nationalistrus
German police in Islamist swoop
German police have carried out a series of raids targeting homes and cultural associations believed to be used to spread extremist material.
The raids, which took place in several areas, including Bonn and Berlin, were linked to nine suspected Islamists.
The nine men, aged between 25 and 47, are believed to have tried to recruit militants to fight abroad.
A total of 130 police took part in the swoop, confiscating material from 16 premises, including a publishing house.
Dutch Islam film website ‘shut’
A website that a Dutch right-wing politician was planning to use to release a film expected to be fiercely critical of Islam has been suspended.
The US hosting service, Network Solutions, said it was investigating complaints that it may have breached guidelines on hate language.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders says the 15-minute film describes Islam as “the enemy of freedom”.
France to reduce nuclear warheads
President Nicolas Sarkozy has said France will reduce its number of airborne nuclear weapons by one third.
Mr Sarkozy said the reduction to fewer than 300 missiles would leave France with “half the maximum number of warheads we had during the Cold War”.
But he also insisted he was committed to France’s nuclear deterrent, saying it was its “life-insurance policy”.
He made the comments in a major defence policy speech after inaugurating a new nuclear-armed submarine, the Terrible.
France is believed to have 348 deployed nuclear weapons, including 288 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 50 air-launched cruise missiles and 10 airborne bombs, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Greece under fire for refugee policies
Greece’s efforts to shed its reputation as an unsafe haven for refugees suffered a major blow with the news that Norway has suspended the return of asylum-seekers to Greece on the grounds that their rights may be violated.
Based on the European Union’s Dublin II Regulation (EC 343/2003, which excludes EU member Denmark but includes Iceland and Norway), the first member state that a migrant enters is the one responsible for examining his/her asylum application. Last week, however, Norway decided it would ignore the Dublin II Regulation and examine the asylum applications of those who had initially passed through Greece.
Poor Whites Struggle in Zimbabwe
An elderly white man sits behind the steering wheel of an old van with “National Railways Zimbabwe” emblazoned on its doors. As he and the group of black men with him disembark from the van, people start pointing and passing comments about him.
Slightly unkempt, with a rough beard and a stooping back, the old man trudges to the Bulawayo offices of National Railways Zimbabwe (NRZ) – once the envy of other rail companies in sub-Saharan Africa but now a run-down shadow of itself after years of mismanagement.
Someone in the crowd of onlookers at Bulawayo station asks why the old man is still around when so many whites have fled the country to settle elsewhere, after the ruling ZANU-PF threw them off their farms in President Robert Mugabe’s land-grab policy.
Another man says he is surprised the railwayman is actually an employee rather than employing others as has generally been the case in this former British colony.
The responses come fast and furious, “He is from that group of poor whites who have nowhere to go”; “He has no choice but work for the NRZ or he would be out on the streets as a vagrant”; “He never owned a farm because if he did, he would have left the country after it had been taken over by the war veterans.”
Protest as 104-year-old singer who performed for Hitler takes Dutch stage
AMERSFOORT, Netherlands-Several dozen protesters gathered outside a theater in the Netherlands Saturday where a singer who once performed for Adolf Hitler was due to take the stage in his native country for the first time in four decades.
Johannes Heesters, 104, has been a popular figure in German-language cabaret since the 1930s, earning him the epithet “the Netherlands’ most durable product.”
He was never accused of being a propagandist or anything other than an actor who was willing to perform for the Nazis, and the Allies allowed him to continue his career after the war. But in his native country he is viewed by some as irredeemable.
“He kept singing for the Nazi regime, for the Wehrmacht, and he earned millions,” said Piet Schouten, representative of a committee formed to protest Heesters’ performance.
“Those are facts and we have a problem with that on behalf of all the victims” he told national broadcaster NOS.
In Heesters’ previous attempt to perform in the Netherlands, in 1964, he was booed off the stage in Amsterdam when he tried to appear as Nazi-hating Captain von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.”
Around 50 demonstrators gathered outside De Flint theater in Amersfoort, where Heesters was born in 1903. A handful of neo-nazis turned up, uninvited, to support Heesters, and several were detained by police after throwing eggs at the demonstrators.
Mysteries of Computer From 65BC Are Solved
A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.
The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck and recovered statues and other artifacts from the site.
The machine first came to light when an archaeologist working on the recovered objects noticed that a lump of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Closer inspection of material brought up from the stricken ship subsequently revealed 80 pieces of gear wheels, dials, clock-like hands and a wooden and bronze casing bearing ancient Greek inscriptions.
Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval periods.
Oregon Whites Win Discrimination Suit
Two former employees of the Oregon State Department of Corrections have been awarded a total of $1 million in a discrimination lawsuit that alleged antiwhite racism by a black supervisor against the pair.
A jury found that Russell Rice and Larry Lytle, both white, had faced racial discrimination and retribution for whistleblowing when they alleged that black superintendent Frank Thompson favored fellow blacks at the expense of qualified whites. All three were employed at the Santiam Correctional Institution, where both white men had routinely earned favorable performance ratings.