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Russian troop presence in Crimea compared to what Germans did in Sudetenland in 1938 Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has compared Russia's troop presence in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula to Hitler's invasion of Sudetenland, a part of the former Czechoslovakia, in 1938. Baird, speaking to host Evan Solomon on CBC News Network's Power & Politics, accused Russia of invading and occupying Crimea, a part of Ukraine. "If it's not war, it's akin to war," he said. At first, Baird said the situation was "right out of the Cold War." When Solomon pointed out Putin claims he is protecting Russian rights in...

"If these negotiations [with Iran] fail, there are two grim alternatives," said Sen. Richard Durbin, "a nuclear Iran, or war, or perhaps both." Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham returned from the Munich security conference saying that even John Kerry agrees that President Obama's Syrian policy has failed. They are urging another look at air strikes. North Korea is warning that should the annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises go forward in March, it could mean war, possibly nuclear war. Philippines President Benigno Aquino III this week compared his country's situation to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and the disputed islets off his...

The Prague district hosting the embassy of the Palestinian Authority wants it moved after the ambassador was killed in a mysterious explosion this past week, local officials told AFP on Friday. "We asked the Czech foreign ministry for the embassy to be moved out of our district," Petr Hejl, senior councilor of Prague's Suchdol district, said. "The district feels betrayed by the behavior of diplomats who kept weapons and explosives at the embassy, violating Czech and international law," he told the news agency. Police said they found unregistered weapons at the PA’s diplomatic mission, but would not elaborate on the...

‘No explosive device on safe that killed Palestine envoy’  Published — Friday 3 January 2014 Last update 3 January 2014 1:06 am PRAGUE: A safe that exploded at the Palestinian residence in Prague, killing the ambassador, was used almost daily for storing cash, and embassy staff were not aware of any explosive safety device in it, the embassy spokesman said on Thursday. Czech police on Wednesday ruled out what they called a “terrorist attack” and said the likely cause was that a safety device that was part of the safe blew up and fatally wounded Ambassador Jamal Al-Jamal. However,...

Footage showing surrendering troops to US Army. southern Bohemia, Czechoslovakia 1945. Isn't strange that some Germans still carry weapons when surrendering plus a few shots from Prague.

American film historians recently came across a fascinating discovery when they found the Czech National Film Archive has the only surviving print of the 1929 US movie, the Mysterious Island. The archive in Prague stores around 500 films from Hollywood’s early days, proof that the global dominance of American cinema goes all the way back to the birth of the film industry.The epic American movie The Mysterious Island, loosely based on the French writer Jules Verne’s adventurous novel, was released in 1929. The Technicolor film starred, among others, the Oscar-winning actor Lionel Barrymore. But it became a financial and critical...

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler's Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured "peace for our time." Today the prime minister is generally portrayed as a foolish man who was wrong to try to "appease" Hitler—a cautionary tale for any leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation. But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to researchers. "The result of this was the discovery of...

Prague, Aug 19 (CTK) - The police have accused the organiser of the Communist secret service StB plot called Kamen (Stone) aimed to catch people trying to escape from then Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes Monday. If convicted, the man, aged 92, who lives in Prague, may be sentenced up to 10 years in prison, MfD writes. Shortly after the 1948 Communist coup, the StB started catching the escapees in a trap under the cover name Kamen, it adds. A false border was established in order to make them believe that they could forget...

He was the mastermind of the mass prison break from a German camp which inspired the iconic film The Great Escape. But a new book has now suggested Spitfire pilot Roger Bushell could also have been linked to the assassination of notorious Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich, known as 'Hitler's Hangman' and the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Simon Pearson's The Great Escaper places Bushell in Prague at the time Heydrich's car was bombed by Czechoslovakian Jan Kubiš, and Slovak Jozef Gabčík, which led to the Nazi officer's death a number of days later.

Nicholas Winton rescued hundreds of young Jews from the Nazis and is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. We meet some of the children he savedThe birthday party will be modest and understated, in keeping with the man. Sir Nicholas Winton is 104 tomorrow and naturally some of his children will be there to wish him well. Not only his blood offspring but those known as Winton’s Children – the ones he saved from near-certain death three-quarters of a century ago. Nicholas – Nicky – Winton hates to be thought of as a hero, hates being compared with Oskar...

If Israel jets show up in Iranian airspace, it will most likely happen while Obama is too busy accusing Mitt Romney of secretly storing all his money in a giant cave in the Rocky Mountains to do more than dispatch a flunky to chew out Netanyahu over the phone. The election is the perfect window for a strike on Iran's nuclear program, because Team Obama will be too tied down on the Romney Front to do much damage to Israel. Despite the signs being brandished at your local Anarchists for Peace rally, accusing the United States of being a puppet...

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...