Daily Telegraph – Winston Churchill ordered the assassination of Benito Mussolini as part of a plot to destroy potentially compromising secret letters he had sent the Italian dictator, a leading French historian has suggested. Pierre Milza, an expert on fascist Italy, theorizes that the wartime prime minister may have wanted Mussolini dead to prevent the letters, in which Churchill expressed his admiration for his Italian counterpart before the outbreak of the Second World War, coming to light. “There is no doubt, judging by his public declarations back in the 1920s and early 1930s, that Churchill was a fan of Mussolini. Roosevelt too,” Mr Milza said. Read Article
Reuters – Thousands of Indonesians were evacuated from the slopes of a volcano on Sunday after it erupted for the first time in more than 400 years, spewing out lava and sending smoke and dust 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) into the air -Read Article
The Guardian – Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar. But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America’s intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks. Read Article
Editorial Note: Before everyone shouts “Conspiracy Theory!” it might be worth just re-reading these earlier mainstream news articles that we have referenced over the years:
1 November 2001 – CIA agent alleged to have met Bin Laden in July
3 September 2003 – Bin Laden family evacuated from US
29 October 2004 – Cronkite: Karl Rove Set Up Bin Laden Tape
16 June 2006 – Bush Senior Met With Bin Laden’s Brother on 9/11
Irish Independent – Adolf Hitler is likely to have had Jewish and African roots, DNA tests have shown. Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust. Read Article
BBC – A draft UN report says crimes by the Rwandan army and allied rebels in Democratic Republic of Congo could be classified as genocide.The report, seen by the BBC, details the investigation into the conflict in DR Congo from 1993 to 2003.It says ten of thousands of ethnic Hutus, including women, children and the elderly, were killed by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army. Read Article
Discovery News – As American troops begin their partial withdrawal from Iraq this week, the war begins a new process of wiggling its way into the history books. But exactly how future generations will view America’s time in Iraq — now seven years, three months and counting — is under debate. To make sense of it all, experts usually turn first to numbers. Lives lost, money spent, measures of success: For any war, these statistics, or metrics, can begin to paint a picture of an era. VIEW SLIDE SHOW
AFP-As Russia battles wildfires triggered by an unprecedented heatwave, flood waters surge across a drenched Pakistan leaving millions of people homeless, and questions are asked about global warming. Extreme weather has been a feature of the summer of 2010, with floods in Pakistan, China and Eastern Europe seemingly matched by heatwaves in Western Europe and Russia -Read Article
Danish Meteorological Institute Centre For Ocean & Ice – Arctic 80N-90N temperatures in the melt season this year is colder than average. This was the case last year too, while earlier years in the DMI analysis period (1958-2010) hardly ever shows Arctic melt season temperatures this cold. This is how DMI temperature averages for Arctic 80N-90N melt season appears when plotted to allow compare over time:
To read further analysis of this data CLICK HERE
The Hindu – On August 6, 1945, World War II took a sudden, explosive turn in Hiroshima. About 140,000 people were killed or died within months after the U.S. dropped the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” on the Japanese city. Hiroshima now makes a new beginning as it marks its biggest memorial yet with representatives from 74 countries, including the U.S Read Article
For a greater understanding of the use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima read our FEATURE PAGE
Time-The sun has been quiet for the past couple of years. Too quiet. Normally, our home star goes through a sort of rising and falling sleep-wake cycle that lasts 11 years, on average. At the so-called solar maximum, magnetic storms roil its outer layers and sunspots dapple its surface; solar flares arc magnificently into space; and clots of charged particles spew outward in bursts of plasma that can reach to Earth and beyond. At the solar minimum — the stage we’ve been experiencing lately — all of that drops off dramatically -Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public “panic” and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose today. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Archaeologists in the Philippines have unearthed a 67,000-year-old human bone in a discovery they claim proves the area was settled by man 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. The foot bone – found during a four-year excavation project of a network of caves – predates the 47,000-year-old Tabon Man that was previously known as the first human to have lived in the Philippines. The discovery was made at the Callao caves near Penablanca, 210 miles north of Manila. Read article
Independent.ie-IT all seemed promising enough when we got a bit of sunshine in May and June. But the recent glut of rain has ensured it was the wettest July in 60 years in some parts of the country. In a depressingly familiar trend, the sun proved elusive, the rain rolled in with abandon and continental heatwaves stubbornly refused to head our way -Read Article
The Register-New research by German and Russian scientists indicates that summer temperatures in the Arctic actually fell for much of the later 20th century, plunging to the levels seen at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The new results are said by their authors to indicate that solar activity exerted a powerful influence over Arctic climate until the 1990s, an assertion which will cause some irritation among academics who contend that atmospheric carbon is the main factor in climate change -Read Article
Independent – Child labour was the crucial ingredient which allowed Britain’s Industrial Revolution to succeed, new research by a leading economic historian has concluded. After carrying out one of the most detailed statistical analyses of the period, Oxford’s Professor Jane Humphries found that child labour was much more common and economically important than previously realised. Her estimates suggest that, by the early 19th century, England had more than a million child workers (including around 350,000 seven- to 10-year-olds) – accounting for 15 per cent of the total labour force. The work is likely to transform the academic world’s understanding of that crucial period of British history which was the launch-pad of the nation’s economic and imperial power. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – By examining DNA, we can plot the bumpy ride followed by humanity to today’s astonishingly populous position, says Steve Jones. The world is booming. Nobody before the 20th century had seen the human population double, but anyone of my age (think bus pass) has done so, and a few elders have seen it grow threefold in their lifetimes. Read article
ABC – Britain’s former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, has told the Iraq inquiry he was nervous about the intelligence being relied on before the invasion in 2003. Lord Prescott was Tony Blair’s loyal deputy for a decade, and party to 23 secret war cabinet meetings. He told the Chilcot inquiry he had significant doubts about 2002 intelligence reports upon which the case for war was based. Read Article
The Age – BRITAIN and the United States should have realised their intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was flawed, the former head of the United Nations weapons inspectors has told an inquiry. Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry in London on Tuesday, Dr Hans Blix said it should have set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall and Washington when the inspectors repeatedly failed to turn up any evidence that Saddam Hussein still had WMD Read Article
Deutsche Welle – Oetzi the Iceman, first discovered in the Alps in 1991, now can be studied in more detail. Researchers say they may be able to understand the connection between 5,000-year-old diseases and modern ones. Read article
ABC – Cambodia’s United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal has sentenced the first Khmer Rouge official to be tried for crimes against humanity to 35 years imprisonment. Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, admitted overseeing the deaths of up to 15,000 people who entered Tuol Sleng, the prison where enemies of the regime were sent. He is also guilty of rape and torture. Read Article
Financial Times – So now we know. Iraq posed no real threat prior to the Anglo-American invasion of March 2003. There was no credible intelligence to suggest any link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But what the assault on Iraq did do was proliferate jihadism across the Middle East and incubate Islamist extremism in the UK, leading to the London Tube and bus bombings five years ago and 15 other “substantial plots”. “Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad,” Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of MI5, the British domestic security service, told the UK war inquiry this week. Read Article
The Guardian – Britain’s ‘deep state’ of secretive bureaucrats is denying witnesses to the Chilcot inquiry crucial files. I testified last week to the Chilcot inquiry. My experience demonstrates an emerging and dangerous problem with the process. This is not so much a problem with Sir John Chilcot and his panel, but rather with the government bureaucracy – Britain’s own “deep state” – that is covering up its mistakes and denying access to critical documents. There is only one solution to this problem, and it requires decisive action. Read Article
The Australian – BRITAIN’S Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has caused a stir by saying Britain’s decision to send troops to invade Iraq was illegal. Mr Clegg, standing in for Prime Minister David Cameron during question time while Mr Cameron is in the US, made the remark during heated exchanges with former foreign secretary Jack Straw. Clashing with Mr Straw on a separate issue, Mr Clegg said: “Perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq.” His remark threatened to cause a rift with Mr Cameron and his Conservative partners — who supported the invasion in 2003 — and pre-empts the Chilcot inquiry into the war. It also raised questions over the position of British troops in Iraq and whether opponents of the war would use the comments as the basis for a legal challenge of the invasion. Read Article
GI Alaska-An ancient jawbone has led scientists to believe that polar bears survived a period thousands of years ago that was warmer than today. Sandra Talbot of the USGS Alaska Science Center in Anchorage was one of 14 scientists who teamed to write a paper based on a polar bear jawbone found amid rocks on a frigid island of the Svalbard Archipelago. The scientists determined the bear was an adult male that lived and died somewhere between 130,000 to 110,000 years ago, and that bear was similar to polar bears today -Read Article
