Nazi Swastika Over New York Skies

The organization promoting the banner, Proswastika.org, aim to reclaim the swastika as a symbol of a peace, its meaning long before it became associated with the Nazis.
The banner shows the swastika over the Star of David. It flew as part of Swastika Rehabilitation Week starting July 5, according to the group's website.
But Mark Treyger, the New York councilman who represents Coney Island, is not buying that argument.
"I will not accept their twisted logic. And I am also going to speak out against sending chilling messages of fear and intimidation to residents," Treyger told CBS New York.
The Las Vegas-based International Raelian Movement paid for the banner, according to Proswastika.org.
Raelians believe extraterrestrials created humans thousands of years ago. The group is not anti-Semitic, Raelian spokesman Thomas Kaenzig told the Wall Street Journal.

Underwater German WWII bomber to be salvaged

A famous German WWII bomber has spent decades submerged in the English Channel — but that's about to change.

British officials on Friday announced a complex salvage operation to rescue the only known surviving example of the German Dornier Do 17 bomber, an aircraft nicknamed "the flying pencil" because of its narrow fuselage.

The wreck is located just off the Kent coast in southeast England in about 60 feet (20 meters) of water. The plane had been shot down during the 1940 Battle of Britain, a monthslong struggle over the skies of Britain that saw RAF fighters engaged in a colossal life-or-death struggle with the German Luftwaffe.

Experts said the bomber, discovered by divers five years ago, is remarkably undamaged despite the passage of time.

Officials at the RAF Museum in London said the challenging salvage will be the biggest recovery of its kind and they hope to one day display the bomber at the museum.

Museum director Peter Dye said the bomber will be exhibited next to a Hawker Hurricane fighter that had also been shot down during the Battle of Britain.

"We feel it's important that they be exhibited side by side," he said, pointing out that two German airmen died in the Dornier. "With time, we recognize that young men died on both sides, which is why we don't intend to restore it. We will conserve it and place it on exhibition alongside the wreck of a Hurricane shot down at much the same time in which a British pilot died."

Plans call for the plane to be lifted out of the water in three or four weeks if preparations go well. But Dye cautioned that the recovery would be dangerous — divers will only be able to work for 45 minutes at a time, among other challenges.

"We are not guaranteed success," he said. "There have been previous aircraft recovery projects that didn't go so well, cases where the structure has disintegrated on retrieval. When it breaks the surface, gravity and the laws of mechanics come into play, so we very much hope the frame we've constructed will support that structure."

Corrosion is another obstacle that could spoil the procedure, he said.

Dye said the German government was aware of the recovery operation.