TBR News April 25, 2016

Apr 25 2016

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 25, 2016: “One of our contributors send in a manuscript for consideration. It is an exact translation of a report prepared by a German police official in 1941 and is concerned with the killing of Jews in the Baltic states after the German occupation. Historical revisionists now claim that the killing of Jews never happened and that reports concerning this mass killing are all post-war inventions. Throughout history, we see similar slaughters. Turks killing Armenians, Japanese killing Chinese, Americans killing Indians, Israelis killing Palestinians are examples. Current Germans would like to forget this, and Turks would like to do it again. Butchery of perceived enemies is not restricted by time or nation. And this is an actual report, one of many that exist. Later, after the war, many of the SD Einsatzgruppen personnel concerned in these reports were taken over by the Gehlen Org. This originally was under the control of the U.S. Army but in 1948, control passed to the CIA and was run by Colonel James Critchfield. They were headquartered at Pullach, outside of Munich, and later became the German BND.”

 

Conversations with the Crow

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.           After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversations with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.

These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.

 

Conversation No. 111

Date: Saturday, November 22, 1997

Commenced: 1:55 PM CST

Concluded: 2:38 PM CST

 

GD: Good afternoon, Robert. A fateful date today, isn’t it?

RTC: What date? One tends to lost time when one gets old.

GD: You aren’t talking to dead relatives, are you?

RTC: Not yet but maybe next week. Oh my, yes, the Kennedy business. Why who could forget that date?

GD: Not in our lifetime, Robert. What a classic example of control of public opinion and such a commentary on the secret government.

RTC: There has always been a secret government, Gregory, even in the reign of George Washington.

GD: Well, you seem to have convinced the masses that Kennedy was offed by a lone lunatic or the Mafia. The masses are made up of twits who either are too stupid to grasp anything or who are obsessed with their own self-important observations. Yes, the lone nut did it or the Mafia…don’t forget the Jew Meyer Lansky either…let’s hear it for the anti-Semites while we’re at it. And all along, Robert, I have been talking to the CIA’s main man.

RTC: There were others, Gregory, a number of others. Well, there was the DSI for one. And Lyndon Johnson, for another, although he only knew what he needed to know. And Hoover and some his sweethearts. Who else? Well, the Pentagon people, or at least some of them. And Naval Intelligence, the NSG people, Colonel Cass, a few of our inner circle. All of these to be certain and many, many more in the game guessed but didn’t actually know.

GD: But if so many knew, why haven’t any of them blabbed? Maybe to a wife, a friend, a shrink, a priest or someone else?

RTC: If they did, they would join the long list of those who died as a result of either knowing too much and possibly talking or making the wrong guesses. It goes back to the invasion of Cuba we planned back just before Kennedy got into office. Eisenhower approved this and a few other nasty pieces of business. You see, the Army was planning to do an operation in which their people mocked attacks on the United States, allegedly from Cuban sources, thus giving Ike a casus belli. But this never came to pass and we all thought Kennedy was the sex-obsessed son of a rich bootlegger who was put into office with his father’s money and mob connections.

GD: You mean the Bay of Pigs? I always thought that was when a congregation of fat women went swimming off Monterey. Raised the sea levels in the neighborhood and got a pod of male whales sexually aroused.

RTC: (Laughter) Unkind. Yes, that plan. A handful of our Cuban refugee trainees invaded, established a beach head and then called for eagerly waiting U.S. airstrikes and a naval blockade in aid of the heroic rebels. It would have worked but Kennedy deliberately wrecked it. He was told and we did not know he did not approve. The usual practice was just to slip these actions into the PDBs and slide right over them. Other Presidents just nodded and paid no attention to any of it. There is an art to such presentations, believe me. Fast talk, papers shown, charts displayed, more smooth talk and the befuddled President nods and tries to look serious. You see, we have wonderful connections with the mob, who wanted Castro out because he had tossed them out, away from the huge money they made in the crooked casinos in Havana. That was their main gripe. And they got Kennedy elected, don’t forget, and they expected pay back for giving him Chicago where the dead voted early and often as my father used to say. That was the Mafia. And when Ike talked about the military/industrial complex, we can think about Alcoa whose Cuban plant was shut down by Castro and the military, mostly the Army I must say, who was on a growth program and loved the thought of a close and safe little war. More troops, more bases, more money from Congress, more power. Yes, the military, business interests and the mob. Our people knew them all and we were all friendly with them. We all had common interests.

GD: The FBI?

RTC: Hoover was a self-important little dictator, given his proclivities, a real bitch in men’s clothes. He was also over the line…

GD: Pardon?

RTC: The color line. Hoover was part black. Onward here. Many very powerful groups were not happy with Kennedy. We felt he could be manipulated by shoving a few pretty cunts in his face and leave the governing to us. After all, we had been running the country since Franklin the First bought the farm. But Kennedy turned out to be a lot tougher than we reckoned on. He backed off on the Pigs plan and they were either killed by Castro or put in nasty jails. Very angry people. And the Cubans in this country were the worst of all so we took note of their fury and used them.

GD: And the military?

RTC: Well, in ’61, they wanted to send troops to Laos and eventually to French Indo China. The frogs wanted us to protect their interest there, mostly the rubber plantations and the possibility of rich offshore oil deposits. We agreed to assist and then they became great friends with us in Europe. No, Kennedy refused to go along with this, at least in the beginning, and nixed sending troops to Laos. He was convinced to send some token forces to Viet Nam but later balked at increasing their number as the locals rebelled. We stood to lose a good deal in that country. Both money and face. We put the Diems into power and they were making trouble at one end and Kennedy, by his stupid idealism, was making trouble on the other. I was in charge of most of the ‘Nam business at work and I came to the unspoken conclusion that we could not win a guerrilla war there, especially when the Russians were arming the Cong. It was obvious that even ten million troops could not keep the lid on there for long but who was going to bell that cat? Not Johnson who might have been a great power broker with Congress but who was useless as tits on a boar pig when it came to military ventures. Those of us who could see into the future, based on the present, knew it was an unwinnable situation but no one dared to make a move towards disengagement.

GD: Not to change the subject but your people put Castro in, didn’t you?

RTC: How clever, Gregory. Of course this happened. You see, the Company is so heavily compartmented that the right hand never knows what the left hand doeth. Yes, one of our sub-groups put him in, thinking he would clean up the really bad corruption…drugs and so on…and we could control that situation. Bad judgment there, Gregory but we close ranks and silence is golden. But the unforgivable  sin as far as Kennedy was concerned was his going around us and establishing a personal contact with Nikita Khrushchev. Not done. All Presidents had to use us as firewalls or contacts. Presidents had to rely on us for their information and what would come of it if they dealt directly with some hostile head of state? This would erode our power and essentially relegate the CIA to being mere messengers. The power? As keepers of the flame, others had to bow to our power but if we lost that power, all of us would be back on the chicken farm. That was the final straw, believe me. And before that, don’t forget, Kennedy was not going to do the Army’s bidding and escalate the local anti-guerrilla campaign in Vietnam. The Army was planning on a massive expansion. There would be contracts with the private sectors that would enrich the men with stars on their shoulders and more jobs for their friends and more bases and so on. No, they wanted a controlled war there, way away from the continental United States. They, through us, could control the incoming news and so on but by not performing as he was expected, Kennedy drew the black spot. Either death or some other kind of removal. And I can recall that when Hoover learned of our house cleaning project, he jumped on board with the caveat that we also get rid of Bobby. John hated Bobby…

GD: John?

RTC: Yes, Colonel John Edgar. Franklin made him a Colonel but Hoover was pissed off that he wasn’t made a general at least so he never used the title but it was there. Anyway, we had no problem with Hoover because Bobby was telling his staff that Hoover was a fairy and John Edgar didn’t like that and when Bobby dig into Hoover’s past and discovered relatives as black as the ace of spades, he got livid with rage. The Kennedy family were living in a dream world their father had convinced them was real. Power can come from money, Gregory, but power has to include working with others who also have power. Dictators cannot function with powerful barons too close. Either kill them or replace them with ciphers. No other choice. So in a sense, Kennedy was going from bad to worse and plots were being hatched all over the place during the last year of his reign. We were certainly determined to stop him from breaking the CIA up and the Army was determined to have its profitable war and then there were the business people and the Mafia in the wings. Killing a sitting President is never easy and one has to move with great care in such matters. Too much talking at the wrong time and in the wrong place can wreck even the most ambitious plans. We knew what had to be done and the opening gambits were to secure the agreement of other power brokers. We got Johnson on board through the good offices of Abe Fortis who would have sold the rotting corpse of his dead mother to the dog food people if they paid him enough. LBJ was a pill in the box in that he had some knowledge and lusted for the Oval Office. And again, Bobby was an irritant by calling him ‘Uncle Cornpone’ all over the Beltway. Johnson was used to power and did not like being ignored and marginalized so he smiled and kept quiet. And we certainly had Hoover and some of the top people in the Pentagon, the full support of the mob and a few other necessary organizations. The Mafia could get their gambling hells back again and a promise of a dead Bobby who was having his fun persecuting the very people who put his brother in the Oval Office.

GD: Ungrateful.

RTC: Yes, indeed, very. We all need friends, Gregory, and deliberately harassing the Mafia in Chicago was very, very unwise. I point out that Jack Ruby was one of their enforcers there. Dare I say more?

GD: No, I don’t think so at this point.

RTC: Not at any point. And then having such wonderful people as the goat-loving Dr. Gottleib on the staff made it easy to give Ruby fatal cancer. Injecting active cancer cells during a routine jailhouse medical examination is the best way. A natural and unsuspicious death. Of course we could have easily given Jack a heart attack but cancer is more believable, especially in the hothouse atmosphere of post-assassination madness.

GD: How many of the loonies were yours?

RTC: God, without number. The Farrell woman is our best. She controls the library and she belongs totally to us. Oh yes, we started all kinds of confusing and idiotic stories and kept most people away. You read ‘Case Closed’ didn’t you. My, Herr Posner just loved and really believed the Warren Report, didn’t he? And the New York Times couldn’t wait to praise the hell out of that piece of crap and make Gerald rich. That’s how it’s done in a nutshell, Gregory, in a nutshell. I talked with the Times people myself and they were panting and eager to praise this to the skies. Just an example of how we work but we have gone over most of this before.

GD: If I felt pity for anyone in all of this, it was for Oswald.

RTC: In a larger sense, yes. A loyal intelligence operator set up as patsy and then iced before he could tell what he knew. And then we got rid of Ruby and that was that. Howard Hunt was involved in some of this and we had to kill his wife to keep him from shooting off his mouth when he got in trouble. An endless circle of betrayal and death, Gregory, but that’s how the game goes.

 

(Concluded at 2:38 PM CST)

 

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Crow-Gregory-Douglas-ebook/dp/B00GHMAQ5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450147193&sr=8-1&keywords=conversations+with+the+crow#sthash.jWpLL7Wr.dpuf

 

Obama vs. Britain’s ‘Isolationists’

President Obama needs to mind his own business

April 25, 2016

by Justin Raimondo

Anti War

American interventionism isn’t just sending in the Marines – more often it’s sending in the President. The “bully pulpit” has worldwide resonance, and President Obama recently used it to urge the British to reject “isolationism” and stay in the EU. As usual with the White House – and not just this one – the little lecture was accompanied by a threat: if the Brits abjured his advice, and that of British Prime Minister David Cameron, they would be put “at the back of the queue” when it comes to signing trade deals with the US.

This is nonsense, as London mayor Boris Johnson pointed out: the European Union’s routinely protectionist stance would actually made it harder rather than easier to negotiate any kind of trade deal. But Obama, undeterred by the furious reaction to his intervention in the debate, continued his assault on British “isolationism” the next day, averring that it would take a decade for the US to agree to freer trade with the British in the absence of the EU.

I had to laugh when I read the following in the Bloomberg piece linked above:

“The comments extended the rare intervention of a U.S. president into another nation’s domestic politics. On Friday, Obama stood beside Prime Minister David Cameron to admonish the British electorate about the perils of embracing an isolationist stance.” “Rare”? In what universe? I’m sure the peoples of South and Central America, not to mention more recent victims of US meddling in Ukraine and other places too numerous to list, would be very interested to hear how “rare” this is!

Indeed, the entire history of post-World War II American foreign policy is the story of US intervention in the internal affairs of nations from Western Europe to Eastasia. What other country has agencies of government devoted to bending the politics of other nations to their will?

So why is an American President intervening in the internal politics of a major ally, provoking a reaction that, incidentally, doesn’t help his case? Note how he couples the EU with NATO:

“Speaking to about 550 invited British young people at a ‘town hall’ event on Saturday, Obama sought to pitch a more optimistic message to young Britons, who are considered to be more pro-European, if less active, voters than their parents.

“Obama said he wanted young people to reject the cynicism piped towards them by TV and Twitter, and he lauded both the European Union and NATO for sustaining peace and prosperity in Europe after centuries of war and strife.

“’Think about how extraordinary that is: For more than 1,000 years this continent was darkened by war and violence. It was taken for granted. It was assumed that was the fate of man,’ Obama said at Lindley Hall in London. ‘We see new calls for isolationism, for xenophobia,’ Obama said. ‘When I speak to young people, I implore them, and I implore you, to reject those calls to pull back.’”

The military-geopolitical aspect of the EU is key to understanding Washington’s enthusiasm for it. The EU is the political component: NATO is the military aspect of the Western powers’ forward march. If the West, victorious in the cold war, is to push its boundaries into the former Soviet Union, then this one-two combination is an essential strategy for the planned expansion. And the rationale for this new aggression is impeccably “progressive”: Without the wise guidance of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels Europe will descend into a new dark age. All nationalism, no matter how pacific, is evil. All opposition is “isolationist.”

Disdained by the “Brexit” camp as an irrelevant “lame duck,” Obama got some back up from none other than Hillary Clinton, his would-be successor, who issued a statement through her spokesman:

“Hillary Clinton believes that transatlantic cooperation is essential, and that cooperation is strongest when Europe is united. She has always valued a strong United Kingdom in a strong EU. And she values a strong British voice in the EU.”

“A strong United Kingdom in a strong EU” is a contradiction in terms. The proposal now before the British people is whether or not to dissolve the UK into the EU. The Brits are being asked to give up their sovereignty: to cede control of their economy, their borders, and their fate to a centralized, unaccountable supra-national entity.

As Johnson pointed out, the US would never even consider surrendering its sovereignty to an EU-like conglomeration – say, a United States of North America. Then why should the Brits?

The American political class and its British cousins see nationalism of any sort as contrary to their interests – including within their own country – and they greatly fear the rising tide of nationalism in Europe. A people who insist on their own sovereignty, their own traditions, and treasure their independence aren’t easily pushed around or bullied into “collective security” arrangements.

The post-cold war plan of the elites is that the world is to be controlled from as few points as possible – hopefully just Washington, D.C., and Brussels. A multi-polar world is not what our wise rulers envisioned when the Soviet Union collapsed: their dream of a unipolar world animates not only neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer, but also progressive like Obama and Mrs. Clinton. The only argument is over the details.

The EU and NATO are instruments of a globalist elite that sees itself as the savior of humanity: us peons aren’t to be allowed to rule ourselves – we must be ruled by our “progressive’ overlords for our own good. The only alternative, according to them, is “isolationism” and a new dark age.

This is balderdash. Indeed, the exact opposite is true: the only possible outcome of an attempt to saddle humanity with a single master is perpetual war, because rebellion is in the very nature of humankind. All their efforts to forge a phony “unity” – as against the innate diversity of human beings – are doomed to fail, and end in bloodshed.

But perhaps they know that, too….

 

 

What really happened when the ‘dino-killer’ asteroid struck

Most of us know that a huge asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, but the aftermath of the impact is far more mysterious

April 18, 2016

by Jane Palmer

BBC

Where armies of trees once stretched skywards, seemingly escaping from the thickets of ferns and shrubs that clawed at their roots, only scorched trunks remain. Instead of the incessant hum of insect chatter blotting out the sound of ponderous giant dinosaurs, only the occasional flurry of wind pierces the silence. Darkness rules: the rich blues and greens, and occasional yellows and reds that danced in the Sun’s rays have all been wiped out.

This is Earth after a six-mile-wide asteroid smashed into it 66 million years ago.

“In the course of minutes to hours it went from this lush, vibrant world to just absolute silence and nothing,” says Daniel Durda, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. “Especially in the thousands of square miles around the impact site, the slate was just wiped clean.”

Much like putting in all the edge pieces of a jigsaw, scientists have outlined the lasting impacts of the meteor strike. It claimed the lives of more than three-quarters of the animal and plant species on Earth. The most famous casualties were the dinosaurs – although in fact many of them survived in the form of birds.

But filling in the details, especially what followed the impact and what enabled some life to survive, has proved more challenging.

The idea that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid strike was first proposed in 1980. At the time it was a controversial suggestion.

Then in 1991, geologists discovered the impact site: a crater 180km (110 miles) across on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. They named it Chicxulub, after the nearest town.

The crater was far from obvious, because it is underground. The northern half is also offshore, buried under 600m (660 yards) of ocean sediments.

So in April 2016, researchers began drilling nearly a mile down into the offshore section of the crater, to extract core samples 10 feet (3m) long. The team will analyse these extracts for changes in rock type, tiny fossils and perhaps even DNA trapped in the rock.

“We will get to look at what is likely to be a sterile ocean at ground zero right after the impact, and then we can watch life come back,” says Sean Gulick of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, who is involved in the drilling.

It has been possible to figure certain things out without drilling into the crater

In particular, given the dimensions of the crater, scientists have calculated how much energy the impact delivered.

Using this information Durda, with David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas, simulated the fine details of the collision – and predicted what knock-on events it might have set off. Researchers have then been able to test this scenario with the fossil record to see if the model’s predictions actually took place.

“All of those kinds of calculations have been laboriously toiled over,” says palaeobotanist Kirk Johnson, a director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “You can build a scenario where you can walk your way through the moment of impact, the last second of the Cretaceous Period, and then step yourself forward over the minutes, hours, days, months, and years after the event.”

These studies tell a cataclysmic story.

The asteroid seared through the sky at more than 40 times the speed of sound and slammed into the Earth’s crust. It produced an explosion equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT, roughly seven billion times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

The plunge into the Earth’s crust sent shock waves across the landscape.

Tsunamis between 100 and 300m high surged across the Gulf of Mexico and ripped up the seafloor down to depths of 500m. Magnitude-10 earthquakes destroyed the coastline and the radiating air blast flattened any forests within thousands of kilometres. Finally, tons of rock showered from the sky, burying any remaining life.

“Basically you are looking at a 10km-diameter bullet,” Johnson says. “The physics is just extraordinary. You get just this incredible explosion, incredible earthquakes, incredible tsunamis, and then anywhere within several hundred kilometres of the site you have building-size blocks raining down on the landscape.”

But these regional impacts alone did not cause the global mass extinction.

When the asteroid hit, it vaporised a large chunk of the Earth’s crust. The debris rose like a fiery plume above the impact site, punching its way through the sky.

“It was just this big, expanding plasma ball that penetrated out of the top of the atmosphere, into space,” Durda says.

The plume spread east and west until it enveloped the entire Earth. Then, still gravitationally bound to the planet, it rained back down into the atmosphere.

As it cooled, it condensed into trillions of quarter-millimetre droplets of glass. These shot down towards the Earth’s surface at about the same entry speed as the space shuttle, heating the upper atmosphere so much that, in some places, land plants caught fire.

“The incandescent heat from re-entering ejecta created a broiler-oven effect on the planet,” Johnson says. “So then you just have a furnace.”

The soot from fires, combined with the dust from the impact, blocked out the Sun’s rays and plunged Earth into a long, dark, wintry spell.

Over the next few months, the tiny particles drizzled back down to the ground, cloaking the entire planet with a layer of asteroid dust. Nowadays palaeontologists can see this layer preserved in the fossil record. It marks the “Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) Boundary”, a turning point in the history of our planet.

In 2015, Johnson hiked 110 miles of exposed K-Pg Boundary layer in North Dakota, seeking out fossils on the way. “If you look down from the layer we were seeing dinosaurs all over the place,” he says. “But if you looked up, no dinosaurs.”

In North America, before the Chicxulub impact, the fossil record paints a picture of lush canopied forests interwoven with swamps and rivers, and a thick understory of ferns, aquatic plants and flowering shrubs.

The climate was warmer than it is now. No ice covered the poles, and some dinosaurs walked the lands as far north as Alaska and as far south as the Seymour Islands of Antarctica.

“You’ve got a world as biologically rich and diverse as everything we see around us today,” Durda says. “But afterward, especially around the impact site, the environment was lunar-like. Just desolate and barren.”

Scientists have deduced the asteroid’s effects by studying the K-Pg layer, which they have found in 300 locations around the world.

“Unlike almost any other geologic process, the asteroid impact happened in an instant. It wasn’t like a hundred million years or ten millions years. It was a moment,” Johnson says. “Once we have fingerprinted the layer back to the debris from the asteroid impact crater, we can do the below and above, before and after, comparison.”

Close to the impact site, animals and plants died from either the scorching temperatures, the ripping winds, the earthquakes, the tsunamis or the boulders that rained from the sky. Further away, even on the other side of the world, species suffered from knock-on effects like the lack of sunlight.

In regions where the fires had not first destroyed habitats, the extreme heat killed food for animals and acid rain polluted the water supplies. Worse still, the debris in the air rendered Earth’s surface potentially as dark as a lightless cave, shutting down photosynthesis and collapsing food chains.

“With all the vegetation gone, the herbivores have nothing to eat. If the herbivores die then the carnivores have nothing to eat,” says Kring. “It became a serious challenge to survive.”

“On land, everything’s burned and dead, and everything big is starving to death,” Johnson says.

The fossil data, where it is available, reveals that nothing larger than a raccoon survived. Such small-bodied species were more likely to survive because they lived in greater numbers, ate less, and could reproduce and adapt faster.

Freshwater ecosystems seemed to fare better than those on land. However in the ocean, entire food chains collapsed.

While the long winter halted photosynthesis, its impacts would have been greater in the hemisphere that was entering the growing season. “If you’re in the beginning of the northern hemisphere summer, for instance, and you turn the lights off during the growing season, then that could be problematic,” Johnson says.

The fossil record indicates that northernmost North America and Europe fared best after the inferno. That suggests that the northern hemisphere had just begun its winter shutdown when the asteroid struck.

But even in the worst-affected areas, life soon came creeping back.

There’s two sides to this issue of the mass extinction,” Kring says. “One side is: what killed life. The flip side of that is: what animals or plants had the right capabilities to survive and eventually emerge and recover?”

The recovery took a long time. It took hundreds if not thousands of years for ecosystems to rebuild. Scientists suggest that, in the oceans, it took three million years for the flux of organic material to return to normal.

Much like after a forest fire today, opportunistic ferns quickly repopulated the scorched landscapes. In ecosystems that escaped the fern frenzy, blooms of algae and mosses dominated.

In areas that escaped the worst of the devastation, some species survived to repopulate the planet. In the oceans, sharks, crocodilians and certain fish made it through to the other side.

The loss of the dinosaurs meant that new ecological niches opened up. “It’s the radiation of mammalian species into those empty ecological niches that is responsible for the full diversity of mammalian life we see in today’s world,” Durda says.

When scientists drill this spring, they will be trying to gain a clearer picture about how the crater formed, information that will help fine-tune the estimates of the impact’s climatic effects.

“We’ll have much better analysis of the actual inside of the crater,” Johnson says. “They’ll learn a lot about the distribution of energy, and fundamentally what happens to Earth when it gets whacked by something that big.”

On top of that, they will examine the veins of minerals and fractures in the rock cores to see what might have lived there. In this way, the drilling could help us understand how life recovered.

“By watching life come back, you can answer some questions,” Gulick says. “Who comes back first? Is it the specialist? The generalist? What kind of evolutionary diversity happened and how quickly?”

Although many species and individual organisms perished, other forms of life thrived in their absence. It is a dual pattern of disaster and opportunity that has repeated itself after many impact events in Earth’s history.

In particular, it is likely that if the asteroid had not struck Earth 66 million years ago, the course of evolution would have been radically different – and humans would not have evolved. “Sometimes, when I wax a little too poetically, I will say that the Chicxulub crater is the crucible of human evolution,” says Kring.

When the asteroid hit, the intense heat drove hydrothermal activity within the Chicxulub crater that may have lasted for 100,000 years.

This could have allowed thermophiles and hyperthermophiles – exotic single-celled organisms that thrive in hot, chemically-enriched environments – to make their homes inside the crater. The drilling project will test this idea.From its birth up until around 3.9 billion years ago, the Earth was bombarded by asteroids and other debris. In 2000, Kring proposed that these impacts created underground hydrothermal systems, just like the ones that probably formed at Chicxulub.

These hot, chemical-rich, wet places could have given rise to the first life forms. If that is true, the heat-tolerant hyperthermophiles were the first life forms on Earth.

 

Thousands worldwide demand that Turkey recognize Armenian genocide on 101st anniversary

April 24, 2016

RT

Thousands of people around the globe took to the streets on Sunday to commemorate the 1915 massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, demanding that Turkey recognize the atrocity as genocide.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and First Lady Rita Sargsyan laid flowers at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in the country’s capital, Yerevan.

The event in memory of the victims was attended by Hollywood star George Clooney and renowned French singer Charles Aznavour, who is of Armenian descent.

Sargsyan used the 101st anniversary to draw international attention to a recent flare up in hostilities in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The multi-ethnic enclave populated by Armenians and Azerbaijanis has been in political limbo since a conflict between the groups involving tens of thousands of casualties ended in 1994 with the region self-declaring independence. Turkish ally Azerbaijan, however, still claims it as its own, and has not backed off its intention to take back control of the territory.

“I declare for the entire world to hear: there will be no purging or deportation of the Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). We will not allow another Armenian Genocide. We – means the Armenian nation, all its segments, we – means our Armenian consolidation,” the president said in a statement.

Several thousand people gathered in Moscow carrying Armenian and Russian flags to mark the somber anniversary.

A group of teens participating in a flash mob removed red bands from their mouths as an Armenian girl passed by in a symbolic gesture meaning that it is impossible to hush up the genocide any longer.

In Greece, hundreds of ethnic Armenians and sympathizers marched through Athens to denounce Turkey and slam Azerbaijan for allegedly escalating the conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region

The protesters marched to the Turkish and Azeri embassies in center of the Greek capital waving Armenian flags and carrying signs reading: “Truth will Triumph,”“Azerbaijan Land of Crimes,” and “Hands off Armenia.”

Meanwhile, thousands of demonstrators in Iran participated in an event at Tehran’s St. Sarkis Cathedral, in which they also urged Ankara to recognize the genocide of Armenians and condemned the recent uptick in hostilities in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“Our demand is that Turkey recognizes the historical truth and accepts legal responsibility for it,” Karen Khanlari, an Iranian-Armenian lawmaker, told RT’s Ruptly video agency.

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, around 2 million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire, but that number decreased to less than half a million over the next eight years.

The mass killings began on April 24, 1915, when 250 Armenian intellectuals were detained by Ottoman authorities and later executed in their capital, Constantinople, which is now present-day Istanbul.

Most of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians were subsequently displaced, deported, or placed in concentration camps, ostensibly for rebelling against the Ottomans and siding with the Russians during World War I.

Turkey – the successor of the Ottoman Empire – admits that many Armenians were mistreated at the time, but claims that the number of victims has been grossly exaggerated and that there was no “genocide” or official systematic effort to eliminate the Armenian minority.

Acknowledging crimes against humanity would not only damage Ankara’s international reputation, but also leave it liable for reparations, which some Armenian human rights groups estimate should be worth trillions of dollars.

On April 25 of last year, Turkey held a celebration to mark 100 years since the Gallipoli Landings, the Ottoman Empire’s greatest success in World War I, in order to distract attention from the 100th anniversary of the genocide, angering many in Armenia.

 

Complete list of executions carried out by the SD in the EK 3 area of Lithuania up to 1 December 1941

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

(The “Jäger report” was written by a commander of one of the “Einsatzgruppen” (special task forces) which were in charge of liquidating Jews, communist leaders, partisans and others in the German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union.)

 

Security police duties in Lithuania taken over by Einsatzkommando 3 on 2 July 1941. (The Wilna [Vilnius] area was taken over by EK 3 on 9 Aug.1941, the Schaulen area on 2 Oct. 1941. Up until these dates EK 9 operated in Wilna and EK 2 in Schaulen.)

 

On my instructions and orders the following executions were conducted by Lithuanian police units:

 

4.7.41     Kauen-Fort VII    416 Jews, 47 Jewesses                  463

6.7.41     Kauen-Fort VII    Jews                                             2,514

 

Following the formation of a raiding squad under the command of  SS-Obersturmführer Hamman and 8-10 reliable men from the  Einsatzkommando the following actions were conducted in cooperation with Lithuanian police units:

 

7.7.41 Mariampole Jews 32
8.7.41 Mariampole 14 Jews, 5 Comm. officials 19
8.7.41 Girkalinei Comm. officials 6
9.7.41 Wendziogala 32 Jews, 2 Jewesses, 1 Lithuanian (f.), 2 Lithuanian Comm.,1 Russian Comm. 38
9.7.41 Kauen-Fort VII 21 Jews, 3 Jewesses 24
14.7.41 Mariampole 21 Jews, 1 Russ., 9 Lith. Comm. 31
17.7.41 Babtei 8 Comm. officials (inc. 6 Jews) 8
18.7.41 Mariampole 39 Jews, 14 Jewesses 53
19.7.41 Kauen-Fort VII 17 Jews, 2 Jewesses, 4 Lith. Comm., 2 Comm. Lithuanians (f.),1 German Comm. 26
21.7.41 Panevezys 59 Jews, 11 Jewesses, 1 Lithuanian (f.), 1 Pole, 22 Lith. Comm., 9 Russ. Comm. 103
22.7.41 Panevezys 1 Jew 1
23.7.41 Kedainiai 83 Jews, 12 Jewesses, 14 Russ. Comm., 15 Lith. Comm., 1 Russ.O-Politruk 125
25.7.41 Mariampole 90 Jews, 13 Jewesses 103
28.7.41 Panevezys 234 Jews, 15 Jewesses, 19 Russ. Comm., 20 Lith. Comm. 288
Total carried forward 3,384

 

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Total carried over 3,384
29.7.41 Rasainiai 254 Jews, 3 Lith. Comm. 257
30.7.41 Agriogala 27 Jews, 11 Lith. Comm. 38
31.7.41 Utena 235 Jews, 16 Jewesses, 4 Lith. Comm., 1 robber/murderer 256
31.7.41 Wendziogala  13 Jews, 2 murderers 15
1.8.41 Ukmerge 254 Jews, 42 Jewesses, 1 Pol. Comm., 2 Lith. NKVD agents, 1 mayor of Jonava who gave order to set fire to Jonava 300
2.8.41 Kauen-FortIV 170 Jews, 1 US Jewess, 33 Jewesses, 4 Lith. Comm. 209
4.8.41 Panevezys 362 Jews, 41 Jewesses, 5 Russ. Comm., 14 Lith. Comm. 422
5.8.41 Rasainiai 213 Jews, 66 Jewesses 279
7.8.41 Uteba  483 Jews, 87 Jewesses, 1 Lithuanian (robber of corpses of Germans) 571
8.8.41 Ukmerge 620 Jews, 82 Jewesses 702
9.8.41 Kauen-FortIV 484 Jews, 50 Jewesses 534
11.8.41 Panevezys 450 Jews, 48 Jewesses, 1 Lith. 1 Russ. 500
13.8.41 Alytus  617 Jews, 100 Jewesses, 1 criminal 719
14.8.41 Jonava  497 Jews, 55 Jewesses 552
15-16.8.41 Rokiskis  3,200 Jews, Jewesses, and J. Children, 5 Lith. Comm., 1 Pole, 1 partisan 3207
6-14.8.41 Rokiskis  493 Jews, 432 Russians, 56 Lithuanians (all active communists) 981
18.8.41 Kauen-FortIV  689 Jews, 402 Jewesses, 1 Pole (f.), 711 Jewish intellectuals from Ghetto in reprisal for sabotage action 1,812
19.8.41 Ukmerge  298 Jews, 255 Jewesses, 1 Politruk, 88 Jewish children, 1 Russ. Comm. 645
22.8.41 Dunaburg  3 Russ. Comm., 5 Latvian, incl. 1 murderer, 1 Russ. Guardsman, 3 Poles, 3 gypsies (m.), 1 gypsy (f.), 1 gypsy child, 1 Jew, 1 Jewess, 1 Armenian (m.), 2 Politruks (prison inspection in Dunanburg 21
Total carried forward 16,152

 

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Total carried forward 16,152
22.8.41 Aglona Mentally sick: 269 men, 227 women, 48 children 544
23.8.41 Panevezys 1,312 Jews, 4,602 Jewesses, 1,609 Jewish children 7,523
18-22.8.41 KreisRasainiai 466 Jews, 440 Jewesses, 1,020 Jewish children 1,926
25.8.41 Obeliai  112 Jews, 627 Jewesses, 421 Jewish children 1,160
25-26.8.41 Seduva  230 Jews, 275 Jewesses, 159 Jewish children 664
26.8.41 Zarasai 767 Jews, 1,113 Jewesses, 1 Lith. Comm., 687 Jewish children, 1 Russ. Comm. (f.) 2,569
28.8.41 Pasvalys 402 Jews, 738 Jewesses, 209 Jewish children 1,349
26.8.41 Kaisiadorys All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish children 1,911
27.8.41 Prienai All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish Children 1,078
27.8.41 DagdaandKraslawa 212 Jews, 4 Russ. POW’s 216
27.8.41 Joniskia 47 Jews, 165 Jewesses, 143 Jewish children 355
28.8.41 Wilkia 76 Jews, 192 Jewesses, 134 Jewish children 402
28.8.41 Kedainiai  710 Jews, 767 Jewesses, 599 Jewish children 2,076
29.8.41 Rumsiskisand Ziezmariai  20 Jews, 567 Jewesses, 197 Jewish children 784
29.8.41 Utenaand Moletai 582 Jews, 1,731 Jewesses, 1,469 Jewish children 3,782
13-31.8.41 Alytusand environs 233 Jews 233
1.9.41 Mariampole 1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses, 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally sick, 1 German subject (f.), married to a Jew, 1 Russian (f.) 5,090
Total carried over 47,814

 

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Total carried over 47,814
28.8-2.9.41 Darsuniskis 10 Jews, 69 Jewesses, 20 Jewish children 99
  Carliava 73 Jews, 113 Jewesses, 61 Jewish children 24 271
  Jonava 112 Jews, 1,200 Jewesses, 244 Jewish children 1,556
  Petrasiunai 30 Jews, 72 Jewesses, 23 Jewish children 125
  Jesuas 26 Jews, 72 Jewesses, 46 Jewish children 144
  Ariogala 207 Jews, 260 Jewesses, 195 Jewish children 662
  Jasvainai  86 Jews, 110 Jewesses, 86 Jewish children 282
  Babtei 20 Jews, 41 Jewesses, 22 Jewish children 83
  Wenziogala  42 Jews, 113 Jewesses, 97 Jewish children 252
  Krakes 448 Jews, 476 Jewesses, 97 Jewish children 1,125
4.9.41 Pravenischkis 247 Jews, 6 Jewesses 253
  Cekiske 22 Jews, 64 Jewesses, 60 Jewish children 146
  Seredsius 6 Jews, 61 Jewesses, 126 Jewish children 193
  Velinona 2 Jews, 71 Jewesses, 86 Jewish children 159
  Zapiskis 47 Jews, 118 Jewesses, 13 Jewish children 178
5.9.41 Ukmerge  1,123 Jews, 1,849 Jewesses, 1,737 Jewish children 4,709
25.8-6.9.41 Mopping up in: Rasainiai 16 Jews, 412 Jewesses, 415 Jewish children 843
  Georgenburg all Jews, all Jewesses, all Jewish children 412
9.9.41  Alytus 287 Jews, 640 Jewesses, 352 Jewish children 1,279
9.9.41 Butrimonys 67 Jews, 370 Jewesses, 303 Jewish children 740
10.9.41 Merkine  223 Jews, 640 Jewesses, 276 Jewish children 854
10.9.41 Varena  541 Jews, 141 Jewesses, 149 Jewish children 831
11.9.41 Leipalingis 60 Jews, 70 Jewesses, 25Jewish children 155
11.9.41 Seirijai 229 Jews, 384 Jewesses, 340 Jewish children 953
12.9.41 Simnas 68 Jews, 197 Jewesses, 149 Jewish children 414
11-12.9.41 Uzusalis Reprisal against inhabitants who fed Russ. partisans; some in possession of weapons 43
26.9.41  Kauen-F.IV 412 Jews, 615 Jewesses, 581 Jewish children (sick and suspected epidemic cases) 1,608
 Total carried over 66,159
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Total carried over 66,159
2.10.41 Zagare 633 Jews, 1,107 Jewesses, 496 Jewish children (as these Jews were being led away a mutiny rose, which was however immediately put down; 150 Jews were shot immediately; 7 partisans wounded) 2,236
4.10.41 Kauen-F.IX  315 Jews, 712 Jewesses, 818Jewish children (reprisal after German police officer shot in ghetto) 1,845
29.10.41 Kauen-F.IX 2,007 Jews, 2,920 Jewesses, 4,273 Jewish children (mopping up ghetto of superfluous Jews) 9,200
3.11.41  Lazdijai 485 Jews, 511 Jewesses, 539 Jewish children 1,535
15.11.41 Wilkowiski 36 Jews, 48 Jewesses, 31 Jewish children 115
25.11.41 Kauen-F.IX 1,159 Jews, 1,600 Jewesses, 175 Jewish children (resettlers from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt am Main) 2,934
29.11.41 Kauen-F.IX  693 Jews, 1,155 Jewesses, 152 Jewish children (resettlers from Vienna and Breslau) 2,000
29.11.41 Kauen-F.IX  17 Jews, 1 Jewess, for contravention of ghetto law, 1 Reichs German who converted to the Jewish faith and attended rabbinical school, then 15 terrorists from the Kalinin group 34
13.7-21.8.41: EK 3 detachment in Dunanberg in the period 9,012 Jews, Jewesses and Jewish children, 573 active Comm 9,585
EK 3 detachment in Wilna:      
12.8-1.9.41 City of Wilna 425 Jews, 19 Jewesses, 8 Comm. (m.), 9 Comm. (f.) 461
2.9.41 City of Wilna 864 Jews, 2,019 Jewesses, 817 Jewish children (sonderaktion because German soldiers shot at by Jews) 3,700
 Total carried forward 99,804

 

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Total carried forward 99,804
12.9.41 City of Wilna 993 Jews, 1,670 Jewesses, 771 Jewish children  3,334
17.9.41 City of Wilna 337 Jews, 687 Jewesses, 247 Jewish children and 4 Lith. Comm. 1,271
20.9.41 Nemencing 128 Jews, 176 Jewesses, 99 Jewish children 403
22.9.41 Novo-Wilejka 468 Jews, 495 Jewesses, 196 Jewish children 1,159
24.9.41 Riesa   512 Jews, 744 Jewesses, 511 Jewish children 1,767
25.9.41 Jahiunai 215 Jews, 229 Jewesses, 131 Jewish children 575
27.9.41  Eysisky  989 Jews, 1,636 Jewesses, 821 Jewish children 3,446
30.9.41 Trakai 366 Jews, 483 Jewesses, 597 Jewish children 1,446
4.10.41 City of Wilna 432 Jews, 1,115 Jewesses, 436 Jewish children 1,983
6.10.41  Semiliski 213 Jews, 359 Jewesses, 390 Jewish children  962
9.10.41  Svenciany 1,169 Jews, 1,840 Jewesses, 717 Jewish children 3,726
16.10.41  City of Wilna 382 Jews, 507 Jewesses, 257 Jewish children 1,146
21.10.41 City of Wilna  718 Jews, 1,063 Jewesses, 586 Jewish children 2,367
25.10.41 City of Wilna 1,776 Jewesses, 812 Jewish children 2,578
27.10.41 City of Wilna 946 Jews, 184 Jewesses, 73 Jewish children 1,203
30.10.41 City of Wilna  382 Jews, 789 Jewesses, 362 Jewish children 1,553
6.11.41 City of Wilna 340 Jews, 749 Jewesses, 252 Jewish children 1,341
19.11.41 City of Wilna 76 Jews, 77 Jewesses, 18 Jewish children 171
19.11.41  City of Wilna 6 POW’s, 8 Poles 14
20.11.41  City of Wilna 3 POW’s 3
25.11.41  City of Wilna 9 Jews, 46 Jewesses, 8 Jewish children, 1 Pole for possession of arms and other military equipment 64
EK 3 detachment in Minsk from 28.9-17.10.41:      
  Pleschnitza, Bischolin, Scak, Bober, Uzda  620 Jews, 1,285 Jewesses, 1,126 Jewish children and 19 Comm. 3,050
      133,346
Prior to EK 3 taking over security police duties, Jews liquidated by pogroms and executions (including partisans) 4,000
      Total 137,346

————————————————————————–

Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.

 

…..

 

The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average

4 to 5 Km.

 

…..

 

I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even more urgently. I am of the view that the sterilization program m of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterilization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.

 

(signed) Jäger

SS-Standartenführer

 

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