They have eavesdropped on the enemy for decades, tracking messages from Hitler’s high command and the Soviet K.G.B. and on to the murky, modern world of satellites and cyberspace. But a lowly and yet mysterious carrier pigeon may have them baffled.
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Pigeon Code Baffles British Cryptographers - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...es-british-cryptographers.html
knowledge WWII carrier pigeons cryptography british nytimes
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igeon specialists said they believed it may have been flying home from British units in France around the time of the D-Day landing in 1944 when it somehow expired in the chimney at the 17th-century home where it was found in the village of Bletchingley, south of London.
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“Unless we get rather more idea than we have about who sent this message and who it was sent to, we are not going to be able to find out what the underlying code was,” said the historian, who was identified only as Tony under the organization’s secrecy protocols.
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s code-breaking and communications interception unit in Gloucestershire, agreed to try to crack the code. But on Friday the secretive organization acknowledged that it had been unable to do so.
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“Without access to the relevant code books and details of any additional encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt,” the Government Communications Headquarters said in a news release.
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Mr. Martin said he was skeptical of the idea that the agency had been unable to crack the code. “I think there’s something about that message that is either sensitive or does not reflect well” on British special forces operating behind enemy lines in wartime France, he said in a telephone interview. “I’m convinced that it’s an important message and a secret message.”
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An Open Letter to My Friends Who Support Donald Trump - 0 views
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But I can't understand why you would support someone as hateful, sexist, racist and ignorant as Donald Trump.
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It's not okay to marginalize an entire race of people, saying things like all the Mexicans are lazy, that they are all stealing our jobs and bringing drugs into our country.
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We're all human. Some humans are really bad people. Some are really good. And it doesn't matter what color they are, it makes no difference whatsoever
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Lucky for us, this isn't Grandma's house, so feel free to punch him in the mouth in the form of getting out and making your vote count.
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but racism isn't one of them, neither is hate, neither is the belittling of women or the judgment of others based on their appearance or their disability, or their sexual preference.
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Do you think empowered women will suddenly quit their jobs and go back to the kitchen ? Because electing Trump won't make any of that come true. We're past that as a nation, or at least I thought we were.
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Whatever led you to believe that racism is okay can be unlearned if you open your mind. I'm sorry that you were raised to believe that you deserve better treatment than the rest of the people on the planet that have different views than yours, worship different gods than you and have skin that isn't white.
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I implore you to get out and vote against him. Don't let the progress of this great nation be halted. We've come too far.
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The idea that certain religions are more dangerous than others and the idea that people should be judged based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
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And then there are just the plainly insane people who finally snap and go on shooting rampages for no discernible reason at all. They just went mad.
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We're still healing from the damage inflicted by the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq and the War on Terror. And it isn't just ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
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Hitler Is a Rock Star in South Asia | VICE | United States - 0 views
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Hitler Is a Rock Star in South Asia
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In Asia, though, Mein Kampf is treated like an old classic. It's long been a popular read for businessmen in India, sold alongside titles like Rich Dad Poor Dad, Who Moved My Cheese?, and the various motivational books by Donald Trump.
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"we [in Nepal] need a leader like Hitler."
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When Nepal hasn't been under the blanket of armed insurgencies, it's been in the grip of corrupt political leaders. People in Nepal seem to be looking for a leader that can carry them out of developmental paralysis, no matter the cost.
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History News Network | History Gets Into Bed with Psychology, and It's a Happy Match - 0 views
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The fact that many of our self-protective delusions are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying to override them. Knowing how dissonance works helps us identify our own inclinations to perpetuate errors -- and protect ourselves from those who can’t. Or won’t.Related LinksWhat Historians Can Learn from the Social Sciences and Sciences /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */ var disqus_shortname = 'hnndev'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */ (function() { var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; dsq.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); })(); Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. News Breaking News Historians DC Breaking News Historians DC ‘Scottsboro Boys’ pardoned in Alabama ‘November 22, 1963’ U-Boat discovered off the coast of Indonesia Vatican publicly unveils bone fragments said to belong to St. Peter Pictured: the 'real site' of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Historian: Taiwan can use WWII legacy to improve standing with China 'I Take Long Walks': The Emotional Lives of Holocaust Scholars Chinese historian: Xi Jinping a master of "neo-authoritarianism" History Comes to Life With Tweets From Past Celtic Paths, Illuminated by a Sundial try{for(var lastpass_iter=0; lastpass_iter < document.forms.length; lastpass_iter++){ var lastpass_f = document.forms[lastpass_iter]; if(typeof(lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2)=="undefined"){ lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2 = lastpass_f.submit; lastpass_f.submit = function(){ var form=this; var customEvent = document.createEvent("Event"); customEvent.initEvent("lpCustomEvent", true, true); var d = document.getElementById("hiddenlpsubmitdiv"); for(var i = 0; i < document.forms.length; i++){ if(document.forms[i]==form){ d.innerText=i; } } d.dispatchEvent(customEvent); form.lpsubmitorig2(); } } }}catch(e){}
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at last, history has gotten into bed with psychological science, and it’s a happy match. History gives us the data of, in Barbara Tuchman’s splendid words, our march of folly -- repeated examples of human beings unable and unwilling to learn from mistakes, let alone to admit them. Cognitive science shows us why
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Our brains, which have allowed us to travel into outer space, have a whole bunch of design flaws, which is why we have so much breathtaking bumbling here on Earth.
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Of the many built-in biases in human thought, three have perhaps the greatest consequences for our own history and that of nations: the belief that we see things as they really are, rather than as we wish them to be; the belief that we are better, kinder, smarter, and more ethical than average; and the confirmation bias, which sees to it that we notice, remember, and accept information that confirms our beliefs -- and overlook, forget, and discount information that disconfirms our beliefs.
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The great motivational theory that accommodates all of these biases is cognitive dissonance, developed by Leon Festinger in 1957 and further refined and transformed into a theory of self-justification by his student (and later my coauthor and friend) Elliot Aronson. The need to reduce dissonance is the key mechanism that underlies the reluctance to be wrong, to change our minds, to admit serious mistakes, and to be unwilling to accept unwelcome information
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The greater the dissonance between who we are and the mistake we made or the cruelty we committed, the greater the need to justify the mistake, the crime, the villainy, instead of admitting and rectifying it
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Rewriting the War, Japanese Right Attacks a Newspaper - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Tabloids brand him a traitor for disseminating “Korean lies” that they say were part of a smear campaign aimed at settling old scores with Japan. Threats of violence, Mr. Uemura says, have cost him one university teaching job and could soon rob him of a second. Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting Internet messages urging people to drive his teenage daughter to suicide.
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The threats are part of a broad, vitriolic assault by the right-wing news media and politicians here on The Asahi, which has long been the newspaper that Japanese conservatives love to hate. The battle is also the most recent salvo in a long-raging dispute over Japan’s culpability for its wartime behavior that has flared under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s right-leaning government.
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“The War on The Asahi,” as commentators have called it, began in August when the newspaper bowed to public criticism and retracted at least a dozen articles published in the 1980s and early ’90s. Those articles cited a former soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have helped abduct Korean women for the military brothels. Mr. Yoshida was discredited two decades ago, but the Japanese right pounced on The Asahi’s gesture and called for a boycott to drive the 135-year-old newspaper out of business.
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With elections this month, analysts say conservatives are trying to hobble the nation’s leading left-of-center newspaper. The Asahi has long supported greater atonement for Japan’s wartime militarism and has opposed Mr. Abe on other issues. But it is increasingly isolated as the nation’s liberal opposition remains in disarray after a crushing defeat at the polls two years ago.Continue reading the main story
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Among the women who have come forward to say they were forced to have sex with soldiers are Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.
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The revisionists, however, have seized on the lack of evidence of abductions to deny that any women were held captive in sexual slavery and to argue that the comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes out to make good money.
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Many on the right have argued that Japan’s behavior was no worse than that of other World War II combatants, including the United States’ bombing of Japanese civilians.
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Mr. Uemura said The Asahi had been too fearful to defend him, or even itself. In September, the newspaper’s top executives apologized on television and fired the chief editor.
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Mr. Uemura did not attend, explaining that he was now reluctant to appear in public. “This is the right’s way of threatening other journalists into silence,” he said. “They don’t want to suffer the same fate that I have.”
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The oldest living Marine, a North Carolina woman, has died at age 107 - CNN - 0 views
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Dorothy "Dot" Cole was the oldest living US Marine veteran when she died on January 7. She was 107 years old.
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Cole decided she would take a stance to support her country after Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.
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"There were women volunteering with the Red Cross and knitting while sitting in church, so I thought I had to do something,
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She was 28 years old in 1943 when she became among the first wave of women to join the Marine Corps Women's Reserve
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The Marine Corps eventually saw its first female pilot in 1995, according to Military Times. All jobs in the military, including combat roles, were opened to women in 2016.
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"She would want to salute all of the veterans for all the service that they've done and also the police and firemen,"
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Germans Protect Memorials to Soviet Troops Who Defeated Nazis - The New York Times - 0 views
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In interviews across three German states, historians, activists, officials and ordinary citizens explained their support for monuments glorifying a former enemy and occupier as a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.
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“We were taught to learn from pain,” said Teresa Schneidewind, 33, the head of Lützen’s museum. “We care for our memorials, because they allow us to learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
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Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.
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Red Army memorials are just some of the divisive symbols that persist in Germany long after the political systems and social mores that sustained them have vanished, a reckoning with parallels in the United States and elsewhere.
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Officials say their duty to care for such memorials dates to the so-called Good Neighbor agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1990. Under that measure, each nation committed itself to the upkeep of the other’s war graves on its territory.
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This propensity for what Ms. Schneidewind calls “historical hoarding” means that many Soviet memorials in East Germany contain Stalin’s name nearly 70 years after the dictator was largely purged from public spaces in Russia itself.
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Most of the Red Army monuments in Germany are believed to have been built above the graves of Soviet soldiers or prisoners of war. The Russian Embassy has used the pact to draw the German government’s attention to Soviet monuments, including the one in Lützen, that have been damaged or neglected.
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“Instead of tearing them down, you should redefine these memorials,” Mr. Nagel said. “You need to explain why they are here, and why you have a different view of them now.”
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In Lützen, local residents say they want to keep their Red Army memorial as it is, a tribute to the central place occupied by the pyramid in the town’s public life during Communist rule. Some remember playing around it while attending the nearby kindergarten, and they say they will fight plans to move it to accommodate a proposed new supermarket.
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“This is our history, no matter what is going on in world politics,” said the town’s mayor, Uwe Weiss. “We have to take care of it, because it is part of us.”