If there was a nation that could safely conclude from its own historical experience that "Crime Pays", than it must be the newest EU member, Croatia. In the modern history this tiny Catholic nation committed one of the most horrific genocides in WWII over Serbian Orthodox Christian population residing in Croatia and Bosnia, murdering at least one million people; and recently in 1995, Croatia conducted (under US supervision) the biggest and permanent ethnic cleansing "military operation" against its (again) Serbian population, expelling over 200,000 of them in just three days (the real number of ethnically cleansed Serbs from Croatia during the wars in 90ies, is at least twice larger)- unofficially becoming the most ethnic cleanse European state.

If you believe, that Croats "en masse", would be ashamed of such reputation, then you are dead wrong. Actually most of them are very proud, and for the last 23 years they are celebrating it very loudly, and doing everything in their power to prevent (after being pressured by the international community) the return of hundreds of thousands of Serbs to their ancient land, and to avoid returning of their stolen property, mostly (real estates, farm lands, etc.).


"We could not prevent the slaughter of the Serbs by the Croatians, including elderly people and children..." - UNPROFOR French Lieutenant-General Jean Cot

This is the second part of a series prepared on the topic. The first part can be found here. The series will include four parts.

The word Oligarch, meaning rule of the few, came from the Ancient Greek civilisations that rose up in the millennia following the collapse of the mighty Egyptian Empire. The later period was named the Archaic and Classical periods which saw the emergence of Greek city states like Sparta which was founded about the 10^th century BCE. Greece was the birthplace of Western philosophy and included the thinkers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In the works of Plato's Republic, we can see the focus given to questions o f political governments.

Sparta was ruled, unusually at this time, by a group of 28 powerful men plus two kings. This group of thirty was called the council of elders, or gerousia, and they drafted resolutions that were put to the vote of an assembly of "free" men. A board of five overseers, or ephors, chosen from the "free" men, was used to counterbalance the council. These elected ephors were charged with maintaining law, even if that meant charging an Oligarch. Spartan citizens themselves spent their time hunting, fighting and politicking. The lower orders, the workers, were excluded from government. It was their regular uprisings that seriously undermined Sparta's fighting capacity. The Oligarchy is also a reason for Sparta's reputation as a conservative city state slow to make decisions. They can be contrasted to their main rival Athens, who were at this time experimenting with democracy.

During a steamy, record-breaking British summer, unease - even madness - filtered through the bright sunshine.

One sweltering August morning, it became too much for one man, who set off on the ten-mile walk from his Essex village to his office in the town of Braintree.

He had never known temperatures like it. After each mile, he removed a piece of clothing and hurled it into the hedgerow as he passed.

Hat, jacket, waistcoat, tie, shirt, trousers, all decorated the wilting hawthorn on his route. He was arrested as soon as he hit Braintree High Street, stark naked, semi-raving and certified by Braintree police as suffering from 'heat insanity'.

Then, like now, it was a summer of unprecedented heat lasting from May to September, as temperatures rocketed above 100F.

"Despite its militant extremism, the Islamist movement has shown that it can be pragmatic." - Roy, "Hamas and the Transformation(s) of Political Islam in Palestine," 13

Let's address head-on the Hamas Charter that denies Israel's right to exist. (We will leave aside in this post Israel's Likud Party platform that denies the right for a Palestinian state to ever exist.) I have tried to keep abreast of the makeup and intentions of Hamas for some years but confine myself in this post (or series of posts) on two relatively recent studies:

• Baconi, Tareq. 2018. Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
• Caridi, Paola. 2012. Hamas: From Resistance to Government. New York: Seven Stories Press.

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global news rooms were covering Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming.

I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side. (Baconi, p. xi)

Shortly after being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a series of talks in the U.S. and UK. Those talks, including his Harvard Address of 1978, caused many in the West to turn against him. Once the hero of the anti-Communist movement in the West, his criticisms of Western culture, including its materialism, legalism, shallowness and cowardice, cut a little too close to the bone. His warning to the West - that we are in a weak enough state to be susceptible to the infection of totalitarianism - was stern. And while it did not come to pass - and the Soviet Union collapsed - his warning still applies.

Today on the Truth Perspective we discuss Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, of Communism, and why his warning is still relevant. The problems he elucidated are not just still present, they have gotten worse. Solzhenitsyn worried that the West would have to learn through experience, and not through the example of those who had already suffered. It looks like he was probably right.

Running Time: 01:28:23

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Even though much that links us to their founding years is gone, cities that reach back to the earliest human civilizations retain an undeniable allure. These 10 examples include some of the oldest cities in history, and people still call each one of them home.

Ife

Founded circa 350 B.C.
The Yoruba people consider Ife the mythical birthplace of mankind. Two of their deities are said to have created the first humans out of clay, with one of them becoming the first king of the Yoruba. By the 11th century, the city had become the capital of a kingdom, with its residents producing the region's famed terra-cotta heads during the following two centuries.

Nearly destroyed as a result of a late 18th-century war, as well as by decades of trauma related to the slave trade, Ife is now home to one of Nigeria's major universities, as well as the Historical Society of Nigeria. In addition, the spiritual leader of the Yoruba people, known as the Ooni, lives in a palace in the center of the city. Ife now has over 600,000 residents.

New research shows that two populations of small-bodied hominins arose independently on the Indonesian island of Flores.

The study, published in the journal Science, reveals that no genetic exchange took place between the tiny extinct hominin species Homo floresiensis, which once inhabited Flores, and the ancestors of a group of extremely short-statured humans who live there today.

The remains of H. floresiensis, or the "Flores Hobbit", were first discovered in the Liang Bua cave on the island in 2003. Intriguingly, the remains were those of a mature adult who would have stood just one metre tall.

Evidence suggests H. floresiensis lived on the island between 60,000 and at least 100,000 years ago. Yet the nature of their relationship to modern humans remains a mystery, in part because no Hobbit DNA has ever been recovered.

Today, several dozen families live in the nearby hamlet of Rampasasa, the overwhelming majority of whom are extremely small, with an average height of around 145cm.

Their small stature and close proximity to the Liang Bua site prompted suggestions that somewhere in their ancestral history, genetic intermixing with the archaic hominins may have occurred.

Scientists say that cremated remains may hold the key to unlocking the truth behind England's greatest mystery: who built Stonehenge?

New studies on the cremated remains of 25 Neolithic people buried at the site show that nearly half of them lived nowhere near the now world-famous monument.

A team from University of Oxford analysed the 25 skull bones, discovering that ten of those cremated originated from western Britain. Five of the ten were potentially from southwest Wales; the same area from which the bluestones that made the monument's original structure originated from.

The other 15 people appear to be local to the Wiltshire and Stonehenge area.

Cremated remains and a broken copper band in a 4,000-year-old settlement on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia suggest that trade networks in ancient North America linked people from the Great Lakes to the southeastern coast. And it wasn't just about exchanging goods; the far-flung connections created shared culture.

Widespread trade networks once linked communities in northeastern US with those around the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley and extended south to the Tennessee River Valley. Around 5,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies in eastern North America started to become more settled, and their populations started to grow. As these communities grew, they also developed long-distance social and economic connections with other communities.

In the archaeological record, we can only really see evidence for the exchange of goods, especially shells, beads, raw stone for working into tools, and copper. But those are probably just the tangible pieces of a more complex set of relationships that may have included political marriages to cement alliances and large ritual gatherings to bring people together and demonstrate wealth, power, and status.

An astonishing stash of 2,800-year-old gold jewellery has been unearthed by archaeologists in Kazakhstan.

Some 3,000 golden and precious items were found in a burial mound in the remote Tarbagatai mountains.

The treasure trove - described as 'priceless' - is believed to belong to royal or elite members of the Saka people who held sway in central Asia eight centuries before the birth of Christ.

Among the finds are earrings in the shape of bells, gold plates with rivets, plaques, chains, and a necklace with precious stones.

Gold beads decorating clothes were made with the use of sophisticated micro-soldering techniques, indicating an exceptional level of development jewellery-making skills for the period.