June 7, 2019

Getting their hair cut is nothing compared to what the Russians were doing

'They raped every German female from eight to 80'

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis"

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.

Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia.

Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/01/news.features11

July 3, 2017

Scary undersea topography, massive undersea landslides could happen at any time

Huge underwater cliffs on plate boundaries could let go with the next earthquake and do it again





Experts urge Jamaica to prepare for big quake

A U.S. seismic expert urged authorities in Jamaica to start long-term efforts to prepare for another major earthquake on the island, where the seaside capital was mostly destroyed by a big temblor just over a century ago.

It's impossible for scientists to determine if the next big quake will hit in days or decades, but geophysics professor Eric Calais of Purdue University is urging the island's government and various stakeholders to understand that the threat is very real based on the area's history and active seismic activity.

"A 6.5 in the harbor by the capital could be a tremendous threat," said Calais visit to Port Royal, a town just outside of Kingston which was the island's main city in the 17th century until an earthquake and tsunami submerged two-thirds of the settlement in 1692.

Calais' call is especially sobering because in March 2008 he was among a group of scientists who warned officials in Haiti that their country was ripe for a major earthquake after detecting worrisome signs of growing stresses in a fault. Two years later, that fault unleashed a 7.0 quake that devastated the Caribbean nation, with the government putting the death toll at 316,000 people.

https://phys.org/news/2013-03-experts-urge-jamaica-big-quake.html

May 26, 2015

you can run, but you can't hide!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/main/index.html