand the Palestinian uprising in the territories, go to these two books [by Benny Morris]. If you want to understand why a settlement is impossible without a solution to the refugee problem, go to Morris. All the early-warning signs appear in his works. They show how our relationship with the Arabs began. Everything that followed, up until this very day, is anchored in their - and particularly our - original sins, which Morris and his colleagues have exposed. 
The far-right party Jobbik has called for legislation that would make the denial of "inherent criminality" among the country's Roma minority punishable by up to three years in jail, five for politicians and other public figures. The draft proposal for an amendment to the Criminal Code was submitted to parliament last Monday. One of its three sponsors, Jobbik politician János Volner, told reporters last Wednesday that the aim was to ensure there is "honest debate" about certain issues, "for example about the question of Gypsy criminality, as is currently taking place in France and Italy". 
Stalin-era repressions, including the Gulag camp system and the deportation of entire ethnic groups were justified according to a new history textbook published in Russia, which critics claim is anti-Semitic. "A History of Russia, 1917-2009," written by two Moscow State University academics, Alexander Barsenkov and Alexander Vdovin, attempts to justify forced collectivisation and the mass arrests and executions of the 1930s. Supporters say the book is filled with patriotism and love of the Motherland. But critics claim the textbook offers a pro-Stalinist and anti-Semitic view of Soviet and Russian history. 
Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germans have failed to grasp how Muslim immigration has transformed their country and will have to come to terms with more mosques than churches throughout the countryside, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily. "Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the task of dealing with immigrants," Ms. Merkel told the daily newspaper. "For years we've been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before." 
There is no question that the United States has a relationship with Israel that has no parallel in modern history. Washington gives Israel consistent, almost unconditional diplomatic backing and more foreign aid than any other country. In other words, Israel gets this aid even when it does things that the United States opposes, like building settlements. Furthermore, Israel is rarely criticized by American officials and certainly not by anyone who aspires to high office ... The bottom line is that the lobby is largely responsible for America's special relationship with Israel, which is harmful to both countries. 
... The threat from al-Qaeda and Taliban has been "exaggerated" by the western powers. The US-led mission in Afghanistan has "ballooned" out of all proportion from its original aim of disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda. The US-led war in Afghanistan, says IISS, using uncharacteristically blunt language, is "a long-drawn-out disaster".... Europeans are fed up with the Afghan war. Polls report 60% of Americans think the war not worth fighting ... The truth about Iraq and Afghanistan is finally emerging. Afghanistan may again prove to be "the graveyard of empires". 
Physical traces of ethnic cleansing that took place in the early 800s suggest the massacre was an inside job. Crushed leg bones, battered skulls and other mutilated human remains are likely all that's left of a Native American population destroyed by genocide that took place circa 800 A.D., suggests a new study. The paper, accepted for publication in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, describes the single largest deposit to date of mutilated and processed human remains in the American Southwest. The entire assemblage comprises 14,882 human skeletal fragments, as well as the mutilated remains of dogs and other animals killed at the massacre site -- Sacred Ridge, southwest of Durango, Colo. 
Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, argues ... that Israelis want peace, and I believe him. They've said so often enough. But the Israelis want lots of other things too. For instance, they want the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, they want the Palestinian aquifers situated beneath the West Bank, and they want to preserve their racial privilege in the Jewish state. They also want to shear the Gaza Strip from Palestine. Most of all, the Israelis want Palestinian quiescence in the face of Israeli wants. Those wants have made the two-state solution impossible to implement. For decades, the Israelis have taken what they want from the Palestinians. 
... Israel is based on the principle that Jews have rights "goyim" don't have. Hence its abuse of Arab gentiles and its defiance of Western gentiles. Mark Weber, of the Institute for Historical Review, has summed up the situation in one pithy sentence: "The truth is that if we held Israel to the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and we'd be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity." 
... Despite its position as the world's unrivalled superpower, international comparisons show the U.S. slipping on a number of fronts. On education, the United States has been falling behind, in everything from science and engineering to basic literacy. The U.S. once had the world's highest proportion of young adults with post-secondary degrees; now it ranks 12th, according to the College Board, an association of education institutions. (Canada is now number one.) In 2001, the U.S. ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use; it now ranks 15th out of 30 nations ... 
Until his death in 2005, Simon Wiesenthal was the world's best-known Nazi hunter. But a new biography finds fault with the way he pursued his quarry and asks whether his "soaring ego" and "tendency to fantasize" actually got in the way of his mission / ... He used questionable methods. He took credit for the achievements of others. And, over the years, he succeeded in antagonizing many people who actually shared the same goals. This side of Wiesenthal is presented in "Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends," a new biography by Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and journalist ... Wiesenthal also concocted legends surrounding the story of the Holocaust and his own suffering. 
People often wind up believing their own cover story. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, for example, is trapped forever in the rationalizations he used in 2003 to explain why he was going along with George Bush's invasion of Iraq. He was at it again last week, telling the BBC that "radical Islam" is the greatest threat facing the world today ... Terrorism, by radical Islamists or anybody else, is a real threat but a modest one. It cannot be "defeated", but it can be contained by good police work and wise policy choices. It might make it into the top ten global threats, but it certainly wouldn't make it into the top three. Anybody who says it does has something to sell or something to hide. 
British historian David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust, said on Tuesday he was in Poland to lead a tour of World War II sites, including the former Treblinka death camp. Holocaust survivors and anti-racism groups have slammed Irving's plans, even calling on Polish authorities to ban his visit which is also scheduled to take in a visit to the former local headquarters of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. But Irving confirmed to AFP that he was now in the Polish capital and planned to remain in the country until September 29. 
A petition to free Vincent Reynouard, a French negationist ["Holocaust denier"], who is serving a prison sentence and to abrogate the Gayssot Act ... has Noam Chomsky's backing. This is the letter he wrote: "I understand that Vincent Reynouard has been condemned and jailed under the Gayssot law, and that a petition is being circulated in protest against these actions. I know nothing about Mr. Reynouard, but regard the Gayssot law as entirely illegitimate, inconsistent with the basic principles of a free society as these have been understood since the Enlightenment. The law in effect grants the state the right to determine historical truth ..." 
... Britain has become one of the most virulently anti-Christian countries in the world. After a few decades in which the traditional anti-Catholic prejudices fell into abeyance, the basic anti-popish reflexes of an ancient Protestant nation have come back with a vengeance, spurred on by ideological attacks on the only Christian church that seems to stand for anything at all ... Britain has traveled further down the road of political correctness than even traditionally permissive European societies like those of the Netherlands or Scandinavia. 
A court has ordered a Czech publisher to withdraw and destroy all its published copies of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." Prague's municipal court issued the verdict Friday at the request of the German state of Bavaria that was suing the publisher, KMa, for copyright infringement. "Mein Kampf" is banned in Germany and Bavaria, which holds the copyright for the book, is seeking to block its publication in other countries for fear it could be misused by right-wing extremists. 
...For those yearning to see an end to the seven decade Jewish-Palestinian conflict, to see security and tranquility for Israel, and justice for Palestinians, last week's so-called "peace talks" in Washington were a painful farce ... The American dialogue on the Holy Land is almost entirely controlled by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is virtually an arm of the Likud Party. Candidate Obama in fact promised AIPAC never to pressure Israel into a peace deal it did not want, a pledge he is keeping. But no pressure on Israel by Washington to trade land for peace means no real peace, no matter what sweetheart deal Abbas signs. No real peace means more woes for the United States in dealing with the Muslim world. 
The movie that Mexican director Luis Estrada is putting out for his country's bicentennial is bluntly named "Hell." Like many Mexicans, Estrada says there is little to celebrate in Mexico today, with its violence, corruption and inequity ... A Pew Research Center poll released in August shows 79 percent of Mexicans are dissatisfied with the country's direction. Even U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the fray last week, saying that Mexico, plagued with drug-running and violence, is looking more and more how Colombia looked two decades ago. Mexico seems to be slipping behind. 
One in seven Americans was living in poverty in 2009 with the level of working-age poor the highest since the 1960s, the US Census Bureau says. The number of people in poverty increased by nearly four million -- to 43.6 million -- between 2008 and 2009, officials said. The bureau defines poverty as any family of four living on less than $21,954 a year. Meanwhile, new figures showed home foreclosures in August hit the highest level since the mortgage crisis began. Banks repossessed 95,364 properties in August, up 3% from July and an increase of 25% from August 2009, said RealtyTrac, a company which charts the national picture. The official US poverty rate in 2009 rose to 14.3% from 13.2% in 2008. 
For nearly three centuries after the Reformation, Catholics in England were outlaws. But in the turmoil and persecution that followed the break between King Henry VIII and Rome, noble families such as the Stonors clung to their faith, "in spite of dungeon, fire and sword," as the Victorian hymn "Faith of our Fathers" put it. "We're just stubborn, really," says Ralph Thomas Campion Stonor, the seventh Lord Camoys, a title bestowed on an ancestor for valor in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Pope Benedict XVI will recall the years of persecution during his upcoming tour of Britain Sept. 16-19. 
... By the late 1930s Hitler had three separate libraries for his ever-expanding collection. At his apartment he removed a wall between two rooms and installed bookshelves. For the Berghof, his Alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler built a second-floor study with handmade bookcases; color photographs of the finished space show an elegant setting with Oriental carpets, two globes, and bookcases fitted with glass doors and brass locks ... By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of novels, though he once ranked Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Don Quixote (he had a special affection for the edition illustrated by Gustave Doré) among the world's greatest works of literature. 
Forty-two percent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as secular or non-religious, making them the largest segment of society, according to figures released by the government [of Israel] on Monday. The Central Bureau of Statistics said another 25 percent identify themselves as "not very religious," 13 percent as "traditional," 12 percent as "religious" and eight percent as "ultra-Orthodox." It said 72 percent of respondents had been to a synagogue in the past year, 82 percent celebrated the Passover holiday and 67 percent light candles for Hanukkah. The numbers are the product of polling carried out throughout 2009 on 7,500 Jews over the age of 20, the bureau said. 
The federal government is on track to record the second-highest deficit of all time with one month left in the budget year. The deficit totaled $1.26 trillion through August, the Treasury Department said yesterday. That puts it on pace to total $1.3 trillion when the budget year ends Sept. 30, slightly below last year's record $1.4 trillion deficit ... Deficits of $1 trillion in a single year had never happened until two years ago. The $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009 was more than three times the size of the previous record-holder, a $454.8 billion deficit recorded in 2008. Last year's deficit was equal to 9.9 percent of the total economy - the highest percentage in 65 years. 
... In my view, Simon Wiesenthal was a liar and a fraud. In fact, I'd go so far as to say he was one of the biggest conmen of the 20th century. I spent four years working on a history of Nazi-hunting that was published last year, and the material I gathered on Wiesenthal was enough to make me scream out loud. When I started my book, I too believed that the great man was just that -- great. But when I looked at all his memoirs, biographies and original archive material, I realised that, like so many others, the image I had built up of Simon Wiesenthal was hopelessly incorrect. 
Controversial historian David Irving has hit back at claims his guided history tours of Polish death camps are 'sick'. Claiming that it is the Polish authorities who are 'tasteless' for their promotion of Auschwitz as a 'Disney-style' tourist site, Mr Irving defended his own trip which is fully-booked with American and British tourists. Critics have slammed the trip Mr Irving is organising to Hitler's headquarters and the notorious death camp Treblinka, referring to it as 'Nazi Travel'. However, the historian, who was convicted of Holocaust denial in Austria in 2006, has said his critics have clearly not read his books on the Second World War. 
At $578 million -- or about $140,000 per student -- the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire [Los Angeles] is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores. The K-12 complex isn't merely an overwrought paean to the nation's most celebrated liberal political family. It's a jarring reminder that money doesn't guarantee success -- though it certainly beautifies failure. 
When Paul Brachfeld took over as inspector general of the National Archives, guardian of the country's most beloved treasures, he discovered the American people were being stolen blind. The Wright brothers' 1903 Flying Machine patent application? Gone. A copy of the Dec. 8, 1941, "Day of Infamy" speech autographed by Franklin Roosevelt and tied with a purple ribbon? Gone. Target maps of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, war telegrams written by Abraham Lincoln, and a scabbard and belt given to Harry Truman? Gone, gone and gone. 
A jailed right-wing Austrian author has been found guilty of violating a prohibition on glorifying Nazi ideology and sentenced to an additional two years in prison. Gerd Honsik is already serving a four-year term, which began last year after he was found guilty of "Wiederbetaetigung" -- "re-engaging" in Nazi-era beliefs. The crime is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The previous sentence was for articles Honsik wrote in a right-wing publication praising the Nazi era. The judgment and sentence pronounced Thursday arose from two books by him that contained similar pro-Hitler and anti Jewish sentiments. 
China is poised to sign a $2 billion deal to build a railway line in Iran in the first step of a wider plan to tie the Middle East and Central Asia to Beijing. China's railways minister, Liu Zhijun, is expected to visit Tehran this week to seal the deal, according to his Iranian counterpart, Hamid Behbahani ... China is rapidly expanding its own high-speed rail network and has unveiled plans for lines that will connect Beijing with London, both through Russia and through central Asia. China Railway Group, the largest railway construction company, has also recently revealed it has had "early stage contact" with South African companies about undertaking rail projects in South Africa. 
... There's another boycott, an international one, that's gaining momentum - an economic boycott. Last week the Chilean parliament decided to adopt the boycott of Israeli products made in the settlements, at the behest of the Palestinian Authority, which imposed a boycott on such products several months ago. ... The world is changing before our eyes. Five years ago the anti-Israel movement may have been marginal. Now it is growing into an economic problem. 
In Washington, the Israelis and Palestinians are discussing peace, but in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, construction is proceeding at full speed. A legal ban is being ignored and the government is looking away. The thousands of new homes could hinder reconciliation. 
... For more than four decades, Israel has been able to rely on aid from the United States to dominate its region militarily and to sustain its economic prosperity. It has counted on its leverage in American politics to block the application of international law and to protect itself from the political repercussions of its policies and actions. Unquestioning American support has enabled Israel to put the seizure of ever more land ahead of the achievement of a modus vivendi with the Palestinians or other Arabs. Neither violent resistance from the dispossessed nor objections from abroad have brought successive Israeli governments to question, let alone alter, the priority they assign to land over peace. 
David Irving, the controversial historian, has outraged war veterans and survivors' groups with a tour of sites related to the Nazi occupation of Poland. Irving will be shadowed by the Polish secret service as he takes a week-long guided trip round various sites related to the German occupation of Poland, including a trip to the notorious SS-run camp Treblinka, where more than 800,000 Jews died between 1942 and 1943. The 1,500 pound-a-head tour, organised by Irving's Focal Point Publications website, will also visit Heinrich Himmler's bunker in Hochward as well as Adolf Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in Ketrzyn, as well as a series of lectures, and screening of the German film Downfall, about the last days of Hitler, featuring commentary by Irving. 
The European Union's chief trade negotiator was accused on Friday of "outrageous anti-Semitism" after comments made in an interview about Israel's role in Middle East peace talks. Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, told a radio station in his native Belgium that the "average Jew" had a belief that they are right, which was "difficult to counter with rational arguments." ... Mr. De Gucht also said the Jewish community wielded its influence in the United States. "Don't underestimate the power of the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill," he added. "That is the best organized lobby; you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics -- no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats." 
Politicians have rushed to condemn a board member of the German central bank for a new book tackling immigration, but his views have found considerable support among the population at large. Thilo Sarrazin's book "is not convincing, but it has convinced many people," said the influential Spiegel magazine, which this week has the Bundesbank executive on its cover, calling him a "people's hero." His publisher is rushing to print more copies of "Germany Does Itself In" to meet demand ... In the book, Sarrazin says Europe's top economy is being undermined, overwhelmed and made "more stupid" by poorly educated, fast-breeding, badly integrated and unproductive Muslim immigrants and their offspring. 
... From 1940 to the end of the war Mann recorded a number of speeches in German which were sent to the BBC and broadcasted from London in order to reach German radio listeners ... As Mann proceeded to declare, the reports on mass killings of Jews were not simply "stories", but history in the making.[30] This is highly ironic, considering that most of the supposedly authentic and reliable reports on mass killings relayed by Mann to his listeners have been quietly thrown down the memory hole. The speeches made by Mann during the war years are actually mythology in the making, and reading them gives us more insight into how and when the mass gassing allegations arose and provides us with leads to follow up in future research into this issue. 
The mayor of the German city of Dresden has flown into London under pressure from fellow politicians to try to get a planned memorial to Second World War bomber crews scrapped. Helma Orosz, 57, is officially in Britain to open an exhibition on the bombing of London, her city and that of its twin, Coventry, during the war. She is under pressure however to get the memorial, which is to recognise the courage of RAF bomber crews, scrapped. The East German city of Dresden was turned into rubble over two days nights in February 1945 by British and American bombers. Some 25,000 people, mostly women and children, died in savage firestorms whipped up by the intense heat of 2,400 tons of high explosive and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs. The raid was controversial because the war was almost over and Dresden had no strategic value as a military target. 
... It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful -- its detractors might suggest zany -- reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state. At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county's residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land. 
... Among the future consequences of not fixing our national problems will likely be an increase in social unrest and an increase in crime. A look at Chicago's problems may serve as a call to action for America's middle class. Chicago's city budget is in dire straits. That's also true of the state of Illinois, California, New York and other areas. In Chicago, the same mismanagement that deepened our fiscal crisis has caused a crisis in essential city services ... Thugs, gangs and renegade groups run the streets and neighborhoods, intimidating and victimizing the decent citizens of this city. They go mostly unchallenged and unchecked by a totally demoralized police force that is dangerously understaffed and still out-gunned on the streets. 
... In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was the inner group of neocons, originally leftist Trotskyites who then switched to the right, bringing their war propensities with them, when they saw the left turning against Israel. They are still very much around in the right wing of the Republican Party, and they are always the people to watch ... The bigger question we now face is whether the American people really want 800 American bases all over the world "projecting power," and whether we want to invade other countries and bring back body bags instead of rebuilding our bridges and highways and ports. 
Thousands of Germans, including teenagers, were forced to toil in Stalin's labor camps after World War II. When they were finally released, their country had been divided into east and west. Karl Heinz Vogeley and Lothar Scholz recall how no one was interested in their fate when they returned ... Between 15 million and 18 million people were imprisoned in Soviet gulags between the mid 1920s and the beginning of the 1950s. 
Dr. MacDonald explains how Jewish intellectuals promote policies to advance Jewish group interests while deceitfully justifying them on the basis of "universal values" and humanitarian principles that appeal to non-Jews. This video presentation, made by James Williams, lasts 4:53 mins. As part of what psychology professor MacDonald calls a "group evolutionary strategy," Jews frame polices that are good for Jews as beneficial for everyone. These policies include: Mass immigration and multiculturalism for the US and Europe, but not for Israel, which are justified on "humanitarian" grounds; and, Wars waged by the US against Israel's enemies, which are justified as promoting "freedom" and "democracy." 
Short answer. Iran's President Ahmadinejad did NOT call for Israeli Jews to be annihilated. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel's Shas party, HAS called, more than once, for the Palestinians (and, in fact, all Arabs) to be exterminated. As reported by the mainstream Western media, Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". What that meant, it was asserted, was the destruction, the driving into the sea, of Israel's Jews. What Ahmadinejad actually called for was the de-Zionization of Palestine. His actual words were to the effect that he wanted the Zionist state to disappear as the Soviet Union had done. 
The first people to be liberated by Britain in the Second World War were our own criminals. As the declaration of hostilities was announced in 1939, the gates of the country's prisons swung open for any inmate with less than three months left to serve and all the Borstal boys who had completed six months. Next month sees the 70th anniversary of the start of the blitz and there will be, quite rightly, many celebrations of the courage and stoicism displayed during it. What may receive less publicity are the activities of those who took advantage of the confusion to make their criminal fortunes because, as most of the nation pulled together to help each other, others were very busily helping themselves. 
Today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home, Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another two million internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under western rule, production of oil - Iraq's staple product - is still below its pre-invasion level, and homes enjoy fewer hours of electricity. This is dreadful. Some 100,000 civilians are estimated to have lost their lives from occupation-related violence ... The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as global policemen. 
The US formally ends its combat operations in Iraq at the end of August, marking a new phase in the seven-year conflict which has cost billions of dollars and many thousands of lives ... The respected and non-partisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the US will have spent almost $802 billion on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011, with $747.6 billion already appropriated. However, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes put the true cost at $3 trillion once additional impacts on the US budget and economy are taken into account. 
... This year, a group of retired generals and admirals released a report titled "Too Fat to Fight." "Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent," the report concluded. Though the Army screens out the seriously obese and completely unfit, it is still finding that many of the recruits who reach basic training have less strength and endurance than privates past. It is the legacy of junk food and video games, compounded by a reduction in gym classes in many high schools, Army officials assert. 
... Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours - the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life ... European social democracy - particularly Germany's - offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. 
Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame for decades as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, a new biography asserts. The assertion, based on numerous documents and interviews with three people said to be Mr. Wiesenthal's Mossad handlers, punctures not only a widely held belief about how he operated; it also suggests a need to re-evaluate the standard view that the Israeli government took no interest in tracking down Nazis until the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, and little thereafter. 
A Jewish French history teacher said Tuesday that she had been suspended for spending too much time teaching her pupils about the Holocaust and for organising trips to former Nazi death camps. A lawyer acting for Catherine Pederzoli, a 58-year-old secondary teacher in the eastern town of Nancy, said her client had been accused by administrators of teaching the World War II massacres with insufficient "neutrality". ... The report, compiled last month, alleged the teacher took up too much time preparing pupils for annual school trips to Poland and the Czech Republic to visit sites like the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. A copy of the report, seen by AFP, accuses Pederzoli of "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" in teaching the Holocaust and of manipulating her charges through a process of "brain-washing". 
... From the spring of 1944 onwards Anne rewrote her diary as she updated it, to turn it into a more eloquent piece of writing. After the war her father, Otto Frank, drew on versions A (the original) and B (Anne's revision) to produce C - the standard edition, until both the critical edition (1989) and the definitive edition (1995) supplemented C with hitherto omitted passages from A and B. ... Her posthumous beatification - the remaining few frames of film of her have almost the status of a relic - rests mostly on those lines in her diary about still believing that people are good at heart. (The ones about people's innate "urge to destroy . . . to kill . . . murder and rage" have curiously never found equal fame.) 
Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947-2004) was an influential libertarian writer, publisher and activist. ... In keeping with his outlook, he fervently opposed US military interventionism in foreign countries, and all forms of state collectivism. He was an ardent defender of free speech and free intellectual inquiry. He was a good friend of the Institute for Historical Review. He addressed the Third IHR conference (1981), contributed to the IHR's Journal of Historical Review, and for years was a member of the IHR Journal's Editorial Advisory Committee. 
... The truth is that the U.S. no longer has a "defense" budget. The adjective is wrong. Our military forces' size long ago ceased to have any meaningful attachment to the requirements of protecting Americans ... Our military spending is nearly equal to half the world's, and our allies spend most of the other half. Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and Iran collectively spend about a fourth of what we do on defense, according to statistics compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Even if we cut our military in half, it would still be far bigger than that of any conceivable rival ... Our deficit problem is an opportunity to surrender the pretension that we are the world's indispensable nation, preventing instability, shaping the international system and guiding history. 
Millions of U.S. teens attend "drug-infested schools" where students routinely see drugs used, sold or kept on schools grounds, according to a national survey of attitudes on substance abuse released on Thursday. Thirty-one percent of high school students -- more than four million -- see drug dealing, illegal drug use or students high or drunk at least once a week on their school grounds, said the annual survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University ... Since 2002, the proportion of students who attend schools where drugs are used, kept or sold soared 39 percent for high school students and 63 percent for those in middle school. 
An influential Israeli rabbi has said God should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week. "Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth," Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel's government, said in a sermon late Saturday, using Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' popular name. "God should strike them and these Palestinians -- evil haters of Israel -- with a plague," the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio Sunday. 
A leading member of Germany's central bank has caused outrage by claiming that Jews are identified by a particular gene. Thilo Sarrazin, who is on the board of the the Bundesbank in Frankfurt, said in a newspaper interview: 'All Jews share a certain gene. Basques (Spanish separatists) have particular genes, that distinguishes them from others.' ... In the book he claims the country is on the road to ruin because of the influx of immigrants from the Middle East which would overwhelm the indigenous population and create a nation of 'dunces'. In particular he singles out Muslims for failing to integrate and having low IQs. This influx, he claims, has been going on virtually since the war while the birthrate of native Germans has been steadily falling. 
In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many [Americans] expected an immediate attack against the West Coast. Fear gripped the country and a wave of hysterical antipathy against the Japanese engulfed the Pacific Coast ... The Japanese were sent to concentration camps not by a group of West Coast racists seeking economic advantage, but by a popular and powerful government run by democratic liberals. At the top of the list of those responsible for not only authorizing the program, but also for keeping it in operation was President Franklin Roosevelt. 
While America's super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever. Long-term unemployment is rising and millions of Americans are struggling to survive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the middle class is disappearing. ... Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are. 
.... Only now, 12 years after her death, have I found the box in my garage, containing dozens of volumes published by the Amalgamated Press (now IPC), in which a generation of schoolboys learned that Germans and Japanese were subhumans, and that we, the Brits - and occasionally Frenchmen and Americans, even Soviets - were fighting courageously against these "hordes" ... At their most racist, the comics cover the Allied-Japanese war. "The Emperor ... has ordered us to show these low-natured curs ... that we are the sons of Japan," a Jap says of the Brits in Malaya. But fear not, a plucky Tommy is there to "mow down the oncoming Japs" while screaming: "Come and get it you grinning little monkeys." 
Britain carried out assassinations during the Cold War, novelist and former secret agent John le Carre told The Sunday Telegraph newspaper. The espionage writer worked for Britain's domestic and external intelligence agencies during the 1950s and 1960s. "Certainly we did very bad things. We did a lot of direct action. Assassinations, at arm's length. Although I was never involved," said the 79-year-old, whose real name is David Cornwell. He drew a distinction between Western spy agencies and their Soviet bloc counterparts in the way they went about it. The novelist, who worked in Berlin in his Cold War days, denied that both sides were as bad each other. 
France's state rail operator, SNCF, has pledged to open its wartime archives to the state of California to prove it has "nothing to hide" over transporting French Jews to Nazi death camps. The pledge came a week after California passed legislation making full disclosure on involvement in taking people to work, concentration, prisoner of war, or extermination camps between January 1942 and December 1944 a requirement for bidding to build a high-speed railway in the state. Under the Holocaust Survivor Responsibility Act details of any reparations paid must also be disclosed. The new legislation is specifically aimed at SNCF, which is making a joint bid with French construction firm Alstom to build a $45 billion high speed link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. 
RAF [British air force] pilots shot down over the Channel during the Battle of Britain had to rely on German search and rescue services to save them from drowning, new research has unveiled. The problem became so severe that British aircraft were ordered to try to avoid travelling over the sea because too many being drowned, it has emerged. Amid the 70th anniversary commemorations this summer it can be disclosed that at least 200 pilots died "needlessly" in 1940 after bailing out over water. Once they hit the water there was very little chance of survival with only the occasional flier being picked up by a passing destroyer or fishing boat. 
A new film tells the terrible story of Stalin's own Final Solution - and Churchill's shameful complicity / … This is the harrowing scene of a devastating new film, Katyn. It takes its name from the village in western Russia where the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish prisoners of war were dug up in 1943. But these bodies were by no means the only ones to be disinterred. Near the Soviet city of Kalinin, now known as Tver, another 6,000 bodies were unearthed. Near Kharkov in Ukraine there were 4,000. In all, more than 22,000 Poles -- roughly two-thirds of them officers and policemen, the rest political prisoners -- suffered the same appalling fate: to be executed, without trial or even warning, and thrown like carcasses into mass graves. 
Germar Rudolf, 44, a German chemist and intellectual dissident who had been serving a prison sentence for violating Germany's law against "Holocaust denial," was released from Mannheim prison on July 4 after three years and nine months behind bars. Upon his release, he was met by his American wife and four-year-old US-born daughter. In October 2005 he was arrested in Chicago, and deported to his homeland, where he was tried, sentenced, and imprisoned. 
In a tour of the western US, David Irving is addressing meetings in 17 cities, including Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Costa Mesa, and Kansas City. His topic is "Hitler, Himmler and `Enigma': Re-writing World War II history using Nazi messages decoded by the British Secret Service." The best-selling British historian also has available copies of his prison memoir, which tells of his headline-making arrest and harrowing prison ordeal in Austria, 2005-06. 
In Russia it is not only the future that is unpredictable; often the past is equally in doubt … When authorities in Estonia removed a monument to Soviet soldiers from the centre of Tallinn two years ago, riots between police and ethnic Russian citizens of Estonia ensued, and the Kremlin made furious noises. With its new commission and law, Moscow is upping the stakes. Russia accuses the governments of Estonia and Latvia of glorifying partisan regiments which fought on the side of the Nazis. In recent years, relations between Latvia and Russia have normalised in many spheres, but the Second World War is still a thorny issue. 
A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the "Great Famine" committed in the 1930s. The nation's security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish. 
It has always been those few who can see through the political correctness and hypocrisy of popular attitudes who are considered dangerous. "Holocaust denial laws" are now in place in about a dozen countries. Defenders of these laws claim that the expression of unconventional views about the Jewish genocide is "hate speech" and "incitement to violence" and therefore must be suppressed. But history shows the greatest purveyors of lies, hatred and incitement to violence are those with the power to spread their poison by manipulating popular opinion via the control or complicity of the mass media. 
President Barack Obama's refusal to take a stand on protests in Iran stands in sharp contrast to demands he has made on Israel, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, says in a Newsmax interview … Klein says leaders of Jewish organizations are rethinking their support of Obama in light of his attitude toward Israel. "There are many leaders in the organized Jewish world who have privately discussed this issue with me, and say they are deeply concerned about Obama's actions and policies toward Israel, and now they're rethinking their support for Obama during the campaign and the election," says Klein … 
Britain is in the grip of a "virulent" new strain of anti-Semitism, according to the Chief Rabbi. Sir Jonathan Sacks told The Times in an interview that in January the number of anti-Semitic incidents reached the highest level since records began. Jews have been physically attacked, schools targeted and cemeteries desecrated … Although the new "mutation" was different from the anti-Semitism promoted by Hitler, it was dangerous because it was international, he said. "The internet means that we no longer have national cultures; we have global cultures and the new anti-Semitism is very much a phenomenon of the global culture." Whereas in the past, hatred was focused against Judaism as a religion or Jews as a race, the focus this time was on Jews as a nation. 
… Not counting money projected for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the presidentially approved budget plan would continue increasing the Pentagon's budget: by another $8.1 billion in 2011 (up 1.5 percent), another $9 billion in 2012 (up 1.6 percent), and $10.4 billion in 2013 (up1.8 percent), and so on all the way out to 2019. If we add in the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year - 2009 - exceeds any year since the end of World War II, including the spending peaks for the Korean and Vietnam wars. President Obama's plan is to increase that lead. Obama also will outspend Ronald Reagan on defense. 
… Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States. In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories -- and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write. The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country. 
… In Iran's system, election fraud has no purpose, because a small select group of ruling mullahs select the candidates who are put on the ballot. If they don't like an aspiring candidate, they simply don't put him on the ballot. When the liberal reformer Khatami ran for president, he won with 70% of the vote and served from 1997-2005. If the mullahs didn't defraud Khatami of his win, it seems unlikely they would defraud an establishment figure like Mousavi, who was foreign minister in the most conservative government, and is backed by another establishment figure, Rafsanjani. 
Adolf Hitler's obsessive hatred for Jews was sparked by his experiences after World War One, according to a new book. Respected historian Ralf-George Reuth argues the dictator blamed them for both the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German economy. The claim is a stark contrast to previous theories … At the time almost half of all German private banks were Jewish owned, the stock exchange dominated by Jewish stockbrokers, almost half of the nation's newspapers were Jewish run as were 80 per cent of chain stores. It became fashionable to decry the loss of the war on Jewish financiers. But Hitler, according to Reuth, also blamed Jews for the Russian revolution … 
Americans like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys … But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. 
An ex-candidate in Canada is suing the country's leading Jewish advocacy groups, alleging they ruined her political career. Lesley Hughes, who was dumped as a Liberal candidate in a Winnipeg-area electoral district, claims the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith Canada made false and defamatory accusations that she is anti-Semitic. In a lawsuit filed June 16, Hughes alleges that as a result of the actions of the CJC and B'nai Brith, former federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion revoked her candidacy in last September's federal elections. 
… The state-run radio station's Washington correspondent, Nathan Guttman, obtained data from a recent unpublished poll, conducted by the Israel Project, an organization that works to improve Israel's image in the United States. The Israel Project has been conducting a periodic running poll, asking American registered voters questions about Israel … There is a steep decline in the percentage of Americans who say that the U.S. should support Israel. That has dropped from 71% in March 2008 (at the time of the Annapolis process) to only 44% now. 
… Thus President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond. Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel's defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. 
… I sometimes fear there's a genetically inbred survival characteristic of the Jews that predisposes us to try to beat the system, to get away with things, a characteristic that came in very handy for all those many centuries during which the nerve and cleverness to beat the system enabled survival, but that has now become a dysfunctional anachronism. Be that as it may, Netanyahu's stance will likely turn out to be a serious miscalculation of Obama's intentions and abilities. Obama has no intention of endangering Israel, but when it comes to outsmarting a would-be outsmarter, he is not exactly a beginner. 
… The idea of the Palestinian state has now become a part of the national consensus, and only a handful of ultra-rightists reject it directly. But this is only the beginning. The main struggle will be about turning the idea into reality. The entire speech was addressed to one single person: Barack Obama. It was not designed to appeal to the Palestinians … Obama is not seeking a frontal collision with the Israeli government. It seems that he wants to exert "soft" pressure, vigorously but quietly. To my mind, that is a wise approach. 
There is growing concern among the American Jewish community over Obama's Mideast initiatives, this according to the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein. "President Obama's strongest supporters among Jewish leaders are deeply troubled by his recent Middle East initiatives, and some are questioning what he really believes," Hoenlein, said in an interview published Monday. 
Only a few years ago, Edward Fagan was a world-renowned lawyer for the underdog, brash and audacious enough to take on Swiss banks and even whole countries to win judgments for Holocaust survivors and victims of South African apartheid. This week, the Supreme Court announced he was barred from practicing law in New Jersey, completing one of the steepest falls from grace in the state's law community. The court found Fagan, 56, misappropriated nearly $400,000 of the money he won for the victims he so effectively championed. 
