Free Republic

In June 1942, Thomas Mann, who was living in exile in California, delivered a commentary on a German-language BBC radio program that decried the sanguinary actions of the Third Reich in avenging the assassination of the leading SS official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. After Heydrich’s elaborate funeral ceremony at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler screamed at the Czech president, Emil Hacha, “Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence.” It wasn’t an idle threat. “Since the violent death of Heydrich,” Mann lamented, “terror is raging everywhere, in a more...

Leadership: Europe's outpouring of grief over the death of Vaclav Havel, hero of Czechoslovakia's great Velvet Revolution, says much about its longing for more like him. His honesty and courage liberated Europe. Some 75,000 Czechs bearing roses and candles lined up in Wenceslas Square beginning Sunday, as they once did in 1989, to pay tribute to one of the greatest freedom fighters of the 20th century. Havel died Sunday at age 75 after liberating his country, leading his nation as president from 1989-2003, and voicing his moral authority to scourge lingering tyrants in Cuba, Burma and China. Havel, a playwright...

Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic's first president after the Velvet Revolution against communist rule, has died at the age of 75. The former dissident playwright, who suffered from prolonged ill-health, died on Sunday morning, his secretary Sabina Tancecova said. As president, he presided over Czechoslovakia's transition to democracy and a free-market economy.

Former Czech Prime Milos Zeman may face criminal charges for calling Islam an ”anti-civilization” enemy whose type of thinking he compared with the Nazis. Speaking at an international conference on Europe last month, Zeman stated, “The enemy is the anti-civilization spreading from North Africa to Indonesia. Two billion people live in it and it is financed partly from oil sales and partly from drug sales.” The former prime minister, who is known for strong statements and insulting speeches, last week compared the manner and strength of Muslim beliefs in the Koran with the followers of Nazism, who he noted believed...

PRAGUE (AP) -- They're the Czech Republic's fourth-largest political party, but the hardline Communists could soon be outlawed if the center-right government has its way. It's more than two decades since communism collapsed here, but the survivors and ideological heirs to the party that ruled from 1948 until the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989 are under increasing political pressure. Petr Necas' government has taken the first step toward a possible ban by asking the Interior Ministry to work on a legal complaint to make it happen. A study commissioned by a Senate committee compiled numerous complaints from lawmakers about their conduct....

Even Barack Obama’s midterm electoral humiliation won’t redeem US foreign policy. The problem didn’t begin with the history-deficient mind-set of American students who’ll earn their bachelor’s degrees in 2014. But the intellectual rootlessness of the class of 2014 exacerbates the flaws. Today’s students/ tomorrow’s leaders fertilize the soil into which bad seeds are sown by the current Washington elite. On the simplistic level it was a hoot to read that to the class of 2014 Beethoven is a movie pooch, Michelangelo was a computer virus and Czechoslovakia never existed. For the past 13 years Beloit College’s Mind-Set List by Tom...

20:40) Sharon to US: Don't turn Israel into Czechoslovakia Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has instructed the IDF to use whatever means necessary to defend the country, he told reporters tonight. He made his comments after three Israelis were killed this afternoon in Afula, and a terror attack overnight in Jerusalem in which two people were injured. He also urged the United States not to turn its back on Israel in favor of the Arab states in the way Europe ignored Czechoslovakia in 1938. The results of that move were calamitous, he said. There is considerable concern in Jerusalem that the ...

JERUSALEM — Two photographs adorn the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist. One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism's founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national...

PRAGUE — For many Czechs, it is a historical reckoning that is 20 years too late. Two decades after the Velvet Revolution overthrew Communist rule here in 1989, a group of Czech senators is pressing to ban the Communist Party, the only surviving one in the former Soviet bloc in Europe and, to its many critics, a national embarrassment and aberration. “The Communists ruined this country and oppressed freedom and yet here they are 20 years later in our Parliament,” said David Cerny, the iconoclastic Czech artist, who in 1991 painted a Soviet tank pink, transforming a memorial to the...

BORN INTO a Catholic family in communist Czechoslovakia, Terezie Hradilkova seemed destined to become a dissident. Snip...“My parents were never in the Communist Party, and were active Catholics. Twice a year a secret Mass would be held here, and Catholics from East Germany would meet up,” recalled Hradilkova, sitting in the kitchen where those Masses were held in defiance of a ban on unlicensed church services.

Assume for the moment that President Obama's sea-based interceptor plan adequately addresses the threat posed to Europe by Iran. Further assume that Secretary Gate's shift from selling his former president's proposal to selling his current president's proposal represents an honest evaluation of a changing threat based on intelligence information that is complete and accurate. Those are very big assumptions, but go with them for a moment. If true, one could assume the American administration simply found a happy confluence of events - a desire to "reset" U.S. relations with Russia; Russia not wanting the heavy American commitment to Poland and...

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel[Editor's Note: Forty-nine years ago last month, the nation Israel was reestablished in the Land. Thirty years ago this month, as a result of the famed Six Day War, Israel regained Biblical Jerusalem, as well as Gaza, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. Although these areas were part of the original mandated land, and are undeniably essential for Israel's defense, it has become strangely "politically correct" to assume that peace in the Middle East is dependent upon their yielding these lands-the so-called "West Bank"-back to their enemies which...

Politically active Barack Obama supporters in Michigan have tried to silence criticism of the president-elect on a talk program at a community radio station by cutting its air time, the program host says. Officials with radio station WRHC told WND the dispute involved talk show host Martin Dzuris' coverage of local issues as well as national issues. But Dzuris explained in a lengthy interview with WND he attended at least one meeting where radio station officials discussed specifically how to reduce Dzuris' criticism of Obama, which has linked Obama's statements taken directly from his speeches to Marxism. Dzuris said one...

August 2008:"The crisis was sparked earlier this week when Georgia sent troops into the breakaway province of South Ossetia to quell a Russian-backed separatist uprising. Russia responded by sending its troops into Georgia and the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali." http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Russia-On-Verge-Of-All-Out-War-As-Troops-Clash-In-Georgias-South-Ossetia/Article/200808215074261?lpos=World%2BNews_4&lid=ARTICLE_15074261_Russia%2BOn%2BVerge%2BOf%2BAll-Out%2BWar%2BAs%2BTroops%2BClash%2BIn%2BGeo Source for these photos:http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Georgia-South-Ossetia-Conflict---Missiles-Soldiers-Tanks/Media-Gallery/200808215074059 ______________________________________________________ May 2008: "Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's new president, delivered a coded rebuke to the West yesterday as Russia paraded its nuclear missiles through Red Square in a show of force not seen since Soviet times."http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1942177/Russia-puts-on-a-Soviet-show-of-might.html "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union... "World democratic...

Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) The general dissatisfaction within the Czechoslovak military became increasingly evident. In 1966 Czechoslovakia, following the lead of Romania, rejected the Soviet Union's call for more military integration within the Warsaw Pact and sought greater input in planning and strategy for the Warsaw Pact's non-Soviet members. At the same time, plans to effect great structural changes in Czechoslovak military organizations were under discussion. All these debates heated up in 1968 during the period of political liberalization known as the Prague Spring, when CSLA commanders put forward plans to democratize the armed forces, plans that included limiting...

This August 21st marks 40 years since the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, an invasion meticulously planned by the Soviet Union to crush the period of economic and political reforms known as the Prague Spring. Within hours of late August 20th and early August 21st some 2,000 tanks as well as an estimated 200,000 troops had poured in. It was the beginning of the occupation which changed the course of Czechoslovak history. Marta Hubscherová – a former radio reporter - witnessed the arrival of the first tanks in northern Bohemia; in an interview for Radio Prague in 2004...

In a townhall meeting held Tuesday in Albuquerque, N.M., John McCain mistakenly referred to current events in Czechoslovakia, a country that ceased to exist in 1993 after separating into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. McCain expressed “regret some of the recent behavior that Russia has exhibited…including reduction in oil supplies to Czechoslovakia.”

In these decadent times when powerful people in the West cannot conceive of any response to totalitarian jihad other than rank appeasement, and when the name of Che Guevara, a bloodthirsty Stalinist and enemy of freedom, is synonymous with heroism, it is vital that free people be familiar with — and honor — the examples of those valiant few who, living under totalitarianism, have stood up to it with a courage that today’s appeasers of Islam could hardly imagine. Among the greatest of these heroes is Vaclav Havel. Born in 1936, Havel spent his early years under the two major...

Archaeologists have uncovered parts of Prague's oldest ramparts, dating back to the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries, thus verifying the then Jewish globetrotter Ibrahim ibn Jaqub's description of Prague as "a town made of stone and lime," the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) wrote Monday... The archaeologists uncovered the remnants of wall in the cellar of the Academy of Performing Arts building, 5 metres underground. A thousand years ago the walls were part of one of Prague's main entrance gates, though which the town was entered from the western and souther directions... Prague, including its ramparts, attracted Ibrahim...

jdkf dkPRAGUE, Czech Republic: Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil's Bible — a medieval manuscript said to have been written 800 years ago with the devil's help — has returned to Prague after an absence of 359 years. And Czechs were eager to see it, officials said Friday.The priceless piece, considered the biggest medieval book, was taken from the Prague Castle by Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. It is in Prague on loan from Sweden's Royal Library in Stockholm. It was put on display under high security at the Czech National Library.Its...

Czech Parliament Unlikely to Legalize Euthanasia By Hilary White PRAGUE, August 23, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Czech Chamber of Deputies, the equivalent of the House of Commons, are unlikely to pass a measure that would legalize physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Of 186 deputies from the 200-seat Chamber, 92 said they did not want physician-assisted suicide to become legal with sixty deputies supporting legalization and 34 undecided. The daily paper, Mladá fronta Dnes, reported in July that the highest support for euthanasia (70 percent) is among the followers of the rightist Civic Democrats (ODS) of Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek. ODS Deputy, Boris...

A Date Worth Remembering: August 20, 1968 by Krzys Wasilewski On August 20, 1968, the forces of the Warsaw Pact crossed the borders of Czechoslovakia to provide “fraternal help,” or rather, reinstate a hard-line communist regime. In a matter of two weeks, 200,000 soldiers from Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union quenched the liberal rebellion, burying the hopes of easing the Soviet grip in Central Europe for decades. Although it lacked the geographic importance of Poland or East Germany, Czechoslovakia still remained an important place on the map of the USSR’s influence. Shortly after the end of...

Czechs remember Russians abducted by Soviet secret police 18.5.2007 - Rob Cameron In Prague last week there was a brief ceremony to commemorate the thousands of Russian émigrés illegally abducted by the Soviet secret police at the close of World War Two. The abductions began as soon as the Red Army began to liberate Czechoslovakia in 1944, and continued long after the Soviets arrived in Prague in May 1945. It's one of the most mysterious chapters in Czechoslovakia's 20th century history, but the fate of those abducted has not been forgotten. A military band played and the wind blew through...

WARSAW, Poland - The United States has entered a decisive phase in a plan to set up missile defense sites in Eastern Europe — a system Washington says is aimed at protecting itself and its allies against potential attacks from the Middle East. But the prospect of sophisticated U.S. radar and interceptor systems in formerly communist Eastern Europe has led Russian military leaders to warn of a new arms race. The system "would create a clear threat for Russia," Col. Gen. Vladimir Popovkin, the chief of Russia's Space Forces, warned Monday. The United States told Polish leaders it wants to...

Jan Palach's suicide remembered 38 years on [16-01-2007] By Rob Cameron Tuesday marks the 38th anniversary of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, the young student whose suicide transformed him into a symbol of Czechoslovak resistance following the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Jan Palach would have turned 59 this year he not taken his own life. His legacy, however, lives on. On January 16th, 1969, a 20-year-old student from Prague's Philosophy Faculty set off for Wenceslas Square, the city's busiest thoroughfare. The country was still under occupation by Soviet troops five months after the invasion. The purge of reformers within the ranks...

Stories of Injustice - those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it [02-11-2006] By Rob Cameron It's just a few weeks now before November 17th, the seventeenth anniversary of the beginning of the Velvet Revolution, when peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people brought the country's communist regime to its knees. Seventeen years on, coming to terms with the past is still difficult. One problem is the country's schoolbooks, which give only the briefest glimpse of the indignities and cruelties of the communist era. But the Czech NGO People in Need is trying to change all...

The Czech National Day: celebrating a state that no longer exists 27.10.2006 - David Vaughan The 28th October is an unlikely date for Czechs to be celebrating their national holiday. After all, it commemorates the founding of a state that no longer exists. Czechoslovakia was established in 1918 with the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy at the end of World War I, and was relegated to the history books 74 years later, when Czechs and Slovaks - or rather their political leaders - decided to go their separate ways at the end of 1992. While Slovaks quickly forgot their old...

Soviet Ghosts Haunt the World Council of Churches By Mark D. Tooley FrontPageMagazine.com | August 25, 2006 As one of his formative spiritual experiences, a top official in the World Council of Churches (WCC) fondly recalls attending a Soviet-front group’s conference in the old Czechoslovakia. In a recent official WCC news report, the Swiss-based ecumenical council interviews Rev. Walter Altmann, a Brazilian Lutheran theologian, former head of the Latin American Council of Churches, and the new moderator the WCC's totalitarian-sounding "central committee." Currently, he also heads the 700,000 member Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil. "As a young...

Warsaw Pact invasion commemorated TOP Slovak officials including MPs and President Ivan Gasparovic commemorated the 38th anniversary of the invasion of the former Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces on August 21, 1968. Gasparovic laid wreaths at SNP Square and Šafárikovo Square in Bratislava. Two people were killed by the invading troops at these locations - Peter Legner on SNP Square and Danka Košanová on Šafárikovo Square. "This event was a black day in the history of the Slovak nation and of the former Czechoslovakia," Gašparovic said. MPs from the opposition Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) were also among the politicians paying...

This Day In History SOVIETS INVADE CZECHOSLOVAKIA: August 20, 1968 On the night of August 20, 1968, approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring"--a brief period of liberalization in the communist country. Czechoslovakians protested the invasion with public demonstrations and other non-violent tactics, but they were no match for the Soviet tanks. The liberal reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubcek were repealed and "normalization" began under his successor Gustav Husak. Pro-Soviet communists seized control of Czechoslovakia's democratic government in 1948. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin imposed his will on Czechoslovakia's communist leaders, and...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A one-legged piano and a chorus was all Jewish prisoners at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia needed to express their defiance of the Nazis. Sixty-three years ago, Jewish prisoner and conductor Rafael Schachter gathered 150 fellow Jews in a basement at the camp to perform Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem" for the Nazis in Latin. Throughout the piece was a plea for liberation. The prisoners felt safe singing it because the Nazis did not get the meaning the Jewish people put behind it, said Natalie Pyle, a music student who will be a junior at The Catholic University...

The struggle over Palestine, with contradictory promises made by Britain to both Jews and Arabs, fueled four Arab-Israeli wars, brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, contributed to the use of oil and terrorism as political weapons, and was used as a pretext (amongst others) for Islamists dedicated to Israel's and the West's destruction.

Strongman sorry for Prague Spring From correspondents in Prague August 22, 2005 FORMER Polish communist strongman, Wojciech Jaruzelski, has apologised to the Czech Republic and Slovakia for Poland's role in the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968 that crushed a pro-democracy movement. "I have felt bad, I have been tormented by that," said Jaruzelski during a broadcast on Czech public television, 37 years to the day after the invasion of then Czechoslovakia. Troops from the Soviet Union and four former Warsaw Pact countries squashed the so-called "Prague Spring", a movement led by Slovak reformer Alexander Dubcek that tried to put "a...

Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser. Like many communities in Bohemia during that era, Budweis had people of both Czech and German ancestries, speaking different languages, though many were also bilingual. They got along pretty well and most people there thought of themselves as Budweisers, rather than as Czechs or Germans. But that would later change -- for the worse -- not...

Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser.

On Sunday Aung San Suu Kyi will celebrate her 60th birthday, which in a Buddhist culture marks an important milestone in one's life. I would like to meet her and give her a rose like the one she is seen holding in a photograph in my study. Such an ordinary wish, however, in the case of such an extraordinary woman as Aung San Suu Kyi may seem a silly idea. The last time I wrote about her in The Post [op-ed, Oct. 12, 2003] was shortly after "unknown" assassins tried to deprive her of her life and Burmese generals put...

An American Traitor: Guilty As Charged By Henry Mark Holzer and Erika HolzerFrontPageMagazine.com | June 10, 2005For three decades Jane Fonda obfuscated, distorted and lied about virtually everything connected with her wartime trip to North Vietnam: her motive, her acts, her intent, and her contribution to the Communists’ war effort.  With the aid of clever handlers, she so successfully suppressed and spun her conduct in Hanoi that many Americans didn’t know what she had done there, and, more important, the legal significance. Three years ago, our book, “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (McFarland & Co.), laid bare...

Based on what you'll read in this report, we can clearly establish that not only Havel was privileged to receive certain favors from the communists [his frequent visits of the capitalist West Germany, Austria and so forth - ordinary people would not be allowed to travel there during the openly communist era], but also Havel was glad to co-operate with these communist criminals...

Payouts due for Prague victims Soviet tanks remained in Czechoslovakia until 1991 Victims of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia are to receive compensation from the Czech government. President Vaclav Klaus approved a law allowing descendants of those killed to ask for a one-off payment of up to 150,000 koruna (£3,400 or 5,000 euros). Those injured or raped by members of the invading armies between 20 August 1968 and 27 June 1991 can claim around 70,000 koruna (£1,587 or 2,331 euros). The 1968 invasion put an abrupt end to the "Prague Spring" liberal reforms. Moscow feared liberalisation in Czechoslovakia would...

  For Immediate ReleaseMay 7, 2005 President's Radio Address      Audio THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. On Sunday and Monday, I will attend ceremonies in The Netherlands and Russia, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. These events will celebrate a great triumph of good over evil. We will never forget the acts of courage that made possible the liberation of a continent, or the heroes who fought in the cause of freedom. And we honor the brave Americans and allied troops who humbled tyrants, defended the innocent, and liberated the oppressed. By their courage and sacrifice, they showed the...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. .................................................................. .................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should...

Archbishop Was Allegedly Agent Thu Feb 10 By ANDREA DUDIKOVA, Associated Press Writer BRATISLAVA, Slovakia - A Roman Catholic archbishop was listed as an agent for the former communist-era secret service, according to an official from a government institute that is making the service's files public. Jan Sokol, now the head of the Bratislava-Trnava archdiocese, was registered by the secret service as an agent in the spring of 1989, just months before he was appointed archbishop in then-communist Czechoslovakia, Miroslav Lehky of the Institute of the National Memory said in a telephone interview Thursday. Prior to that, the service had...

...Vladimir Putin... has again exhibited his contempt for democratic rule and his tin ear for the angry opposition in the world's democracies.... Ukraine was starved into submission by Stalin 72 years ago, but when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence. It was not, however, an independence willingly accepted by Russian hardliners.... The massive outpouring of demonstrators in what they call the "Orange Revolution" is an attempt to replicate the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia... Serbia... the Berlin Wall, the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia and the Solidarity victory in Poland. There was one significant failure too,...

...In Iraq, John Kerry — who used to say that Saddam Hussein posed a genuine threat to America because he surely possessed weapons of mass destruction — would have imposed a "global test" before committing forces to protect U.S. security... [H]e would not be prepared to act until nations like France and Germany gave the go-ahead. Indeed, he stresses the infinite value of conversation — calling for "a summit of all our allies," much as he once begged the first President Bush to send someone to Baghdad in the firm belief that Saddam Hussein could be talked out of Kuwait....

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel...

Vaclav Havel has opened an international conference in Prague on promoting democracy in Cuba. He told delegates that Cuba's situation would change soon and that opponents to Fidel Castro's 45-year rule should prepare for the end of "dictatorship". The meeting is also attended by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and former Latin American leaders. A Cuban diplomat told the BBC that the US was behind the event, which she called an unwanted meddling. In the 1970s and 1980s Mr Havel was one of the most prominent dissidents within Europe's communist bloc. He was in office for 12 years...

Dozens of people have been killed in a massive military clampdown in Czechoslovakia by five Warsaw Pact countries. Several members of the liberal Czechoslovak leadership have been arrested, including Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek. The Soviet news agency, Tass, claims "assistance" was requested by members of the Czechoslovak Government and Communist party leaders to fight "counter-revolutionary forces". But in a secret radio address, Czechoslovak President Ludvik Svoboda condemned the occupation by Warsaw Pact allies as illegal and committed without the government's consent. US President Lyndon Johnson said the invasion was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter and that the...

Holocaust survivor Sol Rosner leads those who attended the Holocaust remembrance service Wednesday on Fort Huachuca in the Mourner's Kaddish. The traditional Jewish prayer was recited to honor the more than 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis during World War II. (Mark Levy-Herald/Review) FORT HUACHUCA - For Sol Rosner, leading a group of people in the Mourner's Kaddish was difficult. Standing on the stage of the post's Cochise Theater Wednesday, he spoke the traditional Jewish prayer in honor of the more than 6 million Jews who were murdered by Nazis during World War II. "It is...

SOVIET TERROR LINKS FOUND IN LEBANON Our major media have long ignored or downplayed evidence linking the Soviet Union and its satellites to international terrorism. When Robert Moss, co- author of The Spike, told an international conference on terrorism held in Jerusalem in 1981 that the PLO had become a Soviet surrogate in the Middle East, the reaction of the representatives of the press was one of cynicism mixed with hostility. Wall Street Journal correspondent Susan Weaver explained the negative reaction to Moss's statement, saying that linking the KGB with world terrorism through the PLO "cast a dark shadow on...

PRAGUE, Nov. 6 - Czech police said on Thursday they were holding three men who had attempted to smuggle 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) of the plastic explosive Semtex, a gun and other items into neighbouring Austria. Experts said the amount of Semtex -- a highly potent Czech-made explosive with a record of being used by guerrilla groups -- was enough to bring down an aircraft. A police spokeswoman said the group tried to cross the border in a car late on Wednesday evening. All were carrying Czech passports. "The behaviour of the driver was very unusual during customs clearance and...