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Under Nazi siege: How Saint Petersburg survived the bloodiest blockade in human history

Anatoliy Brusnikin
RT
Wed, 18 Jan 2023 21:39 UTC
russian ww2 soldier
© RT
Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, was the scene of one of the bloodiest and most tragic episodes of the Second World War.

Nazi Germany's siege of Russia's former capital lasted 872 days, claiming the lives up to a million civilians and about half-a-million soldiers. Eighty years ago, in a colossal military effort, a breach was made in the blockade of the city: Operation Iskra opened a narrow, bare, exposed, but nevertheless operational land corridor from the 'mainland.'

This was the first relatively successful attempt to break through the Nazi lines after four catastrophic failures over the previous years. The success of the operation was incredibly important, but the victory took such a toll and is associated with so much indescribable grief and destruction that, even in Russia, it is recalled very rarely.
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Better Earth

Most humans haven't evolved to cope with the cold, yet we dominate northern climates

Laura Buck, Kyoko Yamaguchi
The Conversation
Mon, 16 Jan 2023 07:05 UTC
eskimo inuit
© Yvette Cardozo / Alamy Stock PhotoHumans have used technology to adapt to the cold.
Humans are a tropical species. We have lived in warm climates for most of our evolutionary history, which might explain why so many of us spend winter huddled under a blanket, clutching a hot water bottle and dreaming of summer.

Indeed all living apes are found in the tropics. The oldest known fossils from the human lineage (hominins) come from central and eastern Africa.


Comment: One must bear in mind that most human origins theories are not compatible with known fossils, and so the 'Out of Africa' theory for humanity remains just a theory, which however may be true for certain lineages, but not necessarily all.


The hominins who dispersed northwards into higher latitudes had to deal with, for the first time, freezing temperatures, shorter days that limited foraging time, snow that made hunting more difficult and icy wind chill that exacerbated heat loss from their bodies.


Comment: It's worth noting here that, as Pierre Lescaudron explicates in his article Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes there's a variety of data showing that the climate on our planet has varied significantly over time, with just one example being that at least 15,000 years ago, and possibly even more recently, regions of Siberia appear to have been much more hospitable than they are today,: Mammoths survived in Siberia until just 3,900 years ago, climate change likely responsible for extinction, new study reveals


Given our limited adaptation to the cold, why is it that our species has come to dominate not only our warm ancestral lands but every part of the globe? The answer lies in our ability to developed intricate cultural solutions to the challenges of life.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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People 2

Fathers have been older than mothers for the past 250,000 years, study finds

Giulia Carbonaro
Euronews
Mon, 16 Jan 2023 18:11 UTC
father child
A recent study found that men have been on average seven years older than women when having their first child.
A great many things have changed for humanity since the first of our species appeared on Earth. But throughout human history, one thing has apparently remained the same: men have always approached parenthood much later in life than women, new research suggests.

A study conducted by scientists at Indiana University in Bloomington in the US tracked genetic mutations in modern human DNA sequences to estimate when men and women conceived babies over the past 250,000 years, since our species emerged.

To do that, they created a model based on data tracking the age of conception and DNA mutations over three generations of 1,500 Icelanders and their parents. They first applied this model to a sample of 2,500 modern people living around the world, and then dated back the emergence of different mutations to create a timeline of motherhood and fatherhood through the ages.

Comment: See also:

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Light Sabers

Viktor Medvedchuk: Total Western support for Zelensky tells us that the US and NATO don't want peace in Ukraine

Viktor Medvedchuk
RT
Mon, 16 Jan 2023 18:32 UTC
Medvedchuk
© Serhii Nuzhnenko/ReutersVictor Medvedchuk exiled Ukrainian opposition leader
Listening to many Western politicians, it seems completely impossible to understand the essence of the current conflict in Ukraine, and the mechanisms which led us here.

Take US President Biden: He denies that American troops are directly involved in the conflict but at the same time he consistently emphasizes his country's multi-billion dollar weapons supplies. If such huge sums are diverted for military purposes in Ukraine, it should mean that Ukrainian interests are extremely important for the US.

However, there is no desire for the US army to fight there. Thus, Kiev's concerns are probably not so vital, after all. And do these weapon supplies, worth billions of dollars, amount to donations? A profitable business? Investments? Or are they for political purposes?

There are no clear answers.

Take the most recent revelations, from former German Chancellor Merkel, that the Minsk Agreements were just an attempt to give Kiev time to re-group. This revelation means that no one was ever going to establish peace in Ukraine. Which means, of course, that Russia was deceived.

But why? For the west to protect Ukraine or to to take it for themselves? And why did they need this deception if they could simply implement what was recommended by Germany? Or did Berlin deliberately suggest something that could never have been implemented? We could go as far as asking if political swindlers ought be held to account but it seems much more relevant today to start clearing the smoke from around the current situation.

What were the root causes? And how can we get out of a situation that is becoming ever more dangerous? Well, let us begin this analysis with the ultimate origins of the crisis.
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Colosseum

First cousin marriages frequent in Minoan Crete, ancient DNA analysis reveals

Max Planck Society
Phys.org
Mon, 16 Jan 2023 12:00 UTC
Minoan
© Eva SkourtaniotiThe well-known figure of a Minoan goddess, artistically appropriated and depicted holding DNA chains instead of snakes. The population is born from her "ancient" body. The orange and red genealogy refers to the research finding of endogamy between first and second cousins.
An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reports completely new insights into Bronze Age marriage rules and family structures in Greece. Analyses of ancient genomes show that the choice of marriage partners was determined by one's own kinship.

When Heinrich Schliemann discovered the gold-rich shaft tombs of Mycenae with their famous gold masks more than 100 years ago, he could only speculate about the relationship of the people buried in them. Now, with the help of the analysis of ancient genomes, it has been possible for the first time to gain insights into kinship and marriage rules in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The results were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Comment: As noted above, perhaps the reason for this practice is partly due to the culture and society specific to the region? Mycenaean necropolis of Trapeza reveals hierarchical society and ancestor worship

See also:

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Blue Planet

5,000 year-old mass grave of decapitated skeletons found in Slovakia

Kiel University
Heritage Daily
Sat, 14 Jan 2023 23:25 UTC
mass grave
© Archaeology/Kiel UniversityProf. Dr. Martin Furholt
Archaeologists find prehistoric mass grave with headless skeletons Share Archaeologists have found a mass grave site in Vráble, Slovakia, containing 38 burials who were decapitated.

Excavations were conducted by a team from the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) at Kiel University (CAU), and the Archaeological Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, which have been conducting research on the site of Vráble-Ve'lke Lehemby, one the largest Early Neolithic settlements in Central Europe.

Vráble-Ve'lke Lehemby was occupied between 5,250 to 4,950 BC, comprising of 313 houses in three neighbouring villages. The south-western of the three settlements was surrounded by a 1.3 km-long double ditch that likely served as boundary marker rather than serving any defensive purpose.

Comment: See also: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus

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Blue Planet

Ceramic production came to Europe through Siberia, study of ancient pottery reveals


Heritage Daily
Sat, 14 Jan 2023 22:42 UTC
Caspian Sea
© ShutterstockCaspian Sea
A new study suggests that the knowledge for producing ceramic vessels arrived in Europe not only from the Middle East, but also from the Far East through Siberia and the Caspian Sea region.

Examples of pottery figurines, such as the Gravettian culture Venus of Dolní Věstonice figurine, discovered in the Czech Republic, date to around 29,000-25,000 BC, however, the earliest examples of pottery vessels come from China around 20,000 to 19,000-years-ago.

The prevailing view among scientists was that the knowledge for producing ceramic vessels arrived in Europe, with the advent of agriculture from the Far East via the Middle East.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Piggy Bank

Things we should understand: The aristocracy is eating the peasants

John Rubino
rubino.substack.com
Wed, 11 Jan 2023 00:00 UTC
Bailout
© openeuropeblog.blogspot.comThe Bailout
Most people (especially most Americans) still seem to view the events of the past half-century as more or less random. Booms and busts erupting out of nowhere, impoverishing all but a handful of lucky elites. Political crises that end up dividing rather than uniting. Wars that cost fortunes and resolve nothing. Everything is bad, and nothing is related to anything else.

But of course that's not true. Each of the above events serves the same purpose: to enrich a modern aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. And the endgame is looking even worse.

To see the scam play out, let's go back to 1995. Two decades previously, in 1971, the US and by extension the world had ditched sound, gold-backed money in favor of "fiat" currencies that their governments, via their central banks, could create in infinite quantities out of thin air. The result was spiking inflation and exchange rate chaos in the 1970s and soaring government deficits in the 1980s.
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Eye 2

Flashback Confession of a CIA agent: They gave us millions to dismember Yugoslavia


The Greanville Post
Mon, 14 Dec 2015 17:21 UTC
Robert Baer CIA officer Yugoslavia
Robert Baer, ​​a former CIA officer: "My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media."
WebTribune publishes their interview with former CIA agent Robert Baer during his promotion tour in Quebec for upcoming book Secrets of the White House last week.

Robert Baer, ​​a former CIA officer, has authored many books which disclosed the secrets of both the CIA and the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He has been arrested and detained several times. Mitt Waspurh, a personal friend who worked at the Senate and shared information was killed at gunpoint. As a senior CIA operative, Baer worked in Yugoslavia during the 1991-94 period and in the Middle East. He has worked on several documentaries on National Geographic, accusing the Bush administration of waging war for oil.

The interview was conducted live in Canada, during my trip a few days ago. Robert Baer is currently promoting his book The Secrets of the White House in Quebec, where we talked. In an interview we spoke of the background of the war in Yugoslavia.

Comment: Robert Baer is still at it:

CIA man's 'tell-all' book reveals more about internal agency incompetence than Russian malfeasance

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Attention

Flashback British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years: How colonialism inspired fascism

Ben Norton
Geopolitical Economy
Mon, 12 Dec 2022 17:07 UTC
A scholarly study found that British colonialism caused approximately 165 million deaths in India from 1880 to 1920, while stealing trillions of dollars of wealth. The global capitalist system was founded on European imperial genocides, which inspired Adolf Hitler and led to fascism.

Churchill and India
© Geopolitical Economy
British colonialism caused at least 100 million deaths in India in roughly 40 years, according to an academic study.

And during nearly 200 years of colonialism, the British empire stole at least $45 trillion in wealth from India, a prominent economist has calculated.

The genocidal crimes committed by European empires outside of their borders inspired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, leading to the rise of fascist regimes that carried out similar genocidal crimes within their borders.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and his co-author Dylan Sullivan published an article in the respected academic journal World Development titled "Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century."

In the report, the scholars estimated that India suffered 165 million excess deaths due to British colonialism between 1880 and 1920.

"This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust," they noted.

They added, "Indian life expectancy did not reach the level of early modern England (35.8 years) until 1950, after decolonization."
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