Neo Nazi

WASHINGTON - An elderly Maryland man with a long history of ties to neo-Nazi organizations walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday and opened fire, killing a security guard, law enforcement officials said. The shooter was shot in the face by museum security and was in critical condition Wednesday night at a Washington hospital, according to The Washington Post. An FBI official said the shooter had been identified as James W. von Brunn, who was described by the Anti-Defamation League and other followers of hate groups as a longtime white supremacist and anti-Semite.

JERUSALEM -- With eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union under arrest, Israeli authorities said yesterday that they had broken up a violent neo-Nazi gang that desecrated synagogues and staged at least 15 attacks on religious Jews, Asian workers, drug addicts and homosexuals. The news shocked Israelis, whose state was founded in part as a refuge for Jews in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust. Video said to have been taken by the skinhead gang to document its beatings was shown at yesterday's Cabinet meeting, triggering urgent debate over what to do about immigrants who came as Jewish offspring but grew up to commit hate crimes and shout, "Heil Hitler!"

DRESDEN, Germany -- While most of the 7,121 hate-crimes across Germany last year went unsolved -- some states cracked fewer than 10 percent of their cases -- Saxony claims an 88 percent success rate.And when it comes to the most serious acts of violence by fascists, skinheads and neo-Nazis, investigations by the Saxony crime bureau resulted in almost 40 percent of all sentences handed down by Germany's criminal courts.In a nation where Turks live in fear of being burned to death in their beds, where pregnant Vietnamese women are stomped under jackboots and where cemeteries routinely are defaced by swastikas, Saxony has reported a 60 percent drop in fascist attacks over the last two years.

Cal who?So the bomber McVeigh and neo-Nazi gun freak paranoids were right about Ruby Ridge. What does that prove?The issue is whether the voters credit the Schmoke Administration with The Streak.Mrs. Clinton went to Mongolia, where the Chinese believe she belongs.Now let's see. The Arkansas governor is off the hook because an Arkansas judge said the wrong prosecutor went after him.

Annapolis residents can voice their concerns about hate mail at a meeting tonight at City Hall. The city's Human Relations Commission has been investigating hate literature since racist leaflets were distributed in early September. The commission -- a volunteer group with no regulatory power -- discovered that the leaflets were printed by the National Alliance, the country's largest neo-Nazi group. Residents can discuss their concerns with the commission and offer suggestions on how to respond to future incidents at the 5:45 p.m. meeting at 160 Duke of Gloucester St.

Paul Brickhill, 74, author of "The Great Escape" and othe best-selling war novels that sold millions of copies and were made into films, died Tuesday in Sydney, Australia. Mr. Brickhill was a journalist on the Sun newspaper in Sydney before joining the Royal Australian Air Force. He trained as a fighter pilot in Canada, flew with a squadron in England and was shot down over the Tunisian desert in 1943. He spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft 111, the prisoner-of-war camp that was the setting of his book "The Great Escape," written in 1949.

Having closed the door to a flood of asylum-seekers, Germany appears to have opened the door to more neo-Nazi outrages against foreigners. The weekend arson-murders of five Turkish residents, including two small children, should put world pressure on Chancellor Helmut Kohl's coalition government to change Germany's reprehensible immigration laws -- laws that effectively deny citizenship except to those who can prove they are ethnically German.Had the five victims of arson-murder in Solingen migrated to the United States, all would probably have had U.S. citizenship.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a ruling that had set aside the death sentence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in a racially tinged case that has made the former Black Panther an international cause celebre. The justices ordered the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to revisit its 2008 ruling that Abu-Jamal deserved a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions at his 1982 trial. The Supreme Court pointed to its ruling in an Ohio case last week, when it said a neo-Nazi killer did not deserve a new sentencing hearing on those grounds.

The Dawn Patrol By Don Winslow In the Light of You By Nathan Singer Bleak House Books / 238 pages / $25 Singer's novels are hard to classify and sometimes tough to take. In the Light of You keeps the brutally dark feel of his earlier work but finally finds a working balance of tone and narrative so that its points about the dangers of blind hatred and following orders come through that much more tangibly. Singer makes horrifyingly clear how easy it would be for a teenage boy like 16-year-old Mikal Fanon, with a middle-class background turned awry, to find comfort in the welcoming arms of a neo-Nazi skinhead group.

BERLIN -- Among the recent prime-time offerings on German television was American actress Valerie Perrine sprawled nude on a bed, lustily displaying herself for a salivating Dustin Hoffman.It was a scene from the 1970s film "Lenny," a biography of self-destructive comedian Lenny Bruce, and you didn't need cable to see it.Meanwhile, playing at the same moment in Germany on U.S. armed forces television was a memorable scene from the Mel Brooks comedy "Blazing Saddles." Dusty cowboys encircled a campfire, gobbling beans.