Berlusconi is the Clown Prince of European Politics.
fuckyeahrussianpolitics:
omg Berlusconi you just never go away do you lol
Putin and Berlusconi are like BFF 5evar
Stop the pointless demonization of Putin | The Great Debate
by Stephen F. Cohen
Stephen F. Cohen is Professor Emeritus of Politics and Russian Studies at Princeton University and New York University. His book “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War” has recently been published in an expanded paperback edition.
American media coverage of Vladimir Putin, who today began his third term as Russia’s president and 13th year as its leader, has so demonized him that the result may be to endanger U.S. national security.
For nearly 10 years, mainstream press reporting, editorials and op-ed articles have increasingly portrayed Putin as a czar-like “autocrat,” or alternatively a “KGB thug,” who imposed a “rollback of democratic reforms” under way in Russia when he succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000. He installed instead a “venal regime” that has permitted “corruptionism,” encouraged the assassination of a “growing number” of journalists and carried out the “killing of political opponents.” Not infrequently, Putin is compared to Saddam Hussein and even Stalin.
Well-informed opinions, in the West and in Russia, differ considerably as to the pluses and minuses of Putin’s leadership over the years – my own evaluation is somewhere in the middle – but there is no evidence that any of these allegations against him are true, or at least entirely true. Most seem to have originated with Putin’s personal enemies, particularly Yeltsin-era oligarchs who found themselves in foreign exile as a result of his policies – or, in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in prison. Nonetheless, U.S. media, with little investigation of their own, have woven the allegations into a near-consensus narrative of “Putin’s Russia.”
Jew, Jewish, or Hebrew? - Darren Garnick - National - The Atlantic
How ethnic labels change, and often revert, with the times
A small New Hampshire town’s debate over the local place name “Jew Pond” is yet another chapter in how ethnic language continues to evolve in the great American melting pot.
The use of the term Jew as an adjective is generally considered derogatory - the Nazis notoriously spray-painted “Jude” on Jewish-owned businesses, for example - while the term “Jewish” is not.
But that wasn’t always the case. After the Civil War, Jewish immigrants to the United States believed that the word “Jewish” itself carried negative connotations and the community began naming its organizations with the words “Hebrew” or “Israelite.”
Tina Strobos, Dutch student who rescued 100 Jews during the Holocaust, dies at 91 - The Washington Post
Tina Strobos, a psychiatry student who joined the Dutch underground during World War II and helped save the lives of more than 100 Jews by giving them refuge in the upper floor of her Amsterdam rowhouse, died Feb. 27 at her home in Rye, N.Y.
She was 91 and had metastatic cancer, said her son Jur Strobos.
Arthur Jones, who has denied the existence of the Holocaust and is an avowed Neo-Nazi, has filed nominating papers in the 3rd Congressional District to run in the 2012 primary as a Republican.
Illinois Republican Party Chairman Pat Brady issued the following statement:
“The Illinois Republican Party disavows any association with the candidacy of Arthur Jones and ask that all citizens of Illinois do the same. His views and previous statements are repugnant and his candidacy should not and will not be supported in any way by the Illinois Republican Party. Unfortunately, pathetic and ignorant human beings like Arthur Jones still exist - my sympathies are with the members of our Jewish community as well as other communities to which Mr. Jones has directed his hate.”
Illinois House Candidate: Holocaust Is The ‘Blackest Lie In History’ | TPMMuckraker
Today in questionable campaign strategies: A Republican running for Congress in Illinois says that the Holocaust is the “biggest, blackest lie in history.”
Arthur Jones, an insurance salesman who is running for the Republican nomination in Illinois’ 3rd District, is a former member of the Nationalist Socialist White People’s Party and once wrote a flyer calling the Holocaust an “international extortion racket.”
“This idea that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust is the biggest, blackest lie in history,” he told KMOX, a CBS affiliate in St. Louis. “There is no proof that the Holocaust took place in Europe against the Jews.”
Jones, who says he is challenging Rep. Dan Lipinski (D) seat because of Lipinski’s Israel policies, says that he’s “the only guy in the state of Illinois against the Israeli lobby.” So far, he’s collected 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot, but the state Republican Party is refusing to let him on because of his views. “I didn’t know believing in the Holocaust became a requirement for public office,” Jones said.
An archival photo from The New York Times shows news pictures being sorted in the newspaper’s photo “morgue,” which houses millions of images. Here they are — several each week — for you to see. Welcome to The Lively Morgue. Photo: The New York Times
The New York Times’ new archive photoblog is great, and it got a prime promotional spot on the paper’s front page. Awesome.
(via shortformblog)
Gerd Ludwig’s “Long Shadow of Chernobyl” project
Internationally-renowned photojournalist Gerd Ludwig has spent years documenting the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 1986, errors at the plant in Ukraine led to an explosion that ultimately caused over a quarter of a million people to permanently evacuate their homes to escape the radiation and radioactive fallout. Over the course of several trips to the site and the region for National Geographic Magazine in 1993, 2005, and 2011, Ludwig has amassed a documentary record of a people and a place irreparably altered by a tragic accident. His 2011 trip was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Now Ludwig has released an iPad app with over 150 photographs, video, and interactive panoramas.
Germany’s Outdated, Wrongheaded Ban on Nazi Books Like ‘Mein Kampf’ - The Atlantic
by Heather Horn
There’s something deeply distasteful about the news out of Germany this week. It’s not that the latest edition of a British publisher’s excerpts of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has sold 250,000 copies in just a few days. It’s that the Bavarian state government, which technically owns the copyright, is considering fighting it.
Hitler’s ideological dumping ground of an autobiography isn’t technically banned in Germany. But it might as well be. The finance ministry of the state of Bavaria, in the south, holds the copyrights to Mein Kampf and has simply refused to let it be republished. It’s done the same for other Nazi works. This same British publisher, Peter McGee of Albertas Ltd., reprinted parts of Nazi newspapers in 2009 with accompanying historical commentary, and the Bavarian government, holding the copyrights to those papers as well, had police seize the publications.
