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POPSThe Balfour Declaration and the Mandate Under the League of Nations ........ The Jewish Connection To The Land ...... We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographical bonds." The purpose of post-World War I's League of Nations was to prepare those liberated from the Turks for independence. Once the indigenous populations demonstrated their ability to assume control, the mandates given to the war's victorious superpowers were supposed to be self-terminating. For the international community, justice for the Arabs meant guaranteeing their economic, civil, and religious rights. Awarding the Arabs any form of self-government within Palestine was precluded by British commitments to the Jews under the Balfour Declaration, which had been incorporated in the mandate of the League of Nations.
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POPSBrain Blasting Laser In a world first, a man was strapped to a bed in Paris and had laser beams fired into his brain. He not only survived but, amazingly, wasn't James Bond.
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POPSWhy you should go with your gut feeling To uncover this ability, Pessiglione and colleague Chris Frith, of University College London, tested 20 volunteers with a simple game based on winning and losing small amounts of money. On a computer screen, the volunteers watched an animated abstract pattern which for a couple of tenths of a second included one of three symbols part way through. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the symbols indicated whether they would lose or gain £1 or break even if they accepted the gamble. Surprisingly, subjects got better at predicting whether they would win or not, eventually plateauing at slightly above chance, strong evidence that volunteers do not consciously notice the symbols but are affected by them nonetheless.
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POPSBirth of the Blitzkrieg - September 1, 1939 "Success is achieved through surprise and speed, which keeps the enemy off balance. Maneuvering is coordinated through the use of radio, which was used so extensively by the Germans that individual tanks carried their own equipment. The French, by comparison, hardly used radio at all. The French High Command was not even connected by radio to units in the field. Instead, it dispatched orders by motorcycle courier from its headquarters outside of Paris. Incidentally, the German Wehrmacht never officially used the word blitzkrieg -- literally, "lightning war" -- though it did appear in several prewar German military publications. It came into popular use after turning up in Time magazine's coverage of the Polish invasion."
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POPSFrom Snapshots, a 3-D View - Amazing New Technology In a Photosynth demonstration at the annual TED conference last year, the presenter blew the crowd’s mind with a photosynth of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, made up of photos mined from Flickr.com. In other words, Microsoft had created a seamless, successful photosynth using hundreds of existing photos, taken by different people at different times using all kinds of cameras.
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POPSA $45T Clean Energy Revolution Oh yeah....this is huge! Bigger than the internet and telecommunications revolution...the energy revolution seems poised to be the defining innovation of this century. In addition to creating a much more stable source of energy and helping the environment, the opportunity for investment and new jobs makes this the most exciting opportunity i've ever seen.
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POPSThe End of The Fairy Tale by Ralph Peters Putin went to war and the American president went to a basketball game--reinforcing the Kremlin's conviction that it could do as it pleased and get away with it. (Bush's gravest flaw is that he's a dreadful judge of character, stubbornly trusting undeserving men, from Iraqi schemer Ahmed Chalabi , through the incompetent Alberto Gonzales , to Vladimir Putin , who played Bush for a fool.) French president Nicolas Sarkozy, well-intentioned and inadequate The Putin regime was perfectly willing to let Monsieur le President return to Paris with a signed piece of paper. The Russians have drawn the lesson from Western efforts to negotiate with Iran and other rogue states that Europe can be narcotized with empty agreements and nebulous promises and that Europe has become a continent of bureaucrats who much prefer paperwork to reality. And there are no penalties when the agreements prove worthless.
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POPSNATO- the paper alliance John Laughland is a British historian and political analyst, and director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.
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POPSEiffel Tower gets new observation deck This is pretty cool. I have mixed emotions about this. I am a fan of history & not making modifications to historical emblems & such but at the same time, I find this very cool. I also think it looks kind of cool. I don't know. What do you think?
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POPSDa Vinci's Model Car Although most historians agree the birth of the modern car came about in the late 19th century when two Germans, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, designed real, working internal combustion engines, experiments with moving vehicles weren't uncommon beforehand. As far back as 1770, a Frenchman named Nicolas Cugnot developed a steam-powered machine, the Fardier, which could crawl through the streets of Paris at about two miles per hour. It was more than 500 years ago, however -- sometime around the year 1478 to be more or less specific -- when Leonardo drew out his plans for the world's first self-propelled vehicle. A working model of Leonardo Da Vinci's car on display at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy.
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POPSPolish President Criticizes France, Germany For Being Too Soft On Moscow
President Kaczynski accused them of being too soft on Moscow due to their commercial ties with Russia. The statement on the president's Web site also said Kaczynski assured Saakashvili that he would continue to "support Georgia's integration in Euro-Atlantic structures" — a reference to Georgia's NATO aspirations. Poland and the ex-Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia , all new EU members, have sharply condemned Russia for its military incursion into Georgia amid the conflict in South Ossetia. After the fighting broke out, the presidents of the four countries issued a joint statement calling Russia's policy "imperialist and revisionist" and urging NATO and the European Union to stand up to Moscow. Leaders from those four nations followed that up with a trip in recent days to Tbilisi, joined by Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko, to show their support to Georgia. Germany and France have been less critical of Russia. Sarkozy holds the EU's rotating preside
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POPSNew Obama Ad - 'Embrace' LA Times : Democrat Barack Obama is on vacation this week, but his campaign released its latest advertisement, accusing Republican rival John McCain of being a "celebrity" in Washington political circles. The McCain campaign fired the first salvo in the celebrity game when it compared Obama to Paris Hilton, who's more famous for being notorious than for any real accomplishment. "For decades, he's been Washington's biggest celebrity," the announcer says of McCain in the Obama ad, titled "Embrace." It then shows the introduction of the Arizona Republican during an appearance on " Saturday Night Live."
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POPSEurope's 'Earth Explorer' to Map Planet "Inside Out" From Space The five hundred million dollar satellite is expected to survive for 20 months - at twenty-five million a month that makes it even higher maintenance than Paris Hilton, but infinitely more useful. Data provided by the satellite will map everything from ocean depths to the magma core of the planet, providing data of unprecedented accuracy for everything from climate physics to geophysics. In an interesting coincidence, GOCE will be launched on the same day the Large Hadron Collider powers up. Project leader Kal-El urges readers not to pay too much attention to this, nor ask why the nose cone seems to be full of diapers and a red cape.
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POPSParis To "White-Haired Dude" --- "What Ever" Most astonishing of all, Big Media (the broadcast and cable networks, The Associated Press and major newspapers) continue their near-total blackout of reporting on a story that broke in the National Enquirer on July 22, well before we went on vacation -- where the tabloid's reporters and a photographer staked out a Los Angeles hotel where former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards allegedly visited his rumored mistress. You can read or hear all about it in the British press, online bloggers, Internet Web sites (including the Huffington Post and most exhaustively on Mickey Kaus' blog), the usual right-wing radio suspects. Even late night comics like Jay Leno are starting to joke about it. But don't expect a word of it to pass the lips of Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric. Elizabeth Edwards Speaks Out On Her Husband's Affair http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/08/elizabeth-edwar.html
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