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Contending that U.S. policies have a “global impact,” a Brussels newspaper editorial demands that Europeans be allowed to vote for the U.S. president. “The United States is the wealthiest nation on Earth, how dare they hoard this wealth and not share it with the less endowed peoples of the world?” the editors of De Standaard ask. The editorial reasoned that the U.S. presence in liberating the continent from Nazi tyranny and guarding against the Soviet threat for four decades after World War II made Europeans the “ipso facto” wards of the U.S. government. “The United States has robbed us of...

Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Avraham Wolff, chief rabbi of Odessa, Ukraine, and director of the local Jewish community, called on Ukraine President Victor Yuschenko to do more to stem the tide of anti-Semitism in the wake of an appearance by a previously unknown hate group. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the "Orthodox Public Organization of Odessa" distributed pamphlets in local Russian Orthodox churches that called for pogroms and the murder of Jews. Community spokesman Berl Kapulkin said that preliminary information pointed to the pro-Russian groups of United Fatherland and the Union of Orthodox Citizens of Ukraine as responsible for the pamphlets'...

Two days ago - On December 18th, 2007 and amazing memorial has been unveiled in my hometown Lowicz (Poland). The idea of this memorial is to commemorate the Jewish and Polish citizens of Lowicz and also the Soviet POWs - all the victims of two forced labour camps located near Lowicz during WW2. The memorial has been built of 3 blocks of basalt wrapped togehter with barbed wire. The speaker of the Polish Parliament Bronislaw Komorowski, the ambassador of Israel David Peleg and the ambassador of Russia Vladimir Grinin took part in the ceremony. The Israeli ambassador said, that the...

This rankles. The AFP photo above, taken from the BBC website, shows Soviet cartoonist Boris Efimov (sometimes transliterated Yefimov) reviewing a retrospective of his drawings in commemoration of his 107th birthday. A nostalgic occasion? It shouldn't be. Efimov was a classic Stalinist toady, at once sycophantic to the dictator and foully malevolent towards his master's enemies, who included not only the Nazis (when expedient) but the Catholic Church as well. The cartoon below, showing the Red Army soldier striking fear into the Axis leaders -- and the Pope -- was titled "Seven Dangers, One Response." That to the right...

Poland honors Katyn genocide victims at a solemn ceremony in Warsaw 12.11.2007 Over the weekend, Warsaw was the venue of a very special celebration commemorating the memory of the victims of the Katyn Forest Massacre - over 20 thousand Polish citizens murdered by the NKVD at Stalin's personal order in 1940. Eliza Mickiewicz reports 'I would like us to focus on those, whose memory was forbidden on this soil for decades - on the victims of genocide in Katyn, Miednoje, Charkow and many other places.' ...said the Polish President Lech Kaczynski opening the two-day solemn ceremony to honor the victims...

Wajda's "Katyn" shown in Moscow 28.10.2007 Polish Embassy in Moscow is again the venue of the screening of "Katyn", a movie on the Katyn Forest Massacre by Oscar winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda. Katyn was shown there for the first time yesterday. The audience, mostly diplomats, human rights activists and artists were moved. "Poles, forgive us," said Russian human rights activist Siergiej Kovaliov after he saw the film. In 1940, over twenty two thousand Polish POWs - both military and civilian - were executed by the Soviet NKVD. The movie tells a fictional story of the victims and their...

Fr. Peszkowski, legendary Katyn genocide survivor dies at 89 08.10.2007 Father Zdzisław Peszkowski, Katyn Forest Massacre survivor and a legendary lifetime chaplain of the families of the Katyn genocide victims, passed away at the age of 89. Joanna Najfeld reports Until the last days of his life, Fr. Peszkowski fought for the truth about the 1940 Soviet mass murder of twenty thousand Polish POWs - military officers, but also civilians - professors, doctors, lawyers, clergy, higher state officials - the intellectual elite of pre-war Poland. The truth, as he often reminded, which was forbidden during the decades of communist regime...

Secrets of 1957 Sputnik launch revealed By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer 3 minutes ago   MOSCOW - When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one...

Wajda’s Katyn Poland’s Oscar candidate Sunday, September 23. 2007 Katyn, the latest film by veteran Polish movie maker Andrzej Wajda, will be Poland’s candidate for ‘Best Foreign Film’ in next year’s Academy Awards. Katyn – which had its premier last week in Warsaw – tells the story of the massacre by over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940. Some of Wajda’s family were murdered during the massacre. Wajda’s latest movie was among 16 Polish films which a special committee had to chose from to send to the Academy in Los Angles for consideration for nomination in the...

Polish leader honours massacred officers on Russia visit MOSCOW (AFP) — Poland's Lech Kaczynski on Monday made his first visit as president to Russia for highly charged commemorations for 22,500 Polish servicemen massacred by Soviet secret police in World War II. The visit to Katyn in western Russia, where many of the killings happened, took place against a backdrop of heightened tensions between Poland and Russia since Kaczynski's rise to power in December 2005. The visit took place on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, which occurred under a secret agreement between Soviet leader Joseph...

In a speech in Tipton, Iowa yesterday, Senator John Edwards described his health care program "It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK. *** Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental...

THE elderly couple did not hesitate to open the door when they saw Dimitry Mukhin through their spy-hole. Mukhin, a psychiatrist who lived in the neighbouring building, had recently paid a friendly visit to ask if they needed anything. But this was no courtesy call. As Emilia Tomareva and Albert Uzikov let him into the Moscow flat where they had lived for decades, Mukhin rushed in with two men in white coats and a policeman. The shocked couple were bundled into an ambulance with their hands tied behind their backs and locked up in separate psychiatric hospital wards, even though...

Russia confirms Soviet sorties over Dimona in '67 By DAVID HOROVITZ The chief spokesman of the Russian Air Force, Col. Aleksandr V. Drobyshevsky, has confirmed in writing for the first time that it was Soviet pilots, in the USSR's most-advanced MiG-25 "Foxbat" aircraft, who flew highly-provocative sorties over Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona in May 1967, just prior to the Six Day War. Gideon Remez and Isabello Ginor, who co-wrote the recent book Foxbats over Dimona, which asserts that the Soviet Union deliberately engineered the war to create the conditions in which Israel's nuclear program could be destroyed, on Thursday...

BERLIN - Construction workers unearthed a 2,200-pound Soviet bomb from World War II in a Berlin suburb Tuesday, forcing authorities to evacuate more than 4,000 people before defusing it. The bomb, which was buried 13 feet underground, was found Tuesday morning in the Lichterfelde district on the capital's southern edge. About eight hours later, specialists defused it, removing two detonators. People in the area were evacuated from their homes as a precaution, police spokeswoman Miriam Tauchmann said. Services on a nearby commuter train line also were disrupted for several hours. Unexploded bombs, relics of Allied bombardments before Nazi Germany's surrender...

Once again, and engaging in perfect Soviet styled historical revisionism, our glorious MSM presents the "truth" of how failed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was really the one who "helped" the U.S. win the Cold War. AP claims Gorby brought about the fall of the Soviet Union but this "ushered in an era of U.S. imperialism," which the AP claims is responsible for "many of the world's gravest problems." So, according to the AP Gorby helped the U.S. win the Cold War, but his good deed is now the cause of all the world's ills? How losing the game can equate...

TALLINN, Estonia - Estonia on Tuesday reburied the remains of eight Soviet soldiers whose exhumation from a war grave had sparked deadly riots and infuriated neighboring Russia. The eight white caskets were lowered into new ground at the Defense Forces cemetery in a ceremony attended by Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo, foreign diplomats and World War II veterans. "We have fulfilled our duty and given these soldiers their final resting place," Aaviksoo said after the hour-long ceremony. He said he hoped the reburial would prevent Russia from using the war grave issue in the future "for provocations against the Republic of...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Forgotten and broken down Soviet-era arcade games are being restored for Moscow's newest museum, just opened by volunteers nostalgic for childhood days spent playing games like "Tankodrom" and "Sniper." ADVERTISEMENT Secret military factories across the Soviet Union churned out the arcade games from the late 1970s, but they were discarded in favor of shinier western imports after the collapse of communism in 1991, explain the museum's founders. While youngsters in the West played Pac-man on their first home computers, their Eastern bloc counterparts from Dresden to Vladivostok were queuing up to play the latest arcade games.

One of the great enigmas of the modern Middle East is why, forty years ago next week, the Six-Day War took place. Neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors wanted or expected a fight in June 1967; the consensus view among historians holds that the unwanted combat resulted from a sequence of accidents.Enter Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, a wife-husband team, to challenge the accident theory and offer a plausible explanation for the causes of the war. As suggested by the title of their book, Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press), they argue...

Historians have long known that the Swedish DC3 shot down by a Soviet fighter plane in 1952 was being used to spy on military facilities on the other side of the Baltic Sea. But only now have the true aims of the covert operation been revealed. Documents recently declassified show that Sweden was prepared at the beginning of the Cold War to launch retaliatory military strikes in the event of a Soviet attack. But not all files have yet been released. According to Ingvar Åkesson, head of Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets Radioanstalt - FRA), "there are structures from...

In a new book that “totally contradicts everything that has been accepted to this day” about the Six Day War, two Israeli authors claim that the conflict was deliberately engineered by the Soviet Union to create the conditions in which Israel’s nuclear program could be destroyed. Having received information about Israel’s progress towards nuclear arms, the Soviets aimed to draw Israel into a confrontation in which their counterstrike would include a joint Egyptian-Soviet bombing of the reactor at Dimona. They had also geared up for a naval landing on Israel’s beaches.