The secret report of Fourth Reich in the EU

The 1944 Red House Report, detailing 'plans of German industrialists to engage in underground activity

three-page, closely typed report, marked 'Secret', copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany's economy by sending money through Switzerland.

Your Ad Here

They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.

The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire - but not just German.

Read more...

The cost of American spying network 31 billion dollars

 

US government is building a vast domestic spying network to collect information on Americans as part of expanding counter-terrorism efforts

The unprecedented network involves local police, state and military authorities feeding a growing database on thousands of US citizens and residents, even though many have never been charged with breaking the law, the Post reported, citing numerous interviews and 1,000 documents. 

The apparatus breaks new ground in the United States — where domestic security measures traditionally have faced legal limits — and raises questions about safeguards for privacy and civil liberties.

Read more...

The case of Oliver Wendell Holmes

The best illustration turns out to be a 1927 case known as Buck vs. Bell. Or as it might otherwise be known, the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the imbeciles.

when the political fight broke out over Sonia Sotomayor's assertion that a judge's ethnic and socioeconomic background might actually influence how he or she interprets the law, I cracked the history books to find support for that fairly obvious point.

Holmes, perhaps the most revered of all Supreme Court justices, was always proud of his opinion in Buck vs. Bell, which upheld a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of "mental defectives." Yet the terse ruling proclaims, in each of its four chilling paragraphs, the narrow elitism of his personal life experience. And its consequence was tens of thousands of ruined lives over the next half-century.

Read more...

Mumbai-style" terror attack against targets in London

On December 20th British authorities are charging nine men arrested with preparing to carry out a "Mumbai-style" terror attack against targets in London. The BBC reports that potential targets included the London Stock Exchange, the U.S. Embassy, and "religious and political figures."

"I have today advised the police that nine men should be charged with conspiracy to cause explosions and with engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism with the intention of either committing acts of terrorism, or assisting another to commit such acts," said Sue Hemming, head of the Crown Prosecution Service Counter Terrorism Division.

Read more...

the great dirty secretes of A I G company

 

Some may be surprised to learn that AIG is a subsidiary of American International Corporation (AIC) and the parent has a most interesting history. AIC has succeeded in remaining invisible and does that by relying on secrecy because that’s how its founders liked it. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., of Robber Baron fame, started the company in 1910. Other Barons of industry joined John D.; Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie. Other American industrialists and bankers also joined the AIC venture. The reason such an illustrious group of giants came together was that knew the financial clout they could exert together would bring them even more wealth, but more importantly, power; at a time when there were few government restrictions interfering with business.

Read more...

The great secretes of the most important royal families in Europe

 

The Hapsburg dynasty was one of the most important and influential royal families in Europe dating back more than 500 years and producing rulers in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands and the German empire. Then, in 1700, it suffered a sudden demise of its Spanish branch. Now scientists believe they have come up with a definitive explanation.

A study of the extended family tree of the House of Hapsburg has found that the last Spanish Hapsburg king, Charles II, was the offspring of a marriage that was almost as genetically inbred as an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister or parent and child.

Scientists have found that the Hapsburg fashion of marrying their relatives to keep their dynastic heritage intact had dire consequences for subsequent generations, which culminated in the last heir to the Spanish throne being sickly and impotent.

Charles II of Spain was nicknamed El Hechizado – The Hexed – because people at the time thought that his physical and mental disabilities were the result of sorcery. Now a study into the genetics of his immediate ancestors has found that he was so inbred that he probably suffered from at least two inherited disorders.

Read more...

Sold of Vatican soul

The Vatican appears to have an enduring vocation for Italian political and financial scandal. Secrecy and intrigue were the order of the day when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus held sway in the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower housing the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican's central bank.

The requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism may explain the choice of business partners such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, whose mafia links and ruinous bankruptcies brought lasting discredit on the Catholic church three decades ago.

The Vatican hoped that a goodwill payment of $240m to the creditors of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano's would salve its conscience and erase the memory of Marcinkus's inept and dishonest banking practices. We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept the premises of the IOR.

Read more...

The art of surviving from sex scandal: Berlusconi's dirty way

In Italy, though, Berlusconi's alleged romps and his heavy-handed attempts to fend off the allegations are just part of the story. In the land of Machiavelli, the one thing that gets as much attention as what's happening inside the Prime Minister's bedroom is what's happening in the political back rooms.

In Italy's Parliament, everyone is on the lookout for potential Judases within the ruling majority's ranks. And as far as the Italian media are concerned, Gianfranco Fini, president of Parliament's lower house, is filling that role nicely. The local paper in Bologna, Il Resto del Carlino, like others in Italy, offers daily updates on a brewing feud between Berlusconi and Fini, the most powerful right-wing politician from this traditionally left-leaning city. Last week, Fini demanded "more democracy" within the center-right coalition and lashed out at Berlusconi's family newspaper, Il Giornale, for accusing him of drifting leftward. "Enough already. 

Read more...

Who killed Observer editor George Orwell

In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.

Read more...

The mystery of Missing U S AIRFORCE H-Bomb

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."

Read more...

U S Military’s Secret dollars

U S military has spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, and purchasing a slew of “Tagging tracking and locating” (TTL) gear — gizmos designed to keep covertly tabs from far away. Most of these technologies are highly classified. But there’s enough information in the open literature to get a sense of what the government is pursuing: laser-based reflectors, super-strength RFID tags, and homing beacons so tiny, they can be woven into fabric or into paper.

Some of the gadgets are already commercially available; if you’re carrying around a phone or some other mobile gadget, you can be tracked – either through the GPS chip embedded in the gizmo, or by triangulating the cell signal. Defense contractor EWA Government Systems, Inc. makes a radio frequency-based “Bigfoot Remote Tagging System” that’s the size of a couple of AA batteries. But the government has been working to make these terrorist tracking tags even smaller.

Read more...

Coca-Cola and McDonald's the great new targets for tourists attack

A jihadist website has posted fatwas that permit the killing of tourists and targeting of "infidel" companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's

The fatwas on the website Al-Minbar Wal-Tawhid came in response to a posting by a member named "Abu Sayyed Qutub," which included the following questions:

"What is the ruling regarding companies that distribute Jewish and American products, such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's?"

"Is it permissible to receive help from gangsters in order to carry out jihad operations, as they say the jihad in Algeria is doing?"

"Is a group of fewer than 10 young people without military or organizational experience permitted to target tourists in countries with apostate [Muslim] governments, where no known jihad group operates?"

Sheikh Abu Walid al-Maqdisi, a Gaza-based cleric, replied that according to Sharia, it is forbidden to harm Muslim lives and possessions but permissible "to target infidel and polytheist lives and possessions."

Read more...

Britain on the al-Qaida targets list

 

An associate of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was arrested earlier this year for allegedly planning a terrorist attack in Britain, UK Home Secretary Theresa May said on Wednesday in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute in London.

May spoke of the changing nature of the al-Qaida threat to Britain, explaining that al-Qaida is now weaker than any time since September 11, and "many other terrorist groups now aspire to attack us." 

AQAP has been "at the forefront" of those other groups, she said. "Police and agencies have been working to disrupt AQAP operatives in this country," and "threats such as these are likely to continue," May noted.

Read more...

U.S. army using a rifle that fires radio-controlled in Afghanistan

The U.S. army is to begin using a futuristic rifle that fires radio-controlled ‘smart’ bullets in Afghanistan for the first time, it has emerged.

The XM25 rifle uses bullets that are programmed to explode when they have travelled a set distance, allowing enemies to be targeted no matter where they are hiding.

The rifle also has a range of 2,300 feet making it possible to hit targets which are well out of the reach of conventional rifles.

The XM25 is being developed specially for the U.S. army and will be deployed with troops from later this month, it was revealed today.

Read more...

Risk Health OF Airport Body Scanners

 

Next time you go through security at the airport, you might be told to empty your pockets, put your hands over your head and stand still while an X-ray machine looks for anything hidden under your clothing.

If this body scanning option sounds unappealing, you have another choice: an “enhanced pat down” conducted by a Transportation Security Administration employee, which some travelers have described as quite intimate. 

The new screening measures have been hotly debated, but mostly in theory. Now that there are nearly 200 body scanning machines in about 50 domestic airports, with 800 more on the way, passengers are facing real-life decisions about what to do. Here’s some information to help you choose.

Read more...

Who trained Bangladeshi death squad?

Members of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), which has been held responsible for hundreds of extra-judicial killings in recent years and is said to routinely use torture, have received British training in “investigative interviewing techniques” and “rules of engagement”.

Details of the training were revealed in a number of cables, released by WikiLeaks, which address the counter-terrorism objectives of the US and UK governments in Bangladesh. One cable makes clear that the US would not offer any assistance other than human rights training to the RAB – and that it would be illegal under US law to do so – because its members commit gross human rights violations with impunity.

Read more...

Mysteries of Mona Lisa's Eyes

Like something out of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code the tiny letters have been identified for the first time under magnification, in the right eye the letters spell out Da Vinci's own initials LV suggesting that he placed them there deliberately.

Intrigue is usually focused on her enigmatic smile.

But the Mona Lisa was at the centre of a new mystery yesterday after art detectives took a fresh look at the masterpiece – and noticed something in her eyes.

Hidden in the dark paint of her pupils are tiny letters and numbers, placed there by the artist Leonardo da Vinci and revealed only now thanks to high- magnification techniques.

Experts say the barely distinguishable letters and numbers represent something of a real-life Da Vinci code.

The revelation could have come straight from the pages of Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code, in which the Mona Lisa is said to contain hidden clues about the Holy Grail.

Silvano Vinceti, president of Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, which spotted the symbols, said: ‘To the naked eye the symbols are not visible but with a magnifying glass they can clearly be seen.

Read more...

Vladimir Putin and poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko

Did Litvinenko had been murdered because of the world cup: ask Vladimir Putin

Russian leader Vladimir Putin probably knew about the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, according to a top American diplomat.

The Kremlin has adamantly denied any involvement in the 2006 murder, but a remark by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried in a new batch of diplomatic cables released last night suggests that Mr Putin would almost certainly have known about the assassination.

Litvinenko’s deathbed accusations that the then Russian president was behind his radiation poisoning made headlines around the world.

He claimed he was targeted after exposing the Russian secret service’s violent activities in helping Mr Putin’s rise to power.

Read more...

Mafia government

 

The mafia's formidable grip on Italy has been starkly illustrated by a new report claiming 13 million Italians live in areas where the mob exerts influence over everyday life.

Commissioned by Italy's parliamentary anti-mafia commission, the report by research institute Censis used crime statistics to find the number of urban and rural districts where clans are active in the Italian south.

The Italians living in the 610 districts identified, even if law abiding and not members of clans, "are in some way conditioned by a presence that draws its strength from the ability to exert a capillary control in the area", the report stated.

Read more...

The CIA's Black Sites Program

February 10, the British High Court finally released a "seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed." The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002. The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released. The revelations regarding Mohamed's torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted "continuous sleep deprivation" under threats of harm, rendition, or being "disappeared," were criticized by the British court as being "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities," and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed's torture places the implementation of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. 

Read more...

The legend of Painting the Crying Boy

 

The stories began around 1985, when several mysterious fires occurred all around England. When the debris was sifted through the only item that remained un-charred was a painting of a little boy with a tear rolling his cheek in every fire. Could this all be coincidence?

Real or not a Yorkshire fireman was so upset that he talked with the “Sun” newspaper in England. They ran his story about how everything in the home was consumed by fire except for a painting of a crying boy. There were at that time more than one of these paintings around and each seemed to have the same effect. The home and all contents would be totally destroyed but the painting of the little crying boy would not show any sign at all of going through a fire.

The newspaper began receiving telephone calls from people all over the area that had similar stories to tell about the crying boy painting.

Read more...

The most famous missing person in United States Amelia Earhart

 

The three bone fragments turned up on a deserted South Pacific island that lay along the course Amelia Earhart was following when she vanished. Nearby were several tantalizing artifacts: some old makeup, some glass bottles and shells that had been cut open.

Now scientists at the University of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA from the tiny bone chips in tests that could prove Earhart died as a castaway after failing in her 1937 quest to become the first woman to fly around the world.

"There's no guarantee," said Ric Gillespie, director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a group of aviation enthusiasts in Delaware that found the pieces of bone this year while on an expedition to Nikumaroro Island, about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.

Read more...

U.S. Spies That Monitors Blogs and Tweets

 

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Read more...

Leak facts about Swine Flu Lab

 

The new H1N1 strain, which was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, may be the product of three strains from three continents that swapped genes in a lab or a vaccine-making plant, Gibbs, and fellow Australian scientists wrote in Virology Journal. The authors analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus and found its origin could be more simply explained by human involvement than a coincidence of nature.

Adrian Gibbs, the virologist who said in May that swine flu may have escaped from a laboratory, published his findings today, renewing discussion about the origins of the pandemic virus.

Their study, published in a free, online journal reviewed by other scientists, follows debate among researchers six months ago, when Gibbs asked the World Health Organization to consider the hypothesis. After reviewing Gibbs’ initial three-page paper, WHO and other organizations concluded the pandemic strain was a naturally occurring virus and not laboratory-derived.

Read more...

Obama the most important CIA Former Agent

 

Dr. Manning heads the Columbia Obama Treason Trial which is scheduled for May 14-19, 2010 at the ATLAH building at 38 West 123rd Street in ATLAH, New York, 10027. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court have failed in their duties to uphold the Constitution and address the legitimacy and other questionable issues surrounding the White House’s current resident. So, Dr. Manning, being a longtime resident of the Columbia University area, the school that Obama allegedly attended, began an intense investigation into Obama’s educational background and discovered some profound discrepancies.

According to Dr. Manning, Obama (born in 1961) enrolled at the very pricey Occidental College in Los Angeles, California in 1979 and was recruited there in 1980 by the CIA which has made it a practice since its inception to recruit college students. He was, by his own admission, a “C” student, a dope smoker and a member of the Marxist Club at Occidental, a co-educational liberal arts college. In 1981, Obama allegedly transferred from Occidental to Columbia University. It is atypical for a student to begin their education in one four-year school and then transfer to another school. Columbia University requires that incoming students pass certain academic requirements which Obama apparently lacked. However, Columbia had a foreign student program and the CIA has major connections and influence with Columbia and the nation’s other educational facilities.

Read more...

C.I.A. and Lee Harvey Oswald

 

For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.

The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role. 

That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

Read more...

Why would Elvis want to disappear

 

Two hours after Elvis's death was announced publicly, a man who reportedly looked remarkably like Elvis purchased a ticket for Buenos Aeries, paid in cash, and used the name John Burrows: the same name Elvis had used as an alias several times before.

Elvis had a book collection that disappeared mysteriously right after his 'death'. Some say this was proof that he was alive and took them with him.

At Elvis's last show in Indiana in 1977, he bid everyone "adios". This is the same as saying good-bye as against saying see you again, or see you soon.

No more suits were ordered after Elvis's last show. Did this mean he was getting ready to leave.

Elvis had signed an unusual contract with NBC that paid much cash up front for his tour

Elvis called a friend named Ms. Foster and said he wasn't going on the tour. She took and passed a polygraph test on this issue.

Read more...

The big deal between Silvio Berlusconi and Mafia

Mafia informants claim the meeting took place in Milan in 1974, when Berlusconi was already a wealthy entrepreneur, at the offices of his property company. The informers say Berlusconi met Stefano Bontade, then one of the mafia’s most powerful bosses, because he feared for his family’s safety at a time when Italy was plagued by a wave of high-profile kidnappings.

THE billionaire Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, once met a leading mafia godfather to ask for protection, according to testimony gathered over several years by crime prosecutors. 

Francesco Di Carlo, one of Bontade’s henchmen who is now in jail, told prosecutors that he was at the meeting. He claims Berlusconi asked for help to ensure that neither he nor his children would be abducted by other mafia clans.

According to the henchman’s testimony, Bontade gave his word that he would personally ensure Berlusconi’s safety. In return Berlusconi told the mafia godfather that he was “at his disposal, for anything”.

According to anti-mafia prosecutors, the meeting was arranged by Marcello Dell’Utri, a close friend and business partner of Berlusconi. Dell’Utri later played an important role in founding the tycoon’s first political party, Forza Italia, which won the 1994 election and took Berlusconi to power.

Read more...

Spy Camera monitors every U.K. citizens

 

Camera-equipped drones, developed by the British military for use in war, will be used in England to keep an eye on civilians from the sky, officials say.

Police in Kent and Essex counties plan to start using them in 2012 for routine monitoring of motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and illegal dumping, The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

Collaboration between the police departments and BAE Systems, maker of the drones, began in 2007, the Telegraph said.

A prototype for police use is expected to fly this year. Its high-resolution cameras can capture images from 20,000 feet.

"Fully autonomous unmanned air systems could be routinely used by border agencies, the police and other government bodies," BAE spokesman Andrew Mellors said.

Unlike manned police helicopters, which can fly for only a few hours, the drones can remain aloft for up to 15 hours, the Telegraph reported.

Read more...

According to Georgia's stone this is the end day of our world

 

The blue-gray vein of granite that courses through northeastern Georgia spawned jobs in the quarries and finishing sheds of Elberton, where generations of stonecutters have turned slabs of rock the size of refrigerators into statues, tombstones and tile.

And one day, it brought a visitor who gifted the town with a landmark that leaves visitors scratching their heads decades later.

The nearly 20-foot high series of granite slabs known as the Georgia Guidestones are inscribed with a series of admonitions for a future "Age of Reason." Billed as "America's Stonehenge," it's an astronomically complex, 120-ton relic of Cold War fears, built to instruct survivors of an Armageddon that the mystery man feared was all too near. 

The identity of the man who called himself "R.C. Christian" is a secret that Wyatt Martin, the banker who acted as his agent in Elberton, vows to take to his grave.

"He told me, 'If you were to tell who put the money up for this, it wouldn't be a mystery any more, and no one would come and read it.' That had to be part of the attraction, to get people to come and read his 10 rules that he came up with," Martin said.

Read more...

Serects facts about Blackwater in Pakistan

Not too long ago, a wave of concern had swept through Pakistan when the local media began screaming about Blackwater’s growing infiltration in the country and its dubious activities. The mounting pressure to expel this infamous US defense contractor put the Zardari government in a corner. It could neither ignore public pressure nor displease its benefactors in Washington. In the end, it chose to vehemently deny these stories. Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, said publicly he would resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan, as if his resignation would be a great loss for the people.

These stories were also denounced as false propaganda by US officials. Responding to accusations that the US Embassy was sponsoring Blackwater, the US Ambassador, Anne Patterson, insisted that “Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan.” She claimed that Pakistani journalists were “wildly incorrect,” and blamed them for compromising the security of US personnel in Pakistan. Secretary Clinton, during her visit shortly thereafter, also dodged questions on the subject.

Read more...

Last secret magic of Renaissance art

Religion is concerned with a spiritual realm beyond the visible world. Science only accepts – for practical purposes and, if you are Richard Dawkins and others, for philosophical purposes, too – the existence of that visible world, and attempts to discover its nature and how it works. But magic is the desire to use invisible forces to change the visible world.

Works of art that we look at today in museums, as if they were solely intended for mute aesthetic contemplation, were often made for magical purposes. This is clearly true of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it also applies to art made thousands of years later in Europe. In Renaissance Florence, portraits of traitors were often painted on walls in public places – after one conspiracy, no less an artist than Sandro Botticelli portrayed the conspirators on the Piazza della Signoria. These were not merely "wanted" posters. They were visual curses: paintings that set out to injure their victims, to invoke malevolent magic. In a similar way, when a Venetian Doge betrayed the Republic of Venice his portrait in the Doge's Palace was blanked out. A modern regime might simply remove his picture: by preserving it over the centuries, as a blank space, Venice did something more potent and spooky.

Read more...

Jews father of Adolf Hitler

 

Adolf Hitler is likely to have been descended from both Jews and Africans, according to DNA tests.

Samples taken from relatives of the Nazi leader show that he is biologically linked to the 'sub-human' races he sought to exterminate.

Journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren used DNA to track down 39 of the Fuhrer's relatives earlier this year.

They included an Austrian farmer revealed only as a cousin called Norbert H.

A Belgian news magazine has reported that samples of saliva taken from these people strongly suggest Hitler had antecedents he certainly would not have cared for.

A chromosome called Haplopgroup E1b1b (Y-DNA) in their samples is rare in Germany and indeed Western Europe.

'It is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, in Algeria, Libya and Tunisia as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews,' Mr Vermeeren said.

'One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,' adds Mr Mulders in the magazine, Knack.

Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.

'This is a surprising result,' said Ronny Decorte, a genetic specialist who agreed that Hitler probably did have some roots in North Africa.

'It is difficult to predict, what happens with this information, both to opponents and supporters of Hitler,' he added.

Read more...

Vatican Bank scandal with businessmen and Mafia

The Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it's under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize euro23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the "Vatican Bank" has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.

The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a "misunderstanding" and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws "with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital." The documents also reveal investigators' suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.

The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew euro650,000 ($860 million) from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed.

Read more...

Nazis Safe Haven in U.S

 

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. 

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

Read more...

Blackwater secrets documents

Documents reveal that Blackwater has been busy expanding its corporate reach by providing intelligence services for agencies such as the Canadian Military, Netherlands Police and corporations like Monsanto.

Blackwater is a private, mercenary army. They've been called the 'shadow army,' and most notoriously worked for the United States in Iraq, where the company courted controversy. Journalist Jeremy Scahill, who wrote a book about Blackwater, wrote an exclusive for The Nation, revealing general details of the extent of the Blackwater business operations. Scahill managed to obtain documents that, according to Scahill, show

"... entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater's work for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by Blackwater's owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly coordinated operation."

Read more...

CIA Human Experiments

 

A federal magistrate judge in San Francisco ordered the CIA to produce specific records and testimony about the human experiments the government allegedly conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975.

Three veterans groups and six individual veterans sued the CIA and other government agencies, claiming they used about 7,800 soldiers as human guinea pigs to research biological, chemical and psychological weapons.

The experiments, many of which took place at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick in Maryland, allegedly exposed test subjects to chemicals, drugs and electronic implants. Though the soldiers volunteered, they never gave informed consent, because the government didn't fully disclose the risks, the veterans claimed. They were also required to sign an oath of secrecy, according to the complaint.

The veterans filed three sets of document requests to find out who was tested, what substances they were given, and how it affected them. Between October and April, the government produced about 15,000 pages of heavily redacted records, most of which related to the named plaintiffs only.

Read more...

Billionaire war against Obama

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him. 

One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

Read more...