Latest news with #Luftwaffe
IOL News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- IOL News
On this day: A love story for the ages, Running Up That Hill, the last Apartheid laws abolished and slaughter at Boipatong
A sad end for the emperor who built the white-marble Taj Mahal for his wife. On this day: June 17 1631 Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, goes on to spend more than 20 years building her tomb – a symbol of great love – the Taj Mahal. 1837 Chemist and inventor Charles Goodyear obtains his first rubber patent. 1855 A heavy French/British bombardment of Sevastopol, in Crimea, kills more than 2 000. 1877 The Nez Perce Indians defeat the US Cavalry at White Bird Canyon in Idaho. 1885 The Statue of Liberty – gift from the people of France – arrives in New York City. 1928 Aviator Amelia Earhart leaves Newfoundland to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic (as a passenger). 1938 Japan finally declares war on China, a year after having invaded the country. 1939 The last public guillotining – that of a murderer – takes place in France. 1940 The liner RMS Lancastria is sunk by the Luftwaffe near Saint-Nazaire, France. 1954 Rocky 'Raging Bull' Marciano beats heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles over 15 rounds. Marciano is the only person to hold the heavyweight title undefeated, with a boxing record of 49 fights, 49 wins and 43 KOs. He dies at 45 in a 1969 plane crash. 1958 Things Fall Apart by Nigerian Chinua Achebe, the most widely read book in African literature, is published. 1982 President Galtieri resigns after leading Argentina to defeat in the Falkland Islands. 1991 The last apartheid laws are abolished. 1992 The slaughter by Inkatha followers at Boipatong leaves 42 people dead. 2019 Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi dies after collapsing in a court. 2021 China launches its Shenzhou-12 spacecraft, with three astronauts arriving at its space station, Tiangong, 6.5 hours later. 2022 Running Up That Hill single by Kate Bush goes to #1 on the UK chart; originally released in 1985, the song was featured in sci-fi TV show Stranger Things, its record 44-year climb to the top also makes Bush, 63) the oldest female artist to score a No 1. 2024 The Philippines accuses the Chinese coastguard of 'a brazen act of aggression' after a confrontation in the contested Spratly Islands escalating the tension in the area. DAILY NEWS
Time of India
11-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
R&D? Rarely
Dependence in critical areas makes the nation vulnerable. Strategic interest must prevail over economic sense Germany's crude reserves are so small, they won't last three months in an emergency. So how did Hitler wage war for five years? By turning coal into petrol. Over 92% of the Luftwaffe's aviation fuel was synthetic. As the world grapples with China's rare earth curbs, there's a useful lesson here. While the rare earths crisis that started with China's export curbs on April 4 may be blowing over – Trump announced on Truth Social yesterday, 'Full magnets, and any necessary rare earths, will be supplied, up front, by China' – it will have a once-bitten-twice-shy effect. Over the past few weeks, Western carmakers have considered producing cars minus some components that use rare earths. At home, Maruti's had to scale back production plans for its first EV due to a global shortage of rare earth magnets. As our second Op-Ed explains, these magnets contain about 25% of a rare earth element called neodymium. It's one of the so-called 'light' rare earths that are available in India, but we don't produce enough of it because cheap Chinese supplies made investment in this area unattractive. While you can make motors without rare earths, other devices like TV screens, computers and MRI machines can't do without them. That's why India needs to build a large rare earths industry. And with the world's fifth largest rare earth reserves, it's well-placed to do so. Likewise, it needs to end its dependence on China for 70% of active pharmaceutical ingredients or APIs, because while buying from the cheapest supplier makes economic sense, it's a strategic risk. The aim must be to reduce dependence because dependence, especially in critical products, is vulnerability. About 90% of our crude is imported. An electric future will take care of that, but not if it means 100% dependence on China for lithium batteries. To find alternatives – like Germany's WW-II 'synfuels' – we need big investments in R&D, which is not our strong suit. As a nation, we invest only 0.6% of our $4tn GDP in research. China invests 2.4% of $18tn, US 3.5% of $29tn. And our private sector is even stingier, accounting for only a third of the national R&D spend, as against 70% in US and S Korea. The rare earth crisis is a brief distraction, the real issue is India's rare investment problem, and it needs national attention now. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
My plan for Prevent
In the autumn of 1940, British cities were being bombed every night by large aeroplanes whose provenance was apparently of some considerable doubt. While the public almost unanimously believed the conflagrations to have been caused by the Luftwaffe, the authorities – right up to the government – refused to speculate. Indeed, when certain members of the public raised their voices and said 'This is all down to Hitler and Goering and the bloody Germans!', they received visits from the police who either prosecuted them for disturbing the peace or put their names on a list of possible extremists. The nights grew darker. The number of towns and cities subjected to these nightly bombardments widened. Very soon everybody in the country knew somebody whose home had been destroyed or who had themselves been killed. The government was forced to take action, and so in November 1940 it came up with what it called its 'Prevent' strategy, which aimed to protect British cities from further destruction. In the introduction to this new policy, civil servants listed possible vectors for these bombing raids and top of the list, by some margin, were the Slovaks. A senior intelligence officer told the public: 'The greatest threat to our nation today is from the Slovaks. We must train our people in how to spot Slovaks and report them to the police whenever they can.' The Germans were also mentioned, further down the list of possible perps, but the wording here was heavily caveated. Yes, some Germans may have been involved, but over all the German population was utterly devoted to peace and regretted the nightly infernos every bit as much as did the people who suffered under them. Our own air force was directed to drop its bombs on Bratislava, Kosice, Poprad and (the consequence of an understandable confusion over the names of the two countries) Maribor. And yet for some mystifying reason, the raids on Britain did not lessen. This seems to me exactly the response of our government(s) and most importantly of Prevent to the threat from Islamic terrorism. Let me be clear: I am not remotely comparing Muslims with Germans or Islam with National Socialism – I am simply saying that, in effect, this is what our government would have done in 1940 if it had been gripped by the same cringing witlessness and outright lying that possesses seemingly all of our authorities today when it comes to terrorist attacks upon the British people. You may be aware of the manifestly stupid quote from the Prevent halfwits that people who believe that 'western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups' are cultural nationalists at risk of becoming the kind of extremists who end up murdering people. People who believe the above probably consist of 70 per cent of the British population and, if his latest speeches are anything to go by, include the Prime Minister. And yet this stuff pervades everything Prevent puts out, while at the same time exonerating Islam and in some cases even those Muslims who do become terrorists (because they have suffered, you see). If people who support Brexit or worry about immigration are extremists, you're going to get pretty high figures So, for example, Bolton council's useful 'Prevent' handbook singles out 'right-wing extremists' as being at the forefront of terror attacks in the UK, and these extremists include people who are cultural nationalists: 'Cultural nationalism is ideology characterised by anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, anti-establishment narratives, often emphasising British/English 'victimhood' and identity under attack from a perceived 'other'.' Islamic terrorism is also mentioned – but, again, heavily caveated. Then there's Prevent's own list of people who were picked up under its guidelines: 45 per cent were related to extreme right-wing radicalisation (230); 23 per cent were linked to Islamist radicalisation (118); the rest were related to other radicalisation concerns, including incels and those at risk of carrying out school shootings. But then I suppose if people who proclaim their support for Brexit or worry a bit about immigration are extremists, you are going to get pretty high arrest figures. If you add into the mix the fact that simply to associate Islam with terrorism you are guilty of Islamophobia, then you can see why we're in the state we're in. Incidentally, when she was Prime Minister, Theresa May, to her credit, drafted a new introduction to the Prevent guidelines which made it clear that the biggest threat to British security was al Qaeda, not Tommy Robinson et al. But that message does not seem to have sunk in with those in Prevent. It seems almost pointless to run through the facts. The truth is that almost every fatal terrorist attack in Britain since 2001 has been perpetrated by Islamists. All bar three. Have these people got a twisted or perverted understanding of Islam, as Prevent insists? I haven't a clue. I am no Quranic expert. I'm just, y'know, taking their word for it. Further, 80 per cent of the Counter Terrorism Policing network's investigations are related to Islamism (2023). Some 75 per cent of MI5's surveillance cases are Islamists. There are around 40,000 potential jihadis being monitored by our security services. There is not the remotest doubt as to the provenance of the gravest terror threats to our country. It's not the shaven-headed nutters with swastika armbands. It is Islamists. Nigel Farage's answer is to sack everyone working in Prevent. That seems a perfectly reasonable suggestion. But I may have a better one. Scrap Prevent entirely and initiate a new network of monitoring and reporting which focuses solely on Islamic terrorism. Junk the sixth-form philosophising over what is meant by the term 'extremist' and locate the problem precisely where it is: somewhere within our Muslim communities, even if we accept that our Muslim communities may not want them there. In short, get real and tell the truth. This kind of approach worked pretty well 85 years ago.
Daily Mail
08-06-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Adolf Hitler's bigamist brother's womanising legacy in Britain revealed... and the UK street that is horrified at becoming a Nazi shrine
The half-brother of Adolf Hitler bigamously married another woman after walking out on his Irish wife in their Merseyside home… before it was blown to pieces by the Luftwaffe. The evil Nazi dictator's family links to Liverpool and unverified claims that the Fuhrer himself once lodged with his relatives in the city before World War One have long been known. Your browser does not support iframes.
BBC News
08-06-2025
- General
- BBC News
'My family and I escaped Soviet soldiers after World War Two'
A woman whose family were captured by the Soviet Army just 24 hours after VE Day has written a book about their Smeed, 83, from Bridgwater, grew up in Silesia. It was historically part of Germany but the land was handed to the Polish after the Potsdam Conference in three, she and her mother Maria Gebauer were made to march towards Russia. Her father, a non-commissioned Luftwaffe officer, was taken to a Soviet labour camp."Few people in England know what happened in mainland Europe after the war ended: the brutality, the disease, and the starvation," she said. The family were among 12 million ethnic Germans who were forcibly evicted or fled from their homes after World War Two Potsdam Conference was a meeting between Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin to decide the future of postwar the meeting, it was decided that Germany's territory was to be reduced by 25% of what it was in 1937, displacing many like Ms Smeed's family. Forced march Speaking to Radio Somerset, Ms Smeed said that on VE Day itself, "neither side knew the war was over". The next day, Russian soldiers arrived and "took whatever jewellery and luggage they fancied", before forcing her family to march, she said."The men and women were separated, and we began walking through Austria."The people in the towns and villages we came through couldn't believe what the Russians were doing after the war had ended."They were incensed, they were shouting at the Russians and throwing food to the women. "My mother and I were suddenly grabbed by a couple of Austrians and taken into the crowd. "They took us home, and many days later they helped us to get back to my grandmother in Silesia," she said. Meanwhile, her father, Alfred Gebauer, who had refused to join the Nazi Party while in the Luftwaffe, was taken to a labour camp in became very ill after six months, and when he left the labour camp he weighed just 38kg (83lbs).He was released from the camp and sent home, and the family reunited in Świebodzice, there, the family sought refuge in Braunschweig, West Germany, and opened a shoe shop using an heirloom necklace as a guarantee for the Smeed's mother had smuggled the necklace into Germany by baking it into a cake to stop it from being years after VE Day, Ms Smeed became pen friends with an English teenager, Philip Smeed, which eventually led to love and marriage, and her relocating to couple have three children, and six grandchildren, including Somerset County Cricket player Will Smeed, and German rugby player Henry Smeed. Ms Smeed said she wanted to write the book, called Silesia, A Homeland Lost – One German Family's Story of War and Survival, for her grandchildren."It was important to me that my grandchildren would know their Silesian as well as English roots, and that our family's story lives on for future generations," she said."This is also my parents' story, their love for each other and for me, and their determination to survive firstly the Nazi regime, then the war and its aftermath."Millions of Germans were forced from their homeland, with little idea of where they were going, and often in freezing temperatures taking only what they could carry."
