By Gerald Swick
Dear Mr. History,
There is one thing in history that particularly interests me. Was President Lyndon Johnson aware of the plans of the Soviet Union and its vassal states to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968? I thank you for your answer.…
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History Net
It wasn’t all that long ago that NATO was supposedly going to be rejuvenated by the influx of post-Communist nations, nations that had previously been a part of the Warsaw Pact (or in the case of the Baltics, the Soviet Union itself). With fresh memories of Russian imperialism these countries would take their membership in NATO seriously, and in their role as NATO policy-makers would help ensure the commitment of the spineless French, Germans, and Italians. “New Europe,” in short, understood that NATO wasn’t some knock-off version of the European Union but was a serious military bloc with serious military responsibilities that demanded a serious commitment of political will and economic resources. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
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Mike Kluzner is a man of many talents. Not only is he the software engineer responsible for fuel system diagnostics for Ford globally, he “got his start designing laser weapon systems capable of disabling the navigation systems of enemy satellites” for the former Soviet Union. Quite a résumé, wouldn’t you say?
You may be asking yourself the same question that popped into our minds upon reading about Mr. Kluzner: What do laser weapon systems have to do with Ford and its EcoBoost engines? We’ll let the man answer himself. “The same process for analyzing key physical relationships works for what we do today in engine combustion, catalyst chemistry and mechanics,” says Kluzner. “These are all part of Ford’s software engineering expertise.” Who are we to argue?
Ford also employs an engineer who previously designed software to detect damage to the heat tiles on the International Space Station, as well as one who’s past work involved particle physics, says the automaker in the press release below. David Bell (pictured above right), global boost system controls engineer for Ford, describes the software running EcoBoost as “the secret sauce” that makes the technology work as the driver intends and demands.
Scroll down below to find out more, and to learn how Ford’s 125 (and growing, it says) patents related to EcoBoost help keep the automaker at the forefront of engine technology.
Continue reading Ford EcoBoost successful because of Soviet laser weapons system expert?
Ford EcoBoost successful because of Soviet laser weapons system expert? originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 28 Jul 2013 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Autoblog
By NewsEditor
Physicist Thomas Fife claims while in Russia in 1992, he was told by former KGB agents that the U.S. will have a black, Soviet agent as President soon named Barack.
By Matt Cantor
Economic struggles following the Soviet Union’s collapse hit Russia’s military hard—but today, its power was on full display in the country’s biggest war games since the Soviet era. Some 160,000 troops and 5,000 tanks were deployed in Siberia and far eastern Russia, the AP reports, while 130… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
The United States’ top naval commander in Asia described military relations with China as “collegial” and rejected Cold War comparisons, urging “methodical and thoughtful” diplomacy in the region.
Vice Admiral Scott Swift, commander of the Japan-based US 7th Fleet and in Sydney for bilateral exercises, said maritime security was an increasingly important issue in the Indo-Pacific region as both trade and militarisation boomed.
“Economic power is being converted to military power in many parts of the region, which may increase the temptation to use coercion or force in an attempt to resolve differences between nations,” he said in a speech to the Lowy Institute foreign policy think-tank.
“The rising of the seas and the opening of the (Arctic’s) Northern Passage will bring new security challenges that must be dealt with as well,” he added, speaking of global warming’s impact in the region.
Swift said he was “very encouraged by the pace” of military connections in the region amid escalating tensions over issues including the South China Sea.
China claims nearly all of the sea, rejecting competing claims to parts of it by the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan.
Some of the claimants have expressed concern at Beijing’s increasingly assertive military and diplomatic tactics to stress its control.
US President Barack Obama warned China last week against using force or intimidation in its maritime disputes and urged a peaceful resolution.
Swift said his focus was on inclusive military operations, seeking “to the maximum extent possible multilateral exercises”, adding he had had “very collegial exchanges with PLAN (Chinese navy) ships throughout the region, and really throughout the world”.
“We need to be methodical and thoughtful about the process by which we pull the relationships together,” he said.
“In the past I think there’s been a rush to achieve a form of success without fully understanding what success is, especially in the context of the parties that are coming together.”
Swift said he believed military collaboration with China was “bringing us closer” to a naval understanding similar to that which existed between the US and the Soviet Union to prevent conflict at sea during the Cold War.
But he distanced himself from comparisons with the 40-year US-Soviet standoff, saying there were “very, very different circumstances”, starting with the fact that the 7th Fleet was as large as the entire Chinese navy.
“We have much more in common than we do have in competition with China,” Swift added.
“The Cold War was really a competition between governments, competition between our militaries, who was the strongest was the question of the day. I just don’t see that in today’s maritime environment.”
Swift said he was “heartened” by the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the region and welcomed discussions about whether its mandate should extend beyond economic issues.
“The instability that is resident within the South China Sea is really ringed by all those countries that are participants in ASEAN, so its relevance is much higher than what it was even four or five years ago,” he said.
“If it grows into a maritime focus more than what …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Holocaust survivors and victims’ heirs have received $1.24 billion from a Swiss fund set up after a scandal over dormant accounts of Jews killed in World War II, a magazine said Monday.
The Swiss-Jewish weekly Tachles said the figure was contained in a report by New York judge Edward Korman, who oversees the management of the fund.
Korman’s report summed up operations since a landmark 1998 deal between the World Jewish Congress and Swiss banks.
The banks were accused of keeping money owned by Jews who had hidden funds in secret accounts in neutral Switzerland but then perished in the Holocaust, and of having given heirs the cold shoulder when they tried to track down the money.
Under the 1998 accord, the banks paid a $1.25 billion settlement, which was transformed into US government bonds.
Payouts were then overseen by Korman and the Swiss-based Claims Resolution Tribunal, which wrapped up its operations in 2012.
Within the fund, a total of $800 million were destined for account holders and their heirs.
According to Korman’s report, Tachles said, $726 million have been paid out since then, with $426 million of that related to claims on 4,600 dormant accounts.
In addition, the fund gave a flat-rate sum of $5,000 each to 12,300 claimants whose cases were deemed “plausible but undocumented”.
Another goal of the settlement was to provide money to survivors of Nazi German persecution, whether or not they had held accounts in Switzerland.
All told, 457,000 Holocaust survivors and heirs have therefore received money from the fund.
Among them were 199,000 people who were pressed into forced labour by Nazi Germany, and who received a share of $288 million.
In addition, 4,100 Jewish refugees who were turned back at Switzerland’s borders during World War II received a total of $11.6 million.
Korman also authorised the payment of a total of $205 million to 236,000 needy victims of Nazi Germany’s occupation, notably in the former Soviet Union.
No details of the fund’s administrative budget have been revealed, but Tachles said that the Claims Resolution Tribunal, based in the city of Zurich, cost $800,000 a month to run.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
It’s a case teaming with colorful characters: a reputed Russian mob boss once accused in an Olympic scandal, a wealthy art world impresario who hung out with Leonardo DiCaprio and a woman named Molly Bloom who gained a celebrity following by hosting them at high-stakes poker games.
U.S. authorities allege all had roles in a sprawling scheme by two related Russian-American organized crime enterprises. Prosecutors say in recent years the operations laundered at least $100 million in illegal gambling proceeds through hundreds of bank accounts and shell companies in Cyprus and the United States.
The sprawling case against more than 30 defendants, announced this week by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, illustrates the insatiable appetite for sports betting around the globe — and the enormous potential for illicit profits. The steep rise in wealth among the upper class in the former Soviet Union has driven that potential to new heights, said Mark Galeotti, a Russian organized crime expert at New York University.
“We’re seeing higher-rolling businessmen involved in these types of cases,” Galeotti said. The high rollers’ bookies are left with the problem “of trying to figure out what to do with suitcases full of cash, and that leads to the money laundering,” he added.
The tentacles of the scheme reached into Trump Tower, the high rise on Fifth Avenue where prosecutors say a U.S. ringleader was living in an apartment one floor below Donald Trump‘s own place. There, he oversaw a network of Internet sites that formed “the world’s largest sports book” that catered “almost exclusively to oligarchs living in the Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” prosecutors said.
On one of the thousands of conversations intercepted on the defendants’ cellphones, the leader could be heard warning a customer who owed money that “he should be careful, lest he be tortured or found underground,” a prosecutor said.
The ring paid Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov — already under indictment in a separate U.S. case accusing him of bribing Olympic figure skating judges at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City — $20 million in gambling proceeds in a two-month period alone, court papers said. In another transaction in late 2010, the same man wired $3 million from a Cyprus bank account to another account in the United States, the papers said.
The new indictment naming Tokhtakhounov called him a “vor” — a term roughly translated to “thief-in-law” and comparable to a Mafia godfather. His role,
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/national/~3/smrAIW68DyM/
The two brothers accused of blowing up homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon came from a Chechen family that for decades had been tossed from one country to another by war and persecution.
Their father and former neighbors from Kyrgyzstan — home to many Chechens who were deported from their native villages by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin — tell of a family often on the move in search of safety and a better life.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured alive, had moved to the United States about a decade ago with their parents and two sisters. By all accounts, the younger brother had many friends, but his older brother felt alienated from American society and in recent years had turned increasingly to Islam.
Although neither spent much time in Chechnya, a province in southern Russia that has been torn apart by war and an Islamic insurgency, both strongly identified themselves as Chechens. They took up boxing and wrestling, two of the most popular sports in Chechnya, where people are proud of their warrior traditions.
The brothers’ story begins in Tokmok, a town about 60 kilometers (35 miles) from the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia that was once part of the Soviet Union. Stalin rounded up the Chechens and shipped them east during World War II, seeing them as potentially disloyal. Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was born in Kyrgyzstan.
“This was a very good family,” Badrudi Tsokoev, a fellow Chechen who lived next door to the Tsarnaevs, said Saturday. “They all strove to get a higher education, to somehow set themselves up in life.”
The brothers’ grandfather had died tragically when a shell exploded as he was scavenging for metal that could be sold as scrap, neighbors said.
After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the family moved to Chechnya, only to have war break out in 1994 between Russian troops and Chechen separatists fighting for an independent homeland. Dzhokhar was born in 1993 and shares the name of Chechnya’s first separatist leader.
The fierce battles, which reduced much of Chechnya to rubble, sent the Tsarnaevs fleeing back to Kyrgyzstan with their two young sons, a daughter and another one on the way.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/cmMkBdvjQRg/
By Bradlee Dean
“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
Can you imagine a world in which the Holocaust never occurred? Or a World War that never took place? Can you imagine all the lives that would have been saved; families that never had to be bereaved of their children; and the millions of men, women, and children whose lives could have been spared? If only the people would have stopped the destruction before it took place. No one ever expected the Holocaust to happen. Who could imagine that such evil embodied through Hitler and his regime could have ever taken place? Were there no warning signs to the people of Germany? Yes, there were.
The Germans told the Jewish people they couldn’t swim in their swimming pools, but no one protested too strongly. Then they said they couldn’t attend their schools, “No problem,” said the Jewish people, “We’ll make our own schools.” Little by little, their rights were stripped from them and taken away through deceptive measures; but no one ever imagined the horror that awaited them because they tolerated the beginning trickles of injustice that left governmental power unchecked, which ended up billowing into one of the most tragic events in history. Everything that Hitler did looked like law, smelled like law, and even had the color of law, but was not law. What is it that we have learned from looking back and studying the past?
John Adams, the second president of the United States, stated: “Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”
Is America walking contrary to John Adams’ statement? You decide. Today, those who stand for the Constitution, the sanctity of life, and the traditional values of morality our country was founded upon are now labeled as un-American haters.
Vladimir Lenin, First Leader of the Soviet Union, said: “We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
Sound familiar?
We see it in trickles now, but left unchecked by the silent majority who sit back and do nothing… what will be your fate, America? History tends to repeat itself unless we stand up and do something to stop it. Knowing what you stand for limits what you fall for.
Proverbs 28:1 says “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a
From: http://www.westernjournalism.com/what-will-be-your-fate-america/
Nearly three dozen people were charged on Tuesday in what investigators said was a Russian organized crime operation that included illegal, high-stakes poker games for the rich and famous and threats of violence to make sure customers paid their debts.
Federal authorities in New York City weren’t naming names but said the poker players included pro athletes, Hollywood celebrities and Wall Street executives. None of them were charged.
The money-laundering investigation led to arrests Tuesday in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and elsewhere around the country. There also were FBI raids at a $6 million apartment in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and a prestigious Madison Avenue art gallery owned by two of the defendants.
George Venizelos, head of the New York FBI office, said the charges against 34 individuals “demonstrate the scope and reach of Russian organized crime.”
He added: “The defendants are alleged to have handled untold millions in illegal wagers placed by millionaires and billionaires, laundered millions, and in some cases are themselves multimillionaires. Crime pays only until you are arrested and prosecuted.”
New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said proceeds from the high-stakes illegal poker games and online gambling were allegedly funneled to organized crime overseas.
Among those named in an indictment filed in federal court was a wealthy Russian fugitive, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. He was already under indictment in a separate U.S. case accusing him of bribing Olympic figure skating judges at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
In a two-month period beginning in late 2011, the money-laundering ring paid Tokhtakhounov $20 million in illegal proceeds, the indictment said.
Along with the illegal poker games, the ring operated “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world,” the indictment said.
Prosecutors alleged proceeds were laundered through shell companies in Cyprus and in the United States by a criminal enterprise with strong ties to Russia and Ukraine.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Harris Fischman told a U.S. magistrate judge in Manhattan that Vadim Trincher, 52, directed much of the international racketeering enterprise from his $5 million apartment at Trump Tower.
“From his apartment he oversaw what must have been the world’s largest sports book,” Fischman said in a successful argument to have Trincher held for trial without bail. “He catered to millionaires and billionaires.”
Trincher’s apartment is located directly below one owned by Donald Trump, authorities said.
Fischman said FBI agents found $75,000 in cash and $2 million in chips from a Las Vegas casino in Trincher’s apartment after he was arrested at 6 a.m. He appeared in court in a white t-shirt and jeans.
Fischman said the government had a strong case against Trincher in part because of recorded conversations between Trincher and his customers captured for several months through a court-approved wiretap.
On one of those calls, Trincher could be heard warning a customer who owed money that “he should be careful, lest he be tortured or found underground,” Fischman said. He said the government was in the process of seizing Trincher’s apartment.
Trincher’s attorney, Michael Fineman, said his client was
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/national/~3/D5oVIsAJdQU/
Former Sen. Richard Lugar is being knighted on orders from the Queen of England, joining a select list of Americans to receive the distinction.
The Indiana Republican, who this year left the Senate after serving 36 years, will receive the rank of honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire during a ceremony at the British Embassy in Washington on Tuesday. The British Ambassador, Sir Peter Westmacott, is set to preside.
Since leaving the Senate, Lugar has taken on various roles, including leading the Richard G. Lugar Institute for Diplomacy and Congress with the German Marshall Fund. He also serves as a distinguished scholar and professor at the Indiana University School of Global and International Studies.
Lugar said he is deeply honored to be knighted. “I will focus my service on solving our most serious challenges in a spirit of cooperation between our countries,” he said in a statement Monday.
He said he was first inspired by Queen Elizabeth‘s leadership “when she received me as the young Rhodes Scholar in London, 58 years ago and asked me about Indiana.”
Lugar’s studies at Oxford University were his first outside of the United States. He went on to become one of the Senate’s foremost foreign policy experts, focusing much of his work on nuclear proliferation issues and relations with Europe. Along with former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., Lugar crafted legislation that helped eliminate nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union.
Lugar will not be known as “sir” Lugar — only royal subjects can carry that title. But few Americans have received honorary knighthood, including Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Lugar was defeated in a Republican primary in 2012, finishing his sixth term in office early this year. Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly won the race to replace him.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/national/~3/rZwhdEazrCA/
By Paul Roderick Gregory, Contributor The most significant geopolitical events of the past half century have been unanticipated. Not that we did not expect them, but they were supposed to happen in the distant future, not now. The North Korean regime could collapse in the same unexpected way, leaving shocked politicians, diplomats, and pundits to fend with its consequences. While it is comforting to believe that predictable rational calculation and self interest determine the course of human events, the most significant changes in the world order are heavily influenced by chance, personalities, emotions, and miscalculations. We expect the two Koreas to muddle along in a shaky equilibrium that will result in the end of the Hermit Kingdom in the distant future. A collapse of the North Korean regime in the near term would send pundits in vain searches of past writings for hints they saw it coming. Unfolding events in the Koreas and their respective mentor states, the United States and China, resemble the run ups to the collapse of communism in the USSR and Central and Southeastern Europe and the reunification of the two Germanys. Few foresaw that both would collapse as abruptly as a house of cards. The intelligence community did not foresee the end of the USSR – an intelligence failure greater than its weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. Likewise, it will likely categorize the near-term collapse of the North Korean regime as a “highly unlikely” outcome. The “fundamentals” explain why regimes change and collapse, but they tell us less about the all-crucial “when.” If the Soviet and East Germany political and economic systems had been sound, they would be with us today. The North Korean fundamentals could not be more terrible – a closed society unable to provide its population with subsistence, but it has survived as such for decades. Mikhail Gorbachev had no intention of setting in motion events that would lead to the collapse of the USSR and its client states. His goal was to repair the Soviet system not end it. Gorbachev would not have begun Perestroika had he known its consequences – one of history’s great miscalculations. Reagan was the first American President who believed that a near-term Soviet collapse was possible, and he did not hesitate to say so. It fell to Reagan’s successor, George Bush, to actually manage the disintegration of the Soviet Union, after his first incredulity wore off. The leadership of the German Democratic Republic also intended to save East-German communism with salami-sliced concessions, which kept growing larger and larger to their dismay. The East German politburo had German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as their counterpart. When the opportunity presented itself, Kohl was there with instantaneous and irreversible reunification. Kohl did not dither when the opportunity presented itself. The two Koreas represent a tinder box in search of a random spark. Both have new and untested leaders, each intent on reshaping the relationship between the two countries in their own way. Both appear unwilling to ramp down the rhetoric or be seen as caving to the
Americans don’t have a lot of information about Hawaii, other than the Hawaiian Ice and the presidential windsurfing.
It was easier for Obama to run his campaign out of Chicago, where none of Hawaii’s communist past could haunt his campaign.
Hawaii may have been a US territory, but Moscow controlled the labor. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Moscow placed a call to their Hawaiian operatives and told them to knock it until after the war.
We have Jack Kawano to thank for that piece of information. Jack Kawano was a member of the Longshoremen’s Union and joined the Communist Party of Hawaii in 1930. He helped organize the sugar plantation workers and rose up through the ranks to become President of the Longshoremen’s Union, Local 136.
Communist organizers from the mainland recognized his leadership abilities and invited him to join the “Traveler’s Club”, the communist underground.
It all came to an abrupt end when communist insurgents staged a revolution in 1949, holding the Hawaiian Islands in a state of siege for 177 days.
Kawano was so shaken by the violence that he offered to tell his story to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He repeated his testimony in an interview with Richard English for the “Saturday Evening Post”, dated Feb. 2, 1952 in an titled “We Almost Lost Hawaii To The Reds.” If you can find a copy, it’s worth the read.
Kawano’s testimony shattered the Communist Party. He described his meetings with his communist advisors as “professional guys and teachers from the University of Hawaii”. They explained the theory of communism, by breaking a twig. Then they tied a dozen twigs together and explained that if the twigs work together, it’s impossible to break.
It’s a weak argument. All the twigs eventually go down in flames. In communism, the little guy does all the dirty work.
The bombshell came when Kawano revealed a plan to take over the leadership of the Democratic Party, which they called “unorganized and weak.” They planned to take over the Republican Party later on. Seems a little prophetic, doesn’t it?
Jack Kawano was one of forty-one communist delegates who attended the territorial convention of the Democratic Party in Hawaii.
Kawano described his trip to San Francisco for special indoctrination at party headquarters.
Kawano listened to lectures on communism for six weeks, describing the school as “mostly students from California, and one Mexican.”
He attended classes in Marxism, propaganda, and training in how to agitate the police. And finally, he was forced to listen to the complete history of the American labor movement and the Communist Party.
I’m surprised they didn’t die of boredom. I guess we should remember that the lectures were probably written by some intellectual genius from Berkeley.
And who needs training on how to agitate the police? I’ll just remind everyone that the students at UC Davis were pepper-sprayed in the face, and then they filed complaints against the university police. Still up to the same old tricks.
This gives us a much different picture of Barack Obama and makes the leadership of the Democratic Party
From: http://www.westernjournalism.com/exposed-hawaiis-communist-past/
To the outside world, the talk often appears to border on the lunatic, with the poor, hungry and electricity-starved nation threatening to lay waste to America’s cities in an atomic firestorm, or to overrun South Korea in a lightning attack.Enemy capitals, North Korea said, will be turned “into a sea of fire.” North Korea‘s first strikes will be “a signal flare marking the start of a holy war.” Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal is “mounted on launch pads, aimed at the windpipe of our enemies.”
And it’s not all talk. The profoundly isolated, totalitarian nation has launched two rockets over the past year. A February nuclear test resulted in still more U.N. sanctions. Another missile test may be in the planning stages.
But there is also a logic behind North Korea‘s behavior, a logic steeped in internal politics, one family’s fear of losing control and the ways that a weak, poverty-wracked nation can extract concessions from some of the world’s most fearsome military powers.
It’s also steeped in another important fact: It works.
At various points over the past two decades, North Korea‘s cycles of threats and belligerence have pressured the international community into providing billions of dollars in aid and, for a time, helped push South Korea‘s government into improving ties.
Most importantly to Pyongyang, it has helped the Kim family remain in power decades after the fall of its patron, the Soviet Union, and long after North Korea had become an international pariah. Now the third generation of Kims, the babyfaced Kim Jong Un, is warning the world that it may soon face the wrath of Pyongyang. If the virulence of Kim Jong Un‘s threats have come as a surprise, he appears largely to be following in his father’s diplomatic footsteps.
“You keep playing the game as long as it works,” said Christopher Voss, a longtime FBI hostage negotiator and now the CEO of the Black Swan Group, a strategic advisory firm focusing on negotiation. “From their perspective, why should they evolve out of this? If it ain’t broke, don’t’ fix it.”
Like hostage-takers, the North Koreans find themselves backed into a corner of their own creation, surrounded by heavily armed foes and driven by beliefs that seem completely illogical to everyone else. “From the outside, it makes no sense,” said Voss. “From the inside it makes all the sense in the world.”
But the
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/cdDZaNyUjpo/
(Phys.org) —Hardware from a spacecraft that the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 1971 might appear in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Hardware from a spacecraft that the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 1971 might appear in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
From: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2013-132&rn=news.xml&rst=3762
Margaret Thatcher, who served as prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, is most famous for teaming up with my father Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II to peacefully end the Cold War and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But at home, the “Iron Lady’s” intellect, political will, and love of freedom and capitalism also saved Britain from its long, slow death by socialism.
Prime Minister Thatcher freed up Britain’s economy by deregulating business, privatizing government-owned industries, and breaking the back of the powerful unions that were smothering her country to death.
Not that The New York Times can bring itself to give Lady Thatcher much credit for any of this in its coverage of her death from a stroke on Monday at age 87.
Paul Krugman, the pathetic Times’ in-house apologist for the serial failures of the Obama Economy, dug out some arcane data that he said raises doubts that Thatcher’s pro-capitalist policies actually did anything to turn around Britain’s economy.
Meanwhile, a so-called news article in the Times on Wednesday about the debate over Thatcher’s legacy in the British Parliament is the latest example of how the Paper of Record’s liberal bias is always at work.
Two Times writers — John F. Burns and Alan Cowell — said, “The Thatcher era is generally recalled as a time when a capitalist revolution crushed labor unions, decimated staid industries that had once formed the nation’s economic base, and inaugurated a period of robust economic growth that sanctified a generation’s acquisitiveness.”
No bias there, right?
I think Burns and Cowell spent more time describing what nasty things Thatcher’s left-wing critics in the Labor Party had to say about her than mentioning her triumphs.
But Lady Thatcher doesn’t need the support of The New York Times or Hollywood to make it into the history books. Her accomplishments on the world stage will speak for themselves forever.
I’ll never forget meeting Lady Thatcher several times in London and in the United States. But my greatest memory of her occurred in 2004 when, despite being very ill, she attended my father’s funeral at the Reagan Library.
The morning after the funeral, as I was eating at the hotel with my family, I greeted Lady Thatcher when she came in for breakfast.
“Oh, Michael,” she said in that great accent of hers. “Think of how much we could have accomplished if your father had been elected in 1976, not 1980.”
“Lady Thatcher,” I said with the greatest respect, “I think God chooses the time for many of the things that happen in the world. And 1976 wasn’t that time; 1980 in fact was.”
“Why would you say that?” she said.
“Simply because I look at 1976 and I say, ‘Where was Margaret Thatcher? Where was Pope John Paul II? Where was Lech Walesa and Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev?’ In 1976, none of you were in positions of power to do anything.
“But 1980 was the right time,” I said to Lady Thatcher.
“You were prime minister. Pope John Paul was pope. And you had
From: http://www.westernjournalism.com/remembering-margaret-thatcher/
Author’s Note – I began my most recent post with the following:
“I never imagined that I’d find myself quoting Bill’s one-time heart throb (okay, eons of time ago), but using her just happens to suit my purpose. (Guess Bill and I aren’t so different after all….)”
Due to an inadvertent title change (the title was to have been the same as this one’s), readers were no doubt puzzled by this. Hopefully, this will clear things up.
Anyone who registers even the faintest EKG response realizes that the “Mainstream Media” isn’t mainstream. So if you felt your not insignificant intelligence was being insulted…and therefore didn’t dive headlong into the piece, I’d ask you to reconsider, as I believe our perception of the establishment media (which almost no one in this audience either reads or watches) is at the very root of all that ails us…and I mean that with absolute sincerity!
Note that I did not say that the endangered media is the problem, but that our perception of it is. Hear me out….
Every national Conservative pundit I know, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh (who has famously – and accurately – dubbed them the “Drive-by” or “Endangered Media”), Michael Savage, and Joseph Farah (who both refer to them as the “so-called ‘mainstream’ media”), mindlessly refers to them as the “mainstream” or “MSM” – freely bestowing upon them the highest of both compliments and credibility!
Would we have called the Communists’ Pravda (far more conservative today than our own state-controlled press!) the Soviet Union’s “mainstream” media? Of course not! It was nothing more than a state-owned organ of propaganda…and while George Soros may not own the New York Times outright (or even in part), it is clear that he, his allies, and his pawns are in lockstep with its entire agenda. (Obviously everything I have said about the networks applies to the so-called “Newspaper of Record,” as well as to its counterparts from coast to coast – whose viewership and coffers are also universally, and happily, “on the brink.”)
To put this in perspective I will recount an experience I had last spring, when AZ State Representative Carl Seel took me by to introduce me to then Speaker of the House, Andy Tobin. It was a Friday afternoon, perhaps 2:00 or 3:00, and the Speaker had gone for the week, as it turned out. His secretary dutifully wrote down my name and phone number, however, promising to have him call me…which, of course, he never did. I knew little about the Speaker at that time, but have since learned all I need to know: he’s a “Republican” – not a Conservative, and a “politician” – not a Statesman, as best I can tell. (It’s difficult, of course, to know any of our “representatives” well when they refuse to respond to their constituents!
As I left his office that day, and passed through the deserted anteroom, there on a …read more
Global leaders expressed praise and admiration Monday for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as news spread of her death. Today’s British leader, David Cameron, summed up the consensus from friend and foe alike that the Iron Lady was “a great Briton.”
“As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds,” Cameron said in Madrid as he cut short a trip to Spain and canceled a visit to France to return home to lead funeral preparations for the longtime leader of his Conservative Party.
“The real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country,” Cameron said, “and I believe she’ll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.”
As flags across the United Kingdom were lowered to half mast, Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth II would send a private message of sympathy to the Thatcher family.
Across Europe and the world, leaders lauded Thatcher for her steely determination to modernize Britain’s industrial landscape — even at the cost of violent strikes and riots — and to stand beside the United States as the west triumphed in the Cold War versus the Soviet Union.
In Poland, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said his country should erect a statue of the British leader. In a tweet he praised Thatcher as “a fearless champion of liberty, stood up for captive nations, helped free world win the Cold War.”
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who ousted the Conservatives from power seven years after Thatcher’s resignation, conceded that Thatcher had been right to challenge labor union power — the traditional bedrock for Blair’s own Labour Party.
“Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world. Margaret was such a leader. Her global impact was vast,” said Blair, who credited Thatcher with being “immensely supportive” despite their opposing views on many issues.
“You could not disrespect her character or her contribution to Britain’s national life,” Blair said.
Discordant notes came from Northern Ireland and Argentina, where Thatcher’s reputation for unbending determination received early tests — when breaking an Irish Republican Army prison hunger strike in 1981, then leading Britain into a 1982 war to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Argentine invaders.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
