Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Cattle Rustling, Pythons and Boogie Angola Style …. the best reads of May
Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start.
Spain rearranges furniture as economy sinks
Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes. The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.
Picking up the pieces from Afghanistan’s war
U.S. gunners scanned a lush Afghan valley from their helicopter, as a white van containing a badly burned baby inched toward another Black Hawk waiting at the army outpost. Eight soldiers had flown into the heart of hostile eastern Afghanistan, in a convoy of one air ambulance and one “chase” helicopter for protection, to collect 18-month-old Amanullah who knocked a pot of scalding water over his legs, penis and scrotum.
In Brazil, extreme weather stokes climate worries
No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before they swallowed the houses of families in Ilha Grande, an island in Brazil’s Parnaiba river delta. Standing on a dune that covers his old home, one man describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight.
Germany looks abroad for Hitler’s helpers
“The accomplices. Hitler’s European helpers in the Holocaust” is the cover story on this week’s Der Spiegel magazine, Germany’s most authoritative weekly.
Complete with a big picture of Hitler, the headline is deliberately provocative and could even hurt relations with Germany’s neighbours.
Spiegel’s take on the deportation of Ukrainian-born Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk, who faces charges he helped murder at least 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in 1943, is groundbreaking as it tackles a subject Germans have so far given little thought to.
The uncomfortable thesis is that while Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, Nazis had help from a huge number of non-Germans in neighbouring countries. And most of those countries have been far slower than Germany to take a proper look at their past.
“With this accused man (Demjanjuk), the foreign perpetrators come into focus, those men who until now have been given surprisingly little attention: Ukrainian gendarmes, Latvian auxiliary policeman, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers. Also Polish farmers, Dutch land register officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers — they were all plainly involved in the crime — the Holocaust,” writes Der Spiegel.
It cites a historian who estimates more than 200,000 non-Germans took part in the Holocaust and the magazine also explores the reasons for the participation of others.
Nazis forced concentration camp and extermination camp guards, like Demjanjuk who had been in the Red Army and taken prisoner, to help with the dirty work. Those who didn’t help faced death.
Jarred wrote: “… there is deep evil in Germany…”
There was deep evil in Germany in the past, indeed. But the German nation now has recognized her past mistakes. So she is still much better than those did the same, and until now are still considering that they are clean.
