'Past rivals Greece, Turkey to boost military ties'

12 Dec 2007

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Greece and Turkey will expand military cooperation as part of new confidence-building measures agreed upon after ties between the traditional rivals were boosted by a major gas pipeline project, officials said Tuesday.

The armed forces of both countries will expand high level visits, and conduct joint missions in NATO, disaster assistance efforts and overseas peacekeeping duties, Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis said.

«Our relations are developing in a dynamic way ... but this requires continued hard work,» Bakoyannis said after talks in Athens with Turkish counterpart Ali Babacan.

Bakoyannis said Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis will pay an official visit to Turkey «very soon» _ the first in 48 years.
Greece and Turkey, at odds over Cyprus and disputed Aegean Sea boundaries, have abandoned decades of rivalry in recent years. Athens is now a strong backer of Turkish efforts to join the European Union.

Greek-Turkish ties were boosted last month when leaders of the two countries opened a gas pipeline project that will carry natural gas from central Asia to western Europe, eventually connecting Azerbaijan and Italy.
The border area dividing Greece and Turkey is currently militarized on both sides. Greece has said it would clear the area of anti-personnel mines by 2010 _ four years before an international treaty deadline.

http://www.pr-inside.com/past-rivals-greece-turkey-to-boost-r331007.htm

the secret Scottish camp for brainwashing Nazi POWs

Fingered by David Irving's Action Report Online:

: ... Newly uncovered documents have revealed that a Caithness prisoner-of-war camp had an extraordinary secret role as a place where some of the most notorious figures in Hitler's Third Reich were locked up, interrogated and - where possible - subjected to "de-Nazification".

While the existence of Camp 165 at Watten, near Wick, is known, local historian Valerie Campbell has obtained recently declassified Government files which reveal the existence of an inner compound with the grim nickname "Little Belsen".

[ ... ]

Between 1942 and 1945, Hoppe was in charge of Stutthoff concentration camp and personally oversaw the deaths of thousands of men, women and children who the Nazi regime deemed to be "sub-human". When British forces liberated the camp, many soldiers were physically sick at the horrors they discovered.

Hoppe was held at Camp Watten between August 1947 and January 1948 and it was expected that he would be executed on his return to Germany.

Yet, extraordinarily, the commandant escaped from a British base in Saxony and was able to work unhindered as a landscape gardener. He was finally re-arrested in 1953 and sentenced to just nine years imprisonment, insisting he had been too young to understand what happened at his camp.

Nazi rocket scientist Schroder, who invented the V2 pilotless bomb which killed thousands of residents in London alone, was treated even more mercifully during his incarceration in Caithness in 1947.

Schroder co-operated with intelligence officials on sharing his knowledge on "the technicalities of rocket projectiles" and as such was awarded special status, despite being deemed to be a Nazi zealot and a "public enemy". He was eventually handed over to the Americans and became a respected adviser to the US Air Force.

Nazi journalist d'Alquen, who was handpicked by Himmler to pen the official history of the SS and helped popularise the idea of Jews as "vermin", was sent to Watten in 1945.

He was allowed to publish a monthly magazine for detainees called Der Wattener.

After the camp closed he was sent to the US where he became a key member of the CIA and helped devise its anti-communist propaganda strategy during the early Cold War. ... "

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900-year-old potery records supernova, uses number 23

With thanks to Dave O. for pointing this out:

" ... Long-sought evidence of a massive star explosion 900 years ago apparently has been found in a painting on an ancient piece of pottery excavated from an Indian village in southwestern New Mexico, University of Texas scientists reported Tuesday.

In an event so violent that debris from the blast still can be seen today, the explosion of the star created a giant cloud of gas and dust known as the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus.

Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded the exploding star, known as a supernova, and those ancient records say the explosion was so bright it could be seen even in daylight for 23 days. A star explodes when it has nearly exhausted its fuel and collapses in on itelf and then erupts violently.

Astronomers have long, searched for a similar record of the Crab supernova in the West, but no unambigious evidence has ever been found.

However astronomer Robert Robbins and one of his students, Russell B. Westmoreland, both of the University of Texas at Austin, told the American Astronomical Society meeting in Albuquerque that. they believe they have finally found a record of the supernova in a "burial plate^*" found at the site of the village of Galaz, home to a group of Indians known as the Mimbres.

The plate shows a sunlike object with 23 rays extending outward. Robbins said that is the only object among the 800 or so that he found that used the number 23, and he doubts that was happenstance because the Mimbres seem to have paid close attention to numerology in all their other works.

Robbins believes the 23 rays stand for the 23 days the supernova was visible. "I'm quite confident" of the finding, Robbins said. "The bowl is the most certain record of the supernova that has ever been discovered outside China and Japan." ... "

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