| Earliest anti-Semitic letter by Hitler displayed Posted: 08 Jun 2011 06:17 PM PDT 
THE signature under the typewritten words on yellowing sheets of nearly century-old paper is unmistakable: Adolf Hitler, with the last few scribbled letters drooping downward. The date is 1919 and, decades before the Holocaust, the 30- year-old German soldier - born in Austria - penned what are believed to be Hitler's first written comments calling for the annihilation of Jews. Written on a German army typewriter, Hitler's letter has long been known to scholars. It is considered significant because it demonstrates how early he was forming his anti-Semitic views. The document was displayed on Tuesday in New York by the founder of a Jewish human rights organization that purchased the letter last month. Hitler "set the gold standard about man's inhumanity to man," said Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Three weeks ago, the Los Angeles-based organization purchased the original for US $150,000 from Profiles in History, a dealer in Calabasas Hills, California, which acquired the document from a dealer in Kansas, who in turn purchased it from a US Army soldier named William F. Ziegler, according to the rabbi. Ziegler is said to have found the four typed pages in a Nazi archive near Nuremberg, Germany, in the final months of World War II. "The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people," Hitler wrote in German. "The cause of this aversion ... arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression that the individual Jew leaves - almost always an unfavorable one." Hitler said that a powerful government could curtail the so- called "Jewish threat" by denying their rights. But "its final aim, however, must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether." |
| Téa Obreht wins for The Tiger's Wife Posted: 08 Jun 2011 12:30 PM PDT 
Not only is the newly announced winner of this year's Orange prize for fiction a first time novelist, she's also strikingly, surprisingly young – only 25 – making Téa Obreht the youngest ever author to be given the award in its 16-year history. The Belgrade-born and New York-based Obreht was given what is the most prestigious prize for women's writing at a ceremony in London's Royal Festival Hall. Something of an unexpected winner, judges praised her debut novel The Tiger's Wife as evidence of a "truly exciting" new literary talent. The historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, who chaired the judging panel, said the novel more than fulfilled the Orange prize criteria of being original, accessible and excellent. "It is a very brave book," she said. "We were looking for a book that had some kind of alchemy, that changed us as readers and changed the way we thought about the world and The Tiger's Wife certainly does that. It is a very special book." To have that effect is all the more remarkable, given Obreht's age. She is 25 now, but the publishers have had the manuscript, written while she was on Cornell University's creative writing course, since 2008. Last year her literary wunderkind status was cemented when she was the youngest member of New Yorker magazine's top 20 writers under 40. Obreht's victory meant defeat for better established writers Emma Donoghue – the bookies' favourite for the best selling Room – and Nicole Krauss for Great House. Many had also fancied the chances of Aminatta Forna for her rich and engrossing The Memory of Love. Hughes said it had been a difficult decision – the final Tuesday-night judging panel session lasted more than four hours – and it was not unanimous. "It was an incredibly exhilarating and very positive meeting and although judges were arguing very passionately for particular books, without exception everyone was delighted that The Tiger's Wife won." Obreht's book is set amid the horrors and aftermath of Balkan civil war, mixing magic, myth and folklore with intense, tough realism. There are encounters with a deathless vampirish man, the autobiographical story of a young woman's love for her dying grandfather and an almost surreal tale about a tiger that terrorises a village. Its subject matter might be heavy – the ravaging effects of the Balkan wars – but Hughes said it was written with "such a lightness of touch that it makes the novel very charismatic and readable". Hughes said the novel had been enlightening. "It opened the doors and allowed us to step into the houses and homes of people who have lived in the Balkans for generations and suffered generations of chronic conflict and it asked what do you do, as a society, to deal with that? One of the things you do, to deal with that level of suffering, is that you tell stories. For a prize which is a celebration of fiction and literature, it seems good to be honouring a book that puts storytelling right at its heart." Obreht was born in what was Yugoslavia in 1985 and grew up in the capital Belgrade until her family moved to Cyprus then Egypt after war broke out. When Obreht was 12, they emigrated to the US. If this year's Orange prize shortlist has been striking for anything, it is the dark and difficult themes that have been mined by the six writers on the shortlist. Donoghue's Man Booker shortlisted Room grippingly tells the Josef Fritzl style story of an imprisoned child and mother while Forna tackles the horrors of Sierra Leone's civil war and Krauss weaves together terribly sad stories of loss and suffering. The other two nominated novels, both debuts, were Kathleen W |
| China confirms first aircraft carrier Posted: 08 Jun 2011 12:25 PM PDT 
HONG KONG: A top Chinese military official has confirmed that Beijing is building an aircraft carrier, marking the first acknowledgement of the ship's existence from China's secretive armed forces. In an exclusive interview published on Tuesday, the Hong Kong Commercial Daily quoted Chen Bingde, chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army, as saying the 300 metre (990-foot) refurbished Soviet carrier "is being built, but it has not been completed". He declined to elaborate although there has been wide speculation that the vessel was nearly finished after the ship, then called the Varyag, was reportedly purchased in 1998. It is currently based in the northeast port city of Dalian. The ship, which an expert on China's military has said would be used for training and as a model for a future indigenously-built ship, was originally built for the Soviet navy. Construction was interrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Hong Kong paper quoted anonymous sources as saying the carrier will be launched by the end of June at the earliest. Qi Jianguo, assistant to the chief of the PLA's general staff, told the newspaper that the carrier would not enter other nations' territories, in accordance with Beijing's defensive military strategy. "All of the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers -- they are symbols of a great nation," he was quoted as saying. But China is involved in a number of simmering marine territorial disputes. China has claimed mineral rights around the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and argued that foreign navies cannot sail through the area without Beijing's permission. In September, Japan and China clashed over the disputed Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu Islands in China, located in the East China Sea. In April, Admiral Robert Willard, head of US Pacific Command, said China's navy had adopted a less aggressive stance in the Pacific after protests from Washington and other nations in the region. The PLA -- the largest army in the world -- is hugely secretive about its defence programmes, which benefit from a big military budget boosted by the nation's runaway economic growth. |
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