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2011年5月9日星期一

Abroad: 50 Years After Trial, Eichmann Secrets Live On

The 50th anniversary of Eichmann’s trial this spring has cast the early days of the postwar Federal Republic in a fresh historical light. Those were the years when the new West Germany held itself up as the cure for what ailed a humiliated and broken nation, and as an alternative to the Communist East.

That era was also the populist heyday of the organization man. And the classic portrait of Eichmann as a soulless cog in the machinery of totalitarianism, a petty bureaucrat acting out of “blind obedience,” in the incredulous description by Moshe Landau, the presiding judge at the trial — who, as it happens, died just the other day, at 99 — has also come to seem a sacred but dubious shibboleth of the time.

A different picture of the man, and the period, has begun to circulate. Bild, the German tabloid, having recently forced the BND through the courts to release a few files, uncovered an index card from 1952 that made clear that West German intelligence officials already knew Eichmann was living in Argentina. The card listed his alias there, or something close to it, and a contact who edited a well-known Nazi magazine in Buenos Aires, Der Weg.

West German authorities had claimed they had no clue where Eichmann went until the Israelis found him. Then in 2006 declassified C.I.A. documents showed they knew as early as 1956. Now it turns out they knew even earlier. Considering that Eichmann’s wife and children settled in Argentina in 1952 — living openly with Eichmann under their own names, in a house that was under his name — it seems remarkable today that authorities got away with claiming ignorance for so long.

Germans reacted to the Bild article with a familiar shake of the head that, here, implies not a lack of concern but stoic resignation. The bigger kerfuffle, though, has been around the more than 4,000 pages of undisclosed intelligence about Eichmann.

“The postwar period remains sensitive,” explained Bettina Stangneth, the author of a new German book on Eichmann, “because many Germans want to preserve the positive image they have of that time.”

She meant the postwar years of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship and the so-called economic miracle. Few West German officials, or for that matter American ones, had any interest in hunting for Eichmann during the 1950s, Ms. Stangneth noted. Both countries employed ex-Nazis in government jobs. Eichmann had beans to spill. Better to leave him in obscurity, they figured.

That Adenauer’s close adviser, Hans Globke, helped strip Jews of their rights under the Nazis was a widely publicized scandal, but it only distracted from the larger shame that countless lesser-known Nazis lived and worked under the radar throughout West German society, including in the ranks of the BND.

A new exhibition about the trial at the Topography of Terror Museum here devotes a section to reappraising the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, pointing out that she failed to attend much of the trial, never saw Eichmann cross-examined and thus didn’t witness his “just following orders” defense crumble.

“Neither perverted nor sadistic,” is how Arendt described Eichmann, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” In Argentina Eichmann had been interviewed by an ex-Nazi, Willem Sassen, who, along with some other ex-Nazis there, dreamed about exonerating Hitler and inaugurating a Fourth Reich. Confronted with some of the Sassen material at the trial, Eichmann was exposed. He had told Sassen that he only regretted not having murdered more Jews. “I could have done more and should have done more,” he said.

The German historian Ulrich Herbert, during a recent interview with a German newspaper, described Eichmann as typical of many high-ranking Nazis, priding himself on being “an anti-Semite without anti-Semitic emotions.” Historians like Mr. Herbert have increasingly been questioning Arendt’s iconic concept of the “banality of evil.” As an underling to ultimate Nazi policy makers like Himmler and Heydrich, Eichmann was following orders, but was also “convinced of his actions,” Mr. Herbert insisted.

2011年5月8日星期日

Six Years and Hundreds of Witnesses Later, Coroner Rules in London Bombings

Stories of bystanders fighting their way into mangled, pitch-black subway cars and refusing to leave passengers whose lives were slipping away. Stories of body parts strewn in the rubble of a sliced-open bus. Stories of grievously wounded people who somehow cheated death because of resilience, luck and the extraordinary efforts of strangers.

And the story, too, of how four British men of Pakistani descent committed one of the worst acts of terrorism in British history on July 7, 2005, setting off four bombs in London’s transportation network that killed 56 people, including themselves, and wounded at least 700 more.

Nearly six years later, after a highly unusual inquest in which the final moments of each of the 52 victims’ lives unfolded in forensic detail in a courtroom here, the coroner in the case made her ruling: “unlawful killing.”

It was a foregone conclusion, as, in a way, was her other finding: “That the evidence I have heard does not justify the conclusion that any failings on the part of any organization or individual caused or contributed to any of the deaths.”

But the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett, explained that the inquest, standard practice after violent deaths in Britain, had in this case a larger purpose: to provide a way for the surviving families to “find out what happened, how their loved ones died and if their deaths could have been prevented.”

The inquest into the 7/7 bombings, as they are known, has been widely praised for its humane and sensitive approach. Though inquests are usually held soon after someone dies, this one was delayed until after the end of several terrorist trials that had bearing on the evidence.

It was an immensely complicated proceeding, dealing with four crime scenes, three in the subway system and one on a bus in central London, and detailing the background and movements of the four men responsible. It heard from 309 witnesses, including intelligence officers, and listened to the written statements of 197 other people.

In her remarks, Lady Justice Hallett said she was certain that the bombings could not have been prevented, even though two of the bombers were known by MI5, Britain’s domestic security service.

She also acknowledged that there were widespread problems in the emergency response to the bombings: some people who survived the attacks died while waiting for up to an hour to be rescued. But she also said that after hearing all the medical evidence, she was convinced that none of those victims would have survived.

“The evidence I have heard does not justify the conclusion that any failings on the part of any organization or individual caused or contributed to any of the deaths,” the coroner said.

But she made a number of recommendations about how the security services could improve intelligence gathering and the emergency services their coordination and organization.

The families of some of the victims said that her recommendations did not go far enough and called for a new inquiry. At the same time, 10 of the families said they were grateful for how the inquest had been conducted.

“The coroner should be commended for her efforts in ensuring that these proceedings have been conducted at all times in a dignified, timely and sensitive manner to those who lost their lives,” they said in a statement.

Day after day, the inquest heard from an array of witnesses, some arriving in wheelchairs or using crutches or canes, others still traumatized and in counseling. Some of the witnesses said that anyone would have helped the way that they did.

The inquest heard how Group Capt. Craig Staniforth of the Royal Air Force smashed his way into one of the bombed subway cars, swinging onto the wreckage from handrails and then discussing his daughter’s college applications with a severely wounded passenger in an effort to keep him conscious.

“I can almost reel off to this day what four universities those were,” the passenger, John Tulloch, told the inquest.

It heard how another passenger, Steve Hucklesbury, climbed into a wrecked car to try to resuscitate Laura Webb, 29, with help from a woman shouting directions through the window, but how he had to give up when her mouth and nose filled with blood and it was clear that nothing more could be done.

It heard how Gill Hicks, on the subway near the Russell Square station, seeing that her legs were “literally hanging by a sinew of skin,” fashioned two tourniquets out of her scarf and willed herself to remain alert because otherwise, “you know, I would die,” she said. She lost 75 percent of her blood and both her legs.

“Until I started this process, I had no idea that people could survive injuries as horrific as yours,” Lady Justice Hallett told her at the inquest. “You are amazing.”

And it heard how Gerardine Quaghebeur, a neuroradiologist who was sitting in the same subway car as one of the bombers, refused to evacuate the wrecked, pitch-black train. wounded, dead and dying passengers, stacked one on top of the other.

Speaking of a woman who had been seated near her, Ms. Quaghebeur said: “She asked, ‘You can’t be leaving us. You aren’t going to leave us?’?”

“No,” she replied. “No, I’ll stay.”

View the original article here

2011年5月6日星期五

52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right

The finding confirms some of the weirdest of the many strange predictions — like black holes and the expanding universe — of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity.

“We have completed this landmark experiment of testing Einstein’s universe,” Francis Everitt, leader of the project, known as Gravity Probe B, said at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington. “And Einstein survives.”

That was hardly a surprise. Observations of planets, the Moon and particularly the shifting orbits of the Lageos research satellites had convinced astronomers and physicists that Einstein’s predictions were on the mark. Nevertheless, scientists said that the Gravity Probe results would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements, and that it was important to keep testing theories that were thought to be correct.

Clifford M. Will of Washington University in St. Louis — who was not part of the team but was chairman of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration advisory committee evaluating its work, and who wrote a book titled “Was Einstein Right?” — said that in science, “no such book is ever closed.”

Einstein’s theory relates gravity to the sagging of cosmic geometry under the influence of matter and energy, the way a sleeper makes a mattress sag. One consequence is that a massive spinning object like Earth should spin up the empty space around it, the way twirling the straw in a Frappuccino sets the drink and the whole Venti-size cup spinning around with it, an effect called frame dragging. Astronomers think this effect, although minuscule for Earth, could play a role in the black hole dynamos that power quasars.

Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second of arc — the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away — every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in agreement with Einstein’s predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.

Likewise, the “sag” should alter the space-time geometry around Earth, warping it from the Euclidean ideal and cutting an inch out of the Gravity Probe’s orbit around it, so that the circumference is slightly less than the Euclidean ideal of pi times the orbit’s diameter, a fact confirmed by the Stanford gyroscopes to an accuracy of 0.3 percent.

For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.

The experiment was conceived in 1959, but the technology to make these esoteric measurements did not yet exist, which is why the experiment took so long and cost so much. The gyroscopes, for example, were made of superconducting niobium spheres, the roundest balls ever manufactured, which then had to be flown in a lead bag to isolate them from any other influences in the universe, save the subversive curvature of space-time itself.

Shortly before the probe’s launching, Dr. Francis said the project had been canceled at least seven times, “depending on what you mean by canceled.” It was finally sent into orbit in 2004 and operated for some 17 months, but not all went well. When the scientists began analyzing their data, they discovered that patches of electrical charge on the niobium balls had generated extra torque on the gyroscopes, causing them to drift.

It would take five more years to understand the spurious signals and retrieve the gravity data by dint of an effort that Dr. Will called “nothing less than heroic.”

In the meantime, the NASA grant ran out. Dr. Everitt secured another one from Richard Fairbank, a financier and son of one of the experiment’s founders, William Fairbank, that was matched by NASA and Stanford. When that ran out and NASA turned him down for a new grant, Dr. Everitt obtained a $2.7 million grant from Turki al-Saud, a Stanford graduate and vice president for research institutes at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

View the original article here

2011年5月5日星期四

52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right

The finding confirms some of the weirdest of the many strange predictions — like black holes and the expanding universe — of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity.

For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-long journey.

It would take five more years to understand the spurious signals and retrieve the gravity data by dint of an effort that Dr. Will called “nothing less than heroic.”

2011年4月24日星期日

Toyota Says No Full Production Until Year’s End

The time frame was the longest yet described by a Japanese car company in assessing the continued effects of the supply chain disruptions caused by last month’s destructive quake and tsunami.

Though Toyota’s 17 plants in Japan escaped the disaster relatively unscathed, factory lines are working at only half volume here and at 40 percent overseas, as vital suppliers in Japan’s worst-hit areas struggle to restart operations.

Toyota had indicated this week that its Japanese operations would remain at half-speed through at least June 3, but was unwilling to speculate beyond that. And it had said on Tuesday that it would cut production at its North American plants by 75 percent in the next six weeks to conserve its limited supply of parts made in Japan.

The two other main Japanese automakers, Nissan and Honda, are also operating at only about half of normal production volumes in Japan.

At a briefing for reporters here on Friday, Akio Toyoda, president and chief executive of Toyota, said he expected to ramp up production gradually in Japan, starting in July, as more parts makers came back on line.

Toyota will raise production at its overseas plants a month later, in August, to allow for the parts to arrive from Japan, Mr. Toyoda said.

Production at home and overseas will return to predisaster levels at all factory lines and across all vehicle models by November or December, Mr. Toyoda said.

“The damage has been so widespread in this unprecedented calamity that its economic effect is being felt throughout Japan and in every industry,” Mr. Toyoda said. He added that the automaker had dispatched employees to help recovery work at some of its most vital parts makers.

The severe disruptions come as a painful blow to Toyota just as it had appeared set to shake off the effects of a sharp slowdown in sales after the global economic crisis, as well as its handling of a spate of recalls. The reduced production also highlights a downside to Toyota’s insistence on making almost half of its cars in Japan and shipping them overseas. Also, its celebrated just-in-time production system, which reduces parts inventories to a minimum, may have made the disruptions worse.

The automaker estimates that it faces shortages of about 150 critical parts, down from about 500 immediately after the March 11 quake. Atsushi Niimi, executive vice president in charge of production, said that Toyota had switched suppliers in some cases to speed the recovery.

He said it had been a bitter revelation to Toyota that its cars, even those produced overseas, still relied so heavily on Japanese parts.

“We need to procure more parts overseas, and we also urge our suppliers to make more forays outside Japan,” Mr. Niimi said. He added that Toyota would diversify its supplier base over all to make its supply chain more resilient.

“It’s something we don’t want to think about, “ he said, “but it is something we cannot avoid if we are to continue to do business in a quake-prone country.”

Mr. Toyoda, the company chief, said continuing aftershocks made the outlook uncertain. He declined to comment on the effect of the disruptions on the company’s earnings.

“We just had an aftershock yesterday,” he said. “As these continue, the rapid recovery we’ve seen can come undone. The future is impossible to predict.”

Another concern is the severe energy shortage brought by the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, 140 miles north of Tokyo, as well as damage to other power plants in the region.

To avert a power supply collapse, the Japanese government initially instructed companies to reduce their energy use by as much as 25 percent. But frantic efforts by utilities to increase power generation at plants outside the worst-hit zones, as well as a public drive to conserve energy, has eased the energy shortfall, allowing the government to lower its directive to 15 percent.

Mr. Niimi, the executive vice president for production, said that Toyota was discussing energy-saving measures with other automakers, like shutting production lines during the week and running them on weekends, when more electricity is available.

Still, Mr. Toyoda said, the company was committed to keeping production — and jobs — in Japan.

“Above all, we all love Japan,” he said. “As we face a national crisis, each company must do its part.”

2011年4月23日星期六

Joel Colton, Who Kept History Current for 50 Years, Dies at 92

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Kenneth.

The textbook, “A History of the Modern World,” was written in 1950 by the Princeton historian R. R. Palmer and published by Knopf. Dr. Colton, a professor at Duke University, collaborated with Dr. Palmer on the next nine editions. About 2 million copies have been sold.

McGraw-Hill, the current publisher, said the textbook has been translated into 10 languages and has been used in more than 1,000 colleges, universities and high schools. The 10th edition was published in 2006 with a third contributor, Lloyd Kramer. In 1987, The New York Times included it on a list of 19 textbooks considered classics in their field.

Despite high sales and accolades, some readers bemoaned the book’s dense prose and considerable heft (about four pounds). Dr. Colton was quick to defend it.

“It’s both scholarly and readable,” he told The Times in 2002. “It was never intended to be only a textbook. It was meant to be a book to be read.”

Joel G. Colton was born on Aug. 23, 1918, in the Bronx. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from City College in 1937 and a master’s in history from Columbia in 1940, but his studies were interrupted by service in the Army.

Dr. Colton began teaching at Duke in 1947 and completed his doctorate in history at Columbia in 1950. He published his first book, “Compulsory Labor Arbitration in France,” in 1951. He followed it with the biography “Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics” in 1966 and “The Twentieth Century,” part of Time-Life’s “Great Ages of Man,” series in 1968.

He was the chairman of Duke’s history department from 1967 to 1974, when he left to serve as director for humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. He returned to Duke in 1982 and retired in 1989.

His wife, Shirley, died in 2003. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Valerie Woodbury, and five grandchildren.

2011年4月22日星期五

Toyota Says No Full Production Until Year’s End

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。