That's Hitler's Mercedes!

A New Jersey auto dealer was shocked to find that the vintage car he bought while searching on an online shopping store was built for the Hitler camp in 1942.

Zenop Tuncer, an auto dealer called up Mercedes to order parts for a vintage car he was repairing, and when he revealed the vehicle's serial number to the company, the reply was: "That's Hitler's car."

Mercedes confirmed that the car was genuine, and was one of just eight made specially cars for Nazi officials.

The 1942 Mercedes 320 Cabriolet D was part of a fleet built for senior officers of the Third Reich during the World War II.

While the model being repaired in Edgewater, New Jersey was probably not flashy enough to be driven by the Fuhrer himself, it is likely to have belonged to one of his generals, The Daily Mail reported

Tuncer reportedly found the car while searching on eBay on behalf of a customer and property developer Fred Daibes.

Daibes bought the car for around $180,000 -- but when he saw the unusual four-door convertible, he assumed it must be a fake.

The best-known of the modified Mercedes 320s was one driven by Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, which was written off after being struck by a bomb during a failed assassination attempt.

The car would almost certainly not have been used by Hitler, who drove a 'top of the line' Mercedes 770, said an expert from Mercedes' headquarters in Germany

The vehicle still has signs of its disquieting origins -- a patch on the fender was apparently an attempt to remove the Nazi flag from the car, said Tuncer.

According to owner Daibes the sinister Mercedes made its way to New Jersey via Chicago thanks to an enterprising American sailor.

The sailor apparently painted the car black to enable him to smuggle it across the Atlantic, keeping it in his basement for decades before his grandson sold it to Daibes.

The Mercedes still runs well, though its engine generates just 80 horsepower, with a top speed of no more than 80 mph.

Daibes has already turned down an offer of $1.5 million for this unique car and he plans to hang on to this extraordinary find.

Nazis planned to invade UK, kill Churchill with choco bomb

Secret wartime papers exchanged between MI5 officials have revealed that the Nazis' plans to conquer Britain included a deadly assault on Sir Winston Churchill [ Images ] with exploding chocolate.

Adolf Hitler's [ Images ] bomb-makers coated explosive devices with a thin layer of rich dark chocolate and then packaged it in expensive-looking black and gold paper.

The Germans planned to use secret agents working in Britain to discreetly place the bars of chocolate -- branded as Peter's Chocolate -- among other luxury items taken on trays into the dining room used by the War Cabinet during the Second World War.

The lethal slabs of confection were packed with enough explosives to kill anyone within several metres.

But Hitler's plot was foiled by British spies who discovered that they were being made and tipped off one of MI5's most senior intelligence chiefs, Lord Victor Rothschild.

Lord Rothschild, a scientist in peacetime as well as a key member of the Rothschild banking family, immediately typed a letter to a talented illustrator seconded to his unit asking him to draw poster-size images of the chocolate to warn the public to be on the lookout for the bars.

His letter to the artist, Laurence Fish, is dated May 4, 1943 and was written from his secret bunker in Parliament Street, central London

The letter, marked 'Secret', reads "Dear Fish, I wonder if you could do a drawing for me of an explosive slab of chocolate."

"We have received information that the enemy are using pound slabs of chocolate which are made of steel with a very thin covering of real chocolate," the Daily Mailquoted the letter as reading.

"Inside there is high explosive and some form of delay mechanism... When you break off a piece of chocolate at one end in the normal way, instead of it falling away, a piece of canvas is revealed stuck into the middle of the piece which has been broken off and a ticking into the middle of the remainder of the slab.

"When the piece of chocolate is pulled sharply, the canvas is also pulled and this initiates the mechanism. I enclose a very poor sketch done by somebody who has seen one of these.  It is wrapped in the usual sort of black paper with gold lettering, the variety being PETERS.

"Would it be possible for you to do a drawing of this, one possibly with the paper half taken off revealing one end and another with the piece broken off showing the canvas.

"The text should indicate that this piece together with the attached canvas is pulled out sharply and that after a delay of seven seconds the bomb goes off," it added.

The letter was found by Fish's wife, journalist Jean Bray, as she sorted through his possessions following the artist's death, aged 89, in 2009.

A legendary Russian spy who foiled a Nazi plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt died in January, aged 87.

Gevork Andreyevich Vartanyan, codenamed Amir, ensured the safety of the three leaders by exposing a plot to kill them at the historic 1943 Tehran conference of the ''Big Three'' Allies.

He was just 19 at the time but he led a group of young Soviet agents to disrupt a German plot codenamed Operation Long Jump to wipe out the leaders of Britain, the USSR and the US.

Christ's birthplace placed on UNESCO danger list

The Church of Nativity in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, believed to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ , has been placed on a list of world heritage sites in danger by the UN cultural body UNESCO.

The church, which sits on a site that is identified by Christian tradition as the birthplace of Jesus, and the pilgrimage route on the site is suffering from damages due to water leaks, UNESCO said.

A church was first completed on the site in 339 AD and the edifice that replaced it after a fire in the 6th century retains elaborate floor mosaics from the original edifice.

The site, situated 10 kilometres south of Jerusalem, includes the church as well as Latin, Greek Orthodox, Franciscan and Armenian convents and churches as well as bell towers and terraced gardens.

The Palestinians had pressed to include the church and pilgrimage route in the danger list at the meeting of the World Heritage 21-nation committee in St. Petersburg, Russia 

The list of World Heritage in Danger is designed to inform the international community of threats to the outstanding universal values for which a property has been inscribed, and to encourage corrective action.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee also inscribed sites from Israel, Palau, Indonesia, Morocco, China, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire on the World Heritage List.

The Nahal Me'arot/Wadi el-Mughara Caves at Mount Carmel in Israel covers 54 hectares and contains cultural deposits representing 500,000 years of human evolution with evidence of burials, early stone architecture and the transition from a hunter-gathering lifestyle to agriculture and animal husbandry.

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon in Palau contains 445 uninhabited limestone islands of volcanic origin, and also counts with a complex reef system featuring over 385 coral species and different types of habitat.

The site harbours the highest concentration of marine lakes anywhere and isolated bodies of seawater separated from the ocean by land barriers.

Five rice terraces and their water temples in Bali, Indonesia, were also recognized for their cooperative water management system, known as subak, which dates back to the 9th century.

Did aliens visit Odisha ahead of India's Independence?

Just a couple of months ahead of India's [ Images ] Independence in 1947, an Unidentified Flying Object was reported to have landed in Odisha's Nayagrah district.

Rejected as fanciful stories by many, traces of the incident buried under the pages of the country's tumultuous history during the period, have been preserved in the form of traditional palm-leaf engravings by a local artist.

Depicting the long-forgotten stories of 'yantra-purusha' (alien robot-like creatures), pieces of those rare engravings have now been published in 'The Obliterary Journal' (Blaft Publications) in between its collection of comics, street art and illustration.

Award-winning 'pattachitra' artist Pachanana Moharana, who runs a workshop in Puri, had made sketches of the alien visitors and their spacecraft which was claimed to have landed in a hilly area of Nayagarh on May, 31, 1947.

Interestingly, only a month later this incident, a mysterious crash was famously reported near Roswell, New Mexico. In the most well-publicised and most controversial of all "UFO sightings" anywhere in the world, the US Air Force [ Images ] had once claimed to have captured a flying saucer from the spot but contradicted it later on.

Moharana's art works are said to be based on the first-hand accounts of two young people who were invited into the spacecraft and given a sort of tour.

If local tales are to be believed, the book says that after the return of the aliens and the spacecraft's departure, the youths sat with a well-known 'tala pattachitra' artist and gave careful descriptions of the beings they had met inside -- a variety of rather anthropomorphic robots, or perhaps, creatures in metal suits.

These descriptions were subsequently passed down to the original artists students, and their students, for 60 years.

One of the palm-leaf engravings shows the 'yantra-purusha' wearing spacesuit with pincer-like hands rising as if offering a blessing.

Hemispherical devices protruding from the head of the aliens are a recurring feature in many of the engravings. Some aliens appear to have ball-shaped hands while others are shown with five-fingered hands.

Edited by Rakesh Khanna, the book rues that the Nayagarh incident remains barely studied or publicised, in India or anywhere else, even as the last few people who claimed to have been eyewitnesses die out.

"The ensuing violent and chaotic, migrations, the heady debate surrounding the future of the new independent nation, the possibility of Adivasi rebellion against the rajas, and the tumultuous years-long political process of integrating the feudatory states into the state of Odisha combined to completely eclipse any press that the fantastical reports from the countryside might have otherwise generated," says the book.

The sole exception is a single-paragraph mention in a Berhampur Odiya-language weekly dated June 15, two weeks after the event, in which the anonymous reporter takes a tone fairly dripping with scorn for "the overactive imaginations of the villagers".

However, the 'tala pattachitra' have been sold for decades in small numbers and without fanfare to curious tourists and art collectors outside the famous temples of Puri district.

"As the skeptics would have it, they might be nothing more than fanciful novelty items based on a colourful local tall tale. On the other hand, they might be the most accurate extant record of humanity's first contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation," says the book.

Britain's biggest UFO mystery

For years, Britain's biggest UFO mystery had been kept under wraps, but now an Air Force official has admitted that an 'extra-terrestrial' craft did visit the air base at Rendlesham Forest in 1980.

Former Deputy Base Commander Col Charles Halt claimed that even though the incident was later covered up, 'extra-terrestrials' had been the cause of the close encounter in Suffolk.

Halt had led a group of airmen who reported seeing a triangular UFO taking off into the air, leaving traces of radiation behind.

'The UFOs I saw were structured machines moving under intelligent control and operating beyond the realm of anything I have ever seen before or since,' the Daily Starquoted Col Halt, now retired, as telling investigator Gary Heseltine. 

'I believe the objects that I saw at close quarters were extra-terrestrial in origin,' he said.

He added that the Air Force later issued 'disinformation' to throw the public off the scent.

His comments were hailed as 'sensational' by former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope.

'This may help us to finally solve Britain's biggest UFO mystery,' Pope said, adding, 'It blows the MoD's line that these events had 'no defence significance' out of the water.'

Image: This photo depicts a possible UFO sighting as reported by the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Photograph: RO/Reuters

Hoax - Picture of Sharks Swimming In Flooded Kuwait Scientific Center

Outline
Message that features an image of sharks swimming in a flooded lobby at the bottom of escalators claims that the picture was taken after the collapse of the shark tank at the Scientific Center in Kuwait.


Brief Analysis
The image is the result of digital manipulation and it does not depict the result of a shark tank collapse in Kuwait, or anywhere else. The source picture shows Toronto's Union Station after water from a damaged sewer pipe inundated the building. There are no sharks in the original picture. 


Detailed analysis and references below example.


Example

The collapse of a shark tank at The Scientific Center in Kuwait. Share this because it's probably the only time in your life you will see something like this.

 

Detailed Analysis
This message, which circulates via social media posts and email and has also been posted to many blogs and websites, features an image supposedly depicting sharks swimming in a flooded building lobby at the base of a pair of escalators. The message claims that the picture depicts the result of a shark tank collapse at the Scientific Center in Kuwait and suggests that users share the image because they are unlikely to see such an event again. 

However, things are not what they seem. The picture is the result of a clever digital manipulation in which the sharks have been added to a photograph of a flooded subway station. The original - sharkless - photograph (included below) can be seen on the CBCNews website and was uploaded on June 1st 2012 by "Your News" user Jenny Porter. The photograph shows a part of Toronto, Canada's Union Station after a surge of rainwater and sewerage unexpectedly inundated the building due to sewerage construction work in the city: 

Image credit: Jenny Porter/CBCNews

Thus it seems that some prankster has taken the original picture and added in the sharks from another image source. And, the picture has no connection to the Scientific Center in Kuwait, which does feature a large - and still very much intact - aquarium. Ironically, back in 2010, a shark-filledaquarium at a large mall in Dubai did crack, causing a precautionary evacuation of the building and some leakage. However, the breach was quickly contained and none of the aquarium's residents escaped to swim the mall and none were harmed.

Although it is currently unclear who created the fake shark image, it seems likely that it was intended only as a harmless prank. 

 

References
Union Station Flood - June 1st
Union Station flooding investigated by TTC and city
The Kuwait Scientific Center
Shark-filled aquarium in Dubai shopping centre cracks open

Olympic Tower 2016 - Rio Solar City Tower Design

Outline
Message claims that attached images show an innovative solar powered tower that is to be built in the bay at Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic Games. 
Brief Analysis
The Solar City Tower is a concept envisaged by Zurich based architecture and design studio RAFAA. The design was created for a competition in 2009. The images show an artist's impression of what the proposed tower might look like if constructed. However, the project is just a proposal and the tower may never actually be built.

Detailed analysis and references below example.

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Last updated: 17th August 2010
First published: 17th August 2010
Article written by Brett M. Christensen
About Brett Christensen and Hoax-Slayer

Example

Subject: Olympic Tower 2016

Olympic Tower 2016... for Rio de Janeiro



This vertical structure will be placed in Cotonduba Island. It will be both a observation Tower, and a welcome sign for the visitors arriving by air and by sea at Rio de Janeiro, where the Olympic Games 2016 will take place.

The project is from Zurique, and utilizes solar energy during the day with its solo power panels, to pump the sea water as seen in the model. The movement of the water will be also utilized to turn the turbines and produce the power to work the system at night time.



In the Solo City Tower is the Cafe anfiteatre, auditórium, shops etc. lifts will take the visitors to the top, where the view will be fantastic, and bungee jumping will have a special platform.

 

Detailed Analysis
According to this message, attached images depict an innovative solar-powered tower that will be built at Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic Games. The message claims that the structure will be placed on an island at the entrance to Rio as a welcome to visitors and will generate energy via solar panels during the day and via water turbines at night. 

However, at the time of writing, the Solar City Tower is just a proposal and it is unclear if the project will actually go ahead. The design for the tower was created by Zurich based architecture and design studio RAFAA. In response to my enquiry about the project, Rafael Schmidt, the director at RAFAA, replied with the following information:

Dear Brett Christensen,

Please let me first clarify the state of the project. The Solar City Tower was a proposal for a competition in 2009. As it had drawn great media attention in the last months, we decided to contact the President of Rio 2016 again. We don't have any confirmation from the local authorities so far and don't know if this project will ever happen! Therefore the design is in a very early stage and we are facing lots of technical problems. Even though we have done some research in this field, a solid cost estimation or an energy consumption of this building is not possible at the moment.

Best Regards
Rafael Schmidt
Director

RAFFAA has more details about the proposal on its website, including the following description of the project's concept:

The aim of this project is to ask how the classic concept of a landmark can be reconsidered. It is less about an expressive, iconic architectural form; rather, it is a return to content and actual, real challenges for the imminent post-oil-era. This project represents a message of a society facing the future; thus, it is the representation of an inner attitude. Our project, standing in the tradition of “a building/city as a machine”, shall provide energy both to the city of Rio de Janeiro and its citizens while using natural resources. We hope to attain an international Olympic message with a political appeal. After hosting the United Nation’s Earth Summit in 1992, Rio de Janeiro will once again be the starting point for a global green movement and for a sustainable development of urban structures. It will perhaps even become a symbol for the first zero carbon footprint Olympic Games.

The tower is certainly an interesting and innovative proposal. However, quite a few of the many blog posts that discuss this project imply that the Solar Tower will definitely be built. As noted above, this is not the case. To reiterate, the Solar Tower is currently just a proposal and, in fact, the project may never go ahead.

 

References
RAFAA - Solar City Tower
2016 Olympic Games - Rio