Historical

Neil Armstrong, 1st man to step on moon, dies at 82 'That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind'

Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who marked an epochal achievement in exploration with “one small step” from the Apollo 11 lunar module on July 20, 1969, becoming the first person to walk on the moon, has died at 82.

The family announced the death in a statement Saturday but did not disclose when or where he died. They attributed it to “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.”

A taciturn engineer and test pilot who was never at ease with his fame, Mr. Armstrong was among the most heroized Americans of the 1960s Cold War space race.

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/25/1347...

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Costas Kantouris, USA Today, August 22, 2012

Border police jeeps hurtle along hot, dusty tracks past potato fields on their way to the river that marks the Greek-Turkish border. Sirens blaring, the convoys have been repelling wave after wave of migrants.

Greece’s remote Evros region has turned into Europe’s main battleground against illegal immigration; more than two-thirds of people making the clandestine journey into the European Union pass through here from neighboring Turkey.

Greece launched an aggressive campaign this month to try to seal its 130-mile northeastern border, as it faces a debilitating financial crisis that has caused a swell in joblessness and a surge in racist attacks against immigrants with dark skin.

The police operation has brought nearly 2,000 additional border guards to the Turkish frontier previously manned by about 500 officers. They fanned out with dogs, night vision equipment and flat-bottomed boats for 24-hour patrols of the Evros River that forms a natural border.

In Athens, the operation is being bolstered by mass roundups of suspected illegal immigrants. They are seen lined up on the streets of the capital every day, many in handcuffs, waiting to be put in detention until they can be deported. In the first week of the crackdown in early August, police said they apprehended nearly 7,000 people for identification checks; nearly 1,700 were slated for deportation.

Uniformed police officers from 25 countries are already helping Greece guard the Evros River as part of the European Union’s border protection agency, Frontex. Greek police figures show more than 21,000 illegal migrants were arrested in the first six months of 2012 after crossing over from Turkey, with nearly all—20,841—caught along the northeastern land border rather than on one of the many Aegean islands near the Turkish coast. The figures show a nearly 29 percent increase from the same period last year.

Afghans currently make up the highest number of people crossing illegally, followed by Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and an increasing number of people from war-ravaged Syria, according to the agency.

The police operation has faced strong criticism from human rights groups, local officials, and even police officers’ associations—with criticism focusing on alleged racial profiling and police brutality.

The government insists the operation is working, reporting a drop in illegal border crossings by around 90 percent in the first week.

“This is a massive operation that is taking place in the country for the first time and it will continue in the long-term,” police spokesman Christos Manouras said.

“It is widely accepted that the expulsion of immigrants who are here illegally is a national necessity, an issue of national survival.”

Anti-racism campaigners last month said immigrants living in Greece have been targeted in at least 300 violent attacks between early April and late July.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-08-2...

Terre’Blanche verdict: what does it mean for South Africa?
Tuesday 29 May 2012

Eugene Terre’Blanche liked to tell me that he would die facing the enemy. He had in mind red communists, pink liberals and black terrorists. Colour was always a big thing for a man whose French Huguenot surname translated into “White Earth”. When the campaign to save the White Rhino got underway, he said simply: “To hell with the rhino – save the white man!”

The end was not as he imagined. “The Leader”, as he liked to be known, South Africa‘s Führer of the Veld, founder of the far-right, Afrikaner Resistance Movement – or ARM as it becomes in English – was bludgeoned to death in his spartan bedroom, on his farm, near his home-town of Ventersdorp, on Easter weekend, 2010.

For a while, in the late 80s, as the old apartheid state was cracking up, Terre’Blanche terrified its leaders because he reminded them of who they were and what they had always preached and were now putting behind them: the religion of race. The idea that God was a white man, probably of Dutch extraction, who condemned racial mixing, revolution and raffles. The old regime hated this preacher of racial rigour who accused them of betrayal and did all it could to destroy him. Terre’Blanche was a fundamentalist in an era of fudge.

Terre’Blanche had been, until recently, a spent force. After a jail term for beating up a black petrol-station attendant, he had fallen from the public gaze. But then he was always doing that: whether falling down drunk; falling in love with the wrong woman; or falling off his horse, at one of those quixotic Boer parades he so relished. Ironically, what put him back in the saddle in recent times has been his campaign to highlight the murders of many hundreds of white farmers up and down the land which Terre’Blanche called systematic genocide.

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Chris Mahlangu, 29, had pleaded guilty but argued that he acted in self-defence in what the judge found was a violent dispute over wages.

Mahlangu has said he feels he did no wrong by ridding the world of a man some called a monster.

The judge had rejected a defence argument that Mahlangu had been sodomised by Terre’Blanche.

A second man, Patrick Ndlovu, who was a teenager at the time of the killing two years ago, had been acquitted of the murder but found guilty of housebreaking. He was sentenced on Wednesday to two years in prison, which means he goes free.

Twenty white protesters were at the court with a black man with a rope around his neck carrying a plaque saying: “Hang Mahlangu.”

LINK W/VID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/aug/22/...