'Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.'
― George Santayana
Twenty-one members of Golden Dawn were sworn into Greece's Parliament on Thursday, making it arguably the most far-right party to enter a European national legislature since Nazi-era Germany.
Europe's financial crisis is changing the tone across the continent, with frustrated voters turning to extremists on both the right and left. None seem as extreme as Golden Dawn, whose leaders claim that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to kill death camp inmates during the Holocaust. The party _ which won 7 percent of the vote in a May 6 election _ says it wants to rid Greece of immigrants and plant landmines along the border with Turkey.
The new parliament will hold power just one day because the election left no party with enough votes to form a government, forcing repeat elections next month. Recent polls show falling support for Golden Dawn, so it's not certain to make it into parliament again. Still, many people across Europe are troubled.
"The Golden Dawn party is a dark stain on European politics," said Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress. "For the first time in over six decades a seemingly long hidden Nazi ideology returned to power."
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Bad news coming out of Greece. This isn't an isolated incident either. There are more examples of whats going on in Europe at the link.
Major coolness!
What you're about to see is really cool - or hot, if you're a physicist. NASA scientists have published a video that shows a star being devoured by a black hole. The video was recorded using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawai'i, and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - In the video, a red supergiant star wanders a bit too close to a supermassive black hole in the heart of a galaxy some 2.7 billion light-years distant. The immense gravity of the black hole violently shreds the star and sends its remnants flying across space.
Black holes, once the realm of science fiction after being predicted by early physicists, and demonstrated possible by Einstein, are real objects of incredible mass and power. They are typically formed when very large, massive stars die.
Stars are gigantic balls of (mostly) hydrogen gas. They are kept "inflated" and shining by the immense pressure in their cores which causes hydrogen atoms to fuse together into helium - the same reaction that takes place in a fusion (hydrogen) bomb. The effect of these billions of explosions occurring every second is a bright, shining star, of which our sun is a typical example.
After billions of years, all the hydrogen is eventually fused into heavier and heavier elements. Eventually the process stops because there are no more elements which can be explosively fused. When that moment arrives, the body of the star collapses into itself. If the star is large enough, many times the mass of our sun, that collapsing process can cascade to the point the star becomes a black hole, a tiny object (comparatively speaking) whose gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape it.
Black holes are called such because they reflect and emit no light - but they can be detected by a variety of other means. For example, when a star passes too close and is shredded by their gravity.
See the video at the link.
I'm sure Israel already has these bases on their radar should Hezbollah attack.
BEIRUT : Recently uploaded satellite images to the online Google Earth portal reveal what appears to be a Hezbollah military training ground constructed since 2006 in remote hills in the eastern Bekaa Valley along the border with Syria.
The facility near Janta includes a suspected driver training course, a 100-meter firing range and a possible urban terrain assault course, according to imagery analysts and European intelligence officials who first noticed the unusual hillside markings in 2008.
Google Earth images also reveal considerable – and surprisingly overt – construction activity in sealed-off Hezbollah security pockets in southern Lebanon, particularly in the hills south of Jezzine, which became the group's main line of defense following the 2006 war with Israel and subsequent redeployment from the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon-patrolled border district.
The scale of the activity hints at the enormous efforts Hezbollah has undertaken since the 2006 war to prepare itself for the possibility of another conflict with Israel. But the construction work also raises questions as to the purpose of these facilities, which are easily visible to Israel's near daily aerial reconnaissance violations as well as to satellite surveillance by Western nations and now to anyone with Google Earth installed on their computer, assuming they know where to look.
The Google Earth image of the Janta area is dated May 21, 2011, and when compared to the previous image dated Nov. 28, 2005, shows substantial activity such as new tracks and buildings alongside the more militaristic facilities.
...It is possible that the construction is genuinely of a civilian nature and is providing the foundation for future agricultural or industrial projects.
But there is another alternative. Hezbollah's military leaders are masters of deception, which raises the possibility that the construction activity is nothing more than a decoy to keep everyone guessing while the militarily significant work is conducted under camouflage and in secrecy elsewhere.
The truth presumably will remain unknown until the next war with Israel.
Facepalm.
One of the big winners in the Greek election was the far-right Golden Dawn.
It passed the three per cent barrier guaranteeing parliamentary participation, and will be the first neo-Nazi formation in the Greek parliament since 1974.
Among other things it wants to expel immigrants and mine the border with Turkey.
Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Micholiakos said:
'The Greeks were anytime nationalists and now they have the chance to express their political stand. Nobody need fear me if he is a good Greek citizen, for everyone who is a traitor I do not care.'
On this day in history Germany surrenders at Reims.
On May 7, 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters in Reims, France, to take effect the following day, ending the European conflict of World War II.
The New York Times published an Associated Press story under the headline 'The War in Europe is Ended!' It reported, '[The Germans] were asked sternly if they understand the surrender terms imposed upon Germany and if they would be carried out by Germany. They answered Yes. Germany, which began the war with a ruthless attack upon Poland, followed by successive aggressions and brutality in internment camps, surrendered with an appeal to the victors for mercy toward the German people and armed forces.'
Gee, I wonder what the Iranians are doing there?
North Korea will soon carry out a nuclear experiment, and Iranian scientists could be present at the explosion site, sources who are familiar with the issue told The Jerusalem Post Monday.
Iranian officials from the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group observed a failed North Korean rocket launch on April 13, according to a report by the South Korean Yonhap news agency.
Although Seoul has neither confirmed nor denied the report, it believes that a delegation of a dozen Iranian scientists may have been technically involved in North Korea's failed long-range rocket launch, which North Korea said was a satellite launch.
Now, the Islamic Republic may be planning a presence at North Korea's upcoming third nuclear test as well.
South Korea government sources said on Sunday that North Korea appears
to have completed preparations for the test, and would need only to push a button to detonate an atomic bomb.The test could come as soon as early to middle May.
How sad. These people have no respect for life whether it be human or animals.
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — There is an afterlife for animals at the Khan Younis zoo in the impoverished Gaza Strip.
Animals who die in the dilapidated park return to be displayed as stuffed creatures, giving visitors the unusual zoo experience of petting a lion, tiger or crocodile. But because taxidermy in the largely isolated Palestinian territory is not advanced and expertise and materials are in short supply, the experience can be grim.
Flies swarm around some of the 10 animals that have been embalmed so far. The makeshift cages housing the exhibits — fashioned from fencing salvaged from Jewish settlements that Israel dismantled in 2005 — are littered with empty soda cans and other trash.
An emaciated-looking stuffed lion, its coat patchy and mangy, lies on an exhibit cobbled together from crates and shipping pallets. A monkey had missing limbs. A porcupine had a hole in its head.
The zoo's 65 live animals, which include ostriches, monkeys, turtles, deer, a llama, a lion and a tiger, don't fare much better. During a recent visit, children poked chocolate, potato chips and bread through the wire. There's no zookeeper on the premises. Gaza has no government body that oversees zoos, and medical treatment is done by consulting over the phone with zoo veterinarians in Egypt.
Mazel tov!
What's so special about a country's 64th birthday?
Well, in the case of most nations, perhaps not all that much, unless the country happens to be Israel, which celebrates its birthday this year on April 25 and 26.
Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only UN member state whose right to exist is regularly challenged, whose elimination from the world map is the aim of at least one other UN member state, Iran, and whose population centers are deemed fair game by Hamas-controlled Gaza and Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. Thus, Israel's sheer act of survival from year to year is itself noteworthy.
None of the countries that are serial human-rights violators – not Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or any of the others – gets anything near the relentless, obsessive, guilty-till-proven-innocent scrutiny that democratic Israel receives from UN bodies, with their built-in, anti-Israel majorities, in New York and Geneva.
No other country is the target of such non-stop, well-funded, and highly-organized campaigns to discredit, delegitimize, and demonize a sovereign state.
No other country faces such systematic attempts to launch boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions against it, not to mention flotillas and flytillas, and all the while those behind the efforts, claiming to speak for human rights, blithely ignore places like Syria, where thousands were killed in the past year alone, because they can't claim an Israeli connection.
And no other country has its right to self-defense challenged as Israel does, even though it does no more than any other nation would do if confronted by periodic terrorist assaults and deadly missile and rocket attacks.
I have enormous admiration for Israel – for its resolve, resilience, courage, and ingenuity.
Other nations might have succumbed, after 64 years of uninterrupted hostility, to the enemies trying everything under the sun to destroy them and, short of that, to demoralize and isolate them. But Israel has not flinched. It refuses to cave. It keeps confounding its foes....
It's incredible that this kind of insanity still exists in today's society.
WARSAW, Poland — In the Baltic States they celebrate their liberation from the Soviet Union in the middle of March.
Winter's worst lies grey on the streets, but that doesn't stop people in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, and Riga, capital of Latvia, from marching solemnly to honor the heroes who fought vainly to keep the Soviet Union at bay.
Among those who march are groups who honor those who fell wearing the uniform of the Waffen SS, the military arm of the notorious Nazi paramilitary unit. These SS veteran marches are not fringe events. Thousands march and thousands more turn out to cheer them on.
The parades' permits are applied for by members of the governing party in parliament. Marchers are defended by the government.
Latvia's president Andris Berzins reportedly praised the SS veterans on Latvian television last week, 'It's crazy to think they're war criminals.' Berzins added, 'Many people lost their lives for the future of Latvia. I don't see any basis to deny this … it seems to me it's not acceptable to dishonor these people, before whom we should bow our heads,' he said.
...The official tolerance for marches honoring those who fought with the SS is part of a general trend in the Baltic States and all along the eastern borders of Europe: an embrace of a form of exclusionary nationalism that belongs to the 19th century, rather than the globalized 21st. It is the kind of nationalism that underpinned Hitler's theory of 'One People and One Reich.'
...The Council of Europe published a report on the Nazi marches in Latvia in February. It said, 'All attempts to commemorate persons who fought in the Waffen SS and collaborated with the Nazis, should be condemned. Any gathering or march legitimizing in any way Nazism should be banned.'
The report went on to state that the EC, 'cannot but express concern about any attempt to justify fighting in the Waffen SS and collaborating with the Nazis, as it risks fueling racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance … '
Have these people not read history books about what the Nazis did 70 years ago?
Has Libya been taken over by Al Qaeda?
A new video purports to show al Qaeda flags flown by Libyan police and military vehicles in Sirte, Libya.
A new video has surfaced online that purports to show a convoy of Libyan military and police vehicles -- more than two dozen in all -- rolling through the hometown of late dictator Moammar Gadhafi while bearing a flag similar to the infamous black banner of al Qaeda.
It was not immediately clear when the video was shot, but according to the accompanying caption written by a self-identified pro-Gadhafi supporter, it was taken in the coastal town of Sirte and shows 29 vehicles -- everything from SUVs labeled "police," "Sirte," and "rebels" to a couple full-sized fire trucks. A handful of heavy machine guns are mounted on some of the military-style trucks. More than a dozen of the black banners long associated with al Qaeda whip in the wind.
If the caption is accurate, it would not be the first time the flag belonging to the world's most high-profile terror group has flown in the war-torn North African nation since the popular revolt against Gadhafi began last February. In October, an al Qaeda flag was reportedly raised over a courthouse in the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi. Caravans bearing the flag, similar to the one shown in the new video, have also apparently been spotted in Tripoli, according to a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
But the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Dabbashi, told ABC News that the video is not what it seems. Libyan brigades have flown similar flags in the past and, when questioned about them, the brigade commanders always said they were simply the "flag of the Prophet Muhammad," Dabbashi said.
