Vernon Tott quit high school and snuck into the military so he could fight for his country. Like many soldiers, Tott learned to accept the realities of war. His 84th Infantry Division fought in the Battle of the Bulge and lost a third of its troops. But, when Tott’s battalion headed toward the city of Hannover, Germany, in April 1945, members of the 84th were totally unprepared for their next encounter.”There was a road,” says concentration camp survivor Ben Sieradzki. “And we saw soldiers. One of them brought out a … baseball.”

The barely alive survivors of the Ahlem slave labor camp realized the soldiers must be Americans.

“We started screaming, ‘Come on up here, come on up here,’ and some of them were just bewildered. They didn’t know it was a concentration camp,” Sieradzki said.

Tott, who died in 2005 from cancer, said he and the other soldiers were unaware of the existence of the camps and were shocked at what they saw.

“We were witnessing hell on earth,” Tott said at an 84th Infantry reunion. “Piles of dead bodies. Men in ragged clothing that were just skin and bones … Me and the soldiers with me, it made us sick to your stomachs and even cried what we seen there.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is addressing the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday after defending Holocaust revisionists and raising questions about who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in a tense showdown at Columbia University.

The deputy commander of Iran’s air force said Wednesday that plans have been drawn up to bomb Israel if the Jewish state attacks Iran, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

“We have drawn up a plan to strike back at Israel with our bombers if this regime (Israel) makes a silly mistake,” deputy air force chief, Gen. Mohammad Alavi was quoted as telling Fars in an interview.

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Iran wants “peace and friendship for all,” the country’s president said Wednesday while again denying Western assertions his nation is pursuing nuclear weapons and trying to destabilize Iraq.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the Natanz nuclear facility in April.

But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a hard line against Israel, calling it “an invader” and saying it “cannot continue its life.”

Asked if Iran had launched a proxy war in Iraq — something the U.S. ambassador and top military commander there both asserted this week — Ahmadinejad said the United States is merely seeking a scapegoat for its failing campaign in Iraq.

“Forces have come into Iraq and destroyed the security, and many people are killed,” the Iranian president told Britain’s ITN during an interview in the garden of the Iranian presidential palace in Tehran.

“And there are some claims that may seem very funny and ridiculous. Those who have lots of weaponry and warfare and thousands of soldiers — if they are defeated, they blame others. There is no way to escape for peace.”

President Vladimir Putin has fired the commander of Russia’s navy, taking to at least four the number of top brass dismissed since he appointed a new defense minister, media in Russia reported on Friday.

The Moscow Times, an English-language daily, said Admiral Vladimir Masorin may have angered the Kremlin by accepting a U.S. award in August without advance permission.

The paper said Masorin had not followed the established practice of asking Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov before accepting the Legion of Merit at a ceremony in Washington.

Defence ministry and Kremlin spokesmen refused to comment on the reports, saying they had not yet seen a decree ordering Masorin’s departure

The U.S. military said on Thursday an Iranian-made rocket was believed to have been used in an attack that killed one person on the headquarters of the American military in Iraq this week.

Military spokesman Major-General Kevin Bergner said it appeared followers of the anti-American Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were responsible for the attack on Tuesday.

“The attack used a 240 mm rocket, which is a weapon that these groups have received from Iranian sources in the past and recently used in other attacks against coalition forces,” Bergner said at a news conference.

Since the alleged Israeli attack in Syria occurred, the Israeli government has refused to divulge any details, but a former Israeli official said he had been told that it was an attack against a facility capable of making unconventional weapons.

Advisors to Syrian President Bashar Assad are pressuring him to respond to the alleged IAF attack by “landing a blow to an Israeli target,” the Kuwait-based Al-Jareeda reported Wednesday. According to the report, Israel targeted long-range missile batteries that were brought to Syria from Iran. The report said five IAF fighter jets carried out the attack.

Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shake hands in Damascus.

Israel Radio quoted the Kuwaiti paper to the effect that the group advocating a military response is being spearheaded by Assad’s brother in law, who has met in recent days with senior Hizbullah and Hamas officials in an effort to draw up an operation plan.

The Kuwaiti paper also reported that the Syrian army has begun drafting reservists from the armed corps, missile corps and anti-aircraft units, and quoted “sources in the know” who said the draft was a response to Israel raising its level of readiness in the north.

And the best part of all…

Reportedly, the Iranian-funded installation was razed to the ground.

And a tid-bit to liven up the North Korean issues..

“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official told the Times, adding that the alleged strike had not necessarily provided evidence to confirm the intelligence.

 And an update

The United States wants to ensure Iraq’s territorial integrity, including from “very troublesome neighbors” like Iran, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday.

Rice said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show that the situation has improved in Iraq under President George W. Bush’s strategy of temporarily building up troops to allow time for Iraqi lawmakers to achieve political reconciliation.

Bush’s top military and civilian leaders in Iraq faced blistering criticism by lawmakers this week and growing questions about whether security gains were enough to keep U.S. troops in the war zone.

Rice agreed that there was still work to be done but she said the American troop presence was important to secure not only Iraq but neighboring countries.