The world could have faced destruction if Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons, Israeli President Shimon Peres said at a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony, comparing that era to the nuclear threat Israel perceives from Iran today.
The ceremony on Wednesday evening at Yad Vashem, Israel?? official Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem, opened the annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II.
Hundreds of Holocaust survivors and other Israelis filled the main plaza on a cool evening to listen to speeches, prayers and music, including a children?? harmonica band founded by Shmuel Gogol, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto.
Restaurants and places of entertainment closed throughout the country. After a memorial air raid siren yesterday morning, further ceremonies were to include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at sites around the country.
Peres, 84, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and serves now as ceremonial head of state, observed that the Jewish people might have been tardy in setting up their state too late to rescue Jews from Europe.
Peres charged that the world woke up too late to eliminate the threat of Hitler before he started a war that killed 60 million people, warning that the world must not let that happen again.
??n history, it is forbidden to be late,??he said.
??y heart shudders when I recall that there was a possibility that Hitler could acquire nuclear weapons,??he said. ?? leader who plans mass destruction, together with weapons of mass destruction.??br />
??hat would have been left of our world???he asked.
Aides confirmed that Peres was comparing Hitler and Nazi Germany to Iran and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad though Peres did not do so explicitly. Despite Iranian denials, Israel believes Tehran is trying to build nuclear weapons and Ahmadinejad has called repeatedly for Israel?? destruction.
??he world must act on its responsibilities without delay,??he added, in what aides said was another reference to Iran.
Speakers at Wednesday?? opening ceremony repeatedly referred to Israel?? military strength, asserting that it could prevent another mass catastrophe from befalling the Jewish people.
In his speech, Peres criticized the German people of the 1930s for electing and venerating a ??razy person,??Hitler.
??ow is it possible that a people does not rise up in the face of murder in the streets, an army rolling on tank treads to destroy neighbors of yesterday and friends of the day before???he asked.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS