The historic testimony from 81-year-old Maria Martin came at the trial of Spain’s most prominent judge, Baltasar Garzon, who is facing criminal charges for having opened a probe into such crimes during and after Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war.

The civil war and its ruinous aftermath of hunger and disease left an estimated 500,000 people dead, and accounts abound of atrocities that both sides committed during the conflict as Gen. Francisco Franco‘s right-wing forces overthrew a leftist Republican government and established a dictatorship.

The Franco regime carried out a thorough accounting of civilians killed by Republican troops or militia. But since Franco died in 1975 and democracy was restored three years later, no official government probe has been conducted of atrocities by his supporters, until Garzon launched one in 2008. Those crimes involve the deaths or disappearances of more than 100,000 people.

Garzon, 56, has been accused by two right-wing groups of knowingly overstepping his jurisdiction, a charge that could effectively end his stellar judicial career.

Martin used a walker Wednesday to slowly make her way into the ornate chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court and take her place on a red velvet chair facing a panel of seven judges to testify in defense of Garzon.

A young clerk helped Martin work the microphone as she told the court how at age six, in September 1936, troops loyal to Franco rolled into her village in central Spain and took away 30 people — 27 men and three women, including her mother Agustina.

“They took out of the house and took her away,” Martin said, her voice barely audible, her white hair pulled back in a bun.

She later showed reporters photocopies of old pictures of her family and small dog-eared notebook with a hand-drawn map of where she thinks the mass grave holding her mother’s remains might be. Her father Mariano was not in the village at the time, she said, although it was not immediately clear why.

She said when her father eventually went to ask about recovering the mother’s body, he was threatened.

“‘Watch out, or we might do with you what we did with her,’” Martin said her father was told.

Now, however, the Spanish judge who became famous around the world for probing crimes against humanity in other countries and seeking to put those perpetrators on trial in Spain is himself on trial for that investigation. The main argument against him is that wartime atrocities were covered by an amnesty passed in 1977 as Spain tried to rebuild and put a dark chapter of its past behind.

Until now, no Spanish court had ever heard testimony from people who lost civilian loved ones to the pro-Franco forces who carried out summary executions and other such crimes, according to an official from the Supreme Court, the tribunal trying Garzon.

Garzon’s lawyers are summoning witnesses like Martin in an apparent bid to buttress his argument that he acted not out of leftist political bias or a zeal for headlines — conservatives accuse him of both — but rather to attend to hundreds of thousands of victims, women like Martin, whose rights have been ignored for decades.

Garzon insists his probe was legitimate. He says Franco forces and the regime in its early years waged a systematic campaign to wipe out opponents and this amounted to a crime against humanity that cannot be wiped away by an amnesty law.

Garzon says forced disappearances cannot be covered by Spain’s 1977 law because if no bodies have ever been found, the crime is an ongoing, “permanent” one that remains subject to prosecution.

If convicted of knowingly overstepping the limits of his jurisdiction with his abortive probe in 2008 — he bowed out reluctantly in a dispute over jurisdiction — Garzon faces up to 20 years of suspension from the bench, which would effectively end his career as a judge.

Prosecutors say he has committed no crime, but the criminal case is being pursued by right-wing groups who have long criticized the famous judge.

Another witness that testified Wednesday, 75-year-old Pino Sosa from the Canary Islands, said pro-Franco forces took her father away with a group of men.

“They beat them. They kept them as prisoners and did a lot of things to them,” Sosa said, adding that Franco forces even stole bread and salt from her home.

Sosa said her mother later fell ill.

“She looked for my father and never found him,” Sosa said. Authorities eventually gave her a death certificate for him but she refused to accept it.

“They took him away alive and she wanted him back alive,” Sosa testified.

Matthew Beard, Olympics Editor

3 Feb 2012

Some London pubs could run out of beer during the Olympics because of restrictions on daytime deliveries, a leading industry body has claimed.

The Brewery Logistics Group, which represents all major brewers, claims that the Games is the “ultimate nightmare” for making deliveries to pubs and clubs.

BLG has complained it faces a logistics crisis because it cannot carry out its normal daytime deliveries to pubs and clubs that are on the 109-mile Olympic Route Network.

Seven hundred bars and clubs that receive deliveries from BLG are situated on the network. The special “Zil lanes” will be in operation on a third of the network and are typically closed to all but official Games traffic from 6am until midnight, making daytime deliveries difficult.

BLG is hampered in switching to night-time deliveries because of noise-abatement laws and strict rules setting out routes to be used by lorries weighing 18 tonnes or more.

Mike Bracey, the group’s chairman, said: “The Olympics for us is the ultimate nightmare and time is running out to find a solution. London Councils and Locog are standing in the way of the solutions we have proposed about altering our routes and operating times.”

He added: “But if there is no breakthrough then our members will have to either meet huge costs in getting the deliveries through or the beer won’t arrive at all.”

A London Councils spokesman said: “We have already agreed a light-touch enforcement approach for the Games, and have discussed this with industry including the Brewery Logistics Group.”

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We were fed up with the fat twerp Prescott’s private lane on the M4, these restrictions are much, much worse. I do wish Paris had been awarded the dubious honour of staging the stupid Olympic games.

- David Davies, London, a Region of the European Soviet Union, 05/02/2012 21:47
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Interesting concept for the moaning-minnies bewailing delivery issues during a specific, short period of time in the summer.

….”Forethought and planning”

Try it out. I’m told it makes a huge difference.

- Rogan, Irving, 03/02/2012 18:25
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English businesses and all other taxpayers come BEFORE the olympics.

- Vince London, West London, 03/02/2012 17:31
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Surely it’s not just pubs which will suffer. What about deliveries to shops? And people moving from properties situated on the “zil lanes.”

As usual, idiots have come up with these outrageous restrictions. I live on part of the VIP route and it’s gridlock every morning and evening now. Only over paid fools cannot see what will happen during the Games.

- BillBones, London, 03/02/2012 15:40
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Where there’s a will (and money to be made) there’s a way. I’m sure the breweries will deliver night-time. No way they’ll want a pub running dry at a time when custom will be at an all-year high!

Mind you if they’re serving tourists, they’ll probably just stock up with long-life keg rubbish.

- Nigel, London, 03/02/2012 15:18
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Just look at another balls up with this joke. How many people will be dispointed, as the price will surely shoot up if there is no beer, but also knowing the times and routes these lorries take ( my local has to get it done by 6 am) and the closure of the link road turnoffs, along with the restrictions all around my area alone. Then big mistake, but who cares, I don’t, sorry guys I already have my stock!!

- Ed, Londoom, 03/02/2012 13:22
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This week, the Simon Wiesenthal Center partnered with The Weinstein Company to host two screenings of The Artist at its Museum of Tolerance outposts in Los Angeles and New York. (Both were to be followed by QAs with the Oscar-nominated film’s producer, Thomas Langmann, who was ultimately unable to participate due to the death of a close family friend.)

Oscars 2012: From ‘Hugo’ to ‘The Artist,’ Todd McCarthy Critiques The Year in Movie MusicQA with ‘The Artist’ Star Malcolm McDowell

What does a movie about the movies have to do with Judaism, Nazi-hunting, or tolerance, you ask?

Nothing — at least directly. But, it turns out, Langmann and the film’s Oscar-nominated writer/director/editor Michel Hazanavicius are both children of Jewish parents who grew up in hiding during the Nazi occupation of France, which led them to share an “emotional connection,” Langmann has said. Their shared bond was instrumental in his decision to take a tremendous gamble by financing a black-and-white silent in the 21st century.

Langmann’s father, Claude Berri, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 74, was born Claude Langmann to a Polish-Jewish father and Romanian-Jewish mother. As the Nazis neared Paris, his parents, hoping to spare their 8-year-old son from the concentration camps, sent him to live with gentile friends in the French countryside, where he weathered the rest of the war quite happily under the last name Berri.

GALLERY: The Making Of ‘The Artist’

Berri would later go on to become a filmmaker around the time of the French New Wave, won an Oscar for his live-action short Le Poulet (1965), and directed many of the France’s most critically embraced and commercially successful films, including his feature directorial debut, The Two of Us (1967). That film tells the story of an 8-year-old Jewish boy named Claude Langmann, sent by his parents to live in the French countryside under a new last name — only, in the film version, he arrives at the home of an elderly Catholic couple who turn out to be anti-Semites, but welcome him in nevetheless, assuming he’s Catholic and had been sent away from Paris simply to avoid the chaos of the war.

The Two of Us was also shown at both of this week’s Museum of Tolerance events.

Both sets of Hazanavicius’ grandparents survived the Nazi occupation of France, like many Jews, by relocating to the French countryside and disavowing their Judaism in order to survive. (One grandfather was even a French resistance fighter.) Hazanavicius has said that his grandparents and parents “didn’t talk” about the war and that his parents were not religiously observant after it ended, but, he has also emphasized, “we certainly think of ourselves as Jewish, if only because of our history.”

At this year’s DGA Awards ceremony, Hazanavicius — who won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Feature Film over the likes of Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Alexander Payne (The Descendants), and David Fincher (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) — said the following during his acceptance speech: “I think about cinema as a religion. We create stories which give a balance to the world and which tell people that they are not alone. We separate light from shadow, and we create worlds filled with characters upon which we have authority of life or death. And people go to temples, raise their heads, and listen to stories which help them to live together. With this idea, Hollywood is like Jerusalem. That’s where everything happened. And like Jerusalem, Hollywood does not only belong to the country where it is, it belongs to all the adepts of this religion all over the world. And in my family, we’re very religious with cinema.”

The picture-postcard Perthshire village of Kenmore has more than one claim to fame.

Tiny in size but big on history, it boasts the oldest inn in Scotland and the oldest tree in Europe and has welcomed both Queen Victoria and the poet Robert Burns.

It’s an idyllic, 18th century model village that’s almost an island, with Loch Tay to its south and west and the head of the River Tay to its north.

Kenmore’s isolated qualities can best be appreciated by taking the easy, zig-zag footpath up the forested slopes of Drummond Hill to a clearing near the top of its 300m summit.

The village has changed little in 250 years, its one street lined by pretty white cottages with an elegant church at one end and the elaborate stone gateway to Taymouth Castle at the other.

The original landowners gave the cottages to people who brought a skill to Kenmore and there is still a plaque on the wall of one of the properties dedicated to the ‘village nurse’.

The post office/shop is still called the ‘Telegraph Office’ and Kenmore Hotel – said to be Scotland’s oldest inn with origins in the 16th century – has a porch with curvaceous tree trunks for columns.

Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns was so struck by the village’s character that in 1787, while on the pretty bridge over the river, he composed a poem extolling the area’s virtues.

He later wrote the poem in pencil on the chimney breast of the fireplace in what the Kenmore Hotel now calls its Poet’s Bar. It can still be read there today, and here’s part of it:

Th’ outstretching lake, imbosomed ‘mong the hills,
The eye with wonder and amazement fills;
The Tay meand’ring sweet in infant pride,
The palace rising on his verdant side,
The lawns wood-fring’d in Nature’s native taste,
The hillocks dropt in Nature’s careless haste,
The arches striding o’er the new-born stream,
The village glittering in the noontide beam

Kenmore’s other famous visitor was Queen Victoria, who stayed at the neo-gothic, 19th century Taymouth Castle, which contained some of the most opulent interiors of the era.

It was Victoria’s first trip to Scotland and she was so impressed by its natural beauty that she bought her own estate at Balmoral. Her journal served to popularise Kenmore and the Highlands.

Plans to restore Taymouth Castle to its former glory and turn it into the UK’s first seven-star hotel are ongoing.

But if that sounds a little pricey there’s an outstanding alternative just across Rabbie’s bridge on a 120-acre site at the foot of Drummond Hill that was formerly the castle’s home farm.

Mains of Taymouth has a stunning selection of four and five-star cottages, luxury lodges and contemporary mews-styles houses and was voted ‘Best Holiday Cottage Complex in Britain’ by the Sunday Times.

A year later, the post office’s victory — a new location — has turned into an economic win for Carlos Goncalves, owner of Hawleyville Wine Liquors, which recently moved to a larger space in the new complex.

“I was maxed out at the other place,” Goncalves said. “People around here love their wine. I needed more shelf space since I am constantly placing special orders.”

Goncalves said he has a fondness for Port wine, made in Porto, Portugal, his native homeland.

“I love this place. He always has good suggestions and options to go along with the right food,” said Heliett Sanchez of Newtown.

“We have a wide selection of organic wines, which have been gaining popularity due to the low sulfite content,” Goncalves said.

Live a Little is one of those wines, described on its colorful label as a “rather revealing Shiraz Rose, unwooded, with a nose of vanilla and pepper, and adding a spice of raspberry and black cherry,” offered at $9.99.

On the counter is a selection of alcohol-infused whipped cream in caramel, vanilla, cherry and chocolate flavors.

“This ought to take off, especially during the holidays,” Goncalves said.

After what was a risky investment for someone unfamiliar with the area, Goncalves now greets regulars by name. Extended hours also have helped, now that the state allows him to stay open until

9 p.m.

The extra 600 square feet of space easily was filled with enticing specials, such as the gift-boxed Vincent Van Gogh Espresso Vodka, including two, limited-edition martini glasses for $25.99.

“I like to personally support the local businesses and it’s right on the way home,” said Richard Oparowski, as he purchased the pre-chilled white wines Goncalves had set aside for him.

Wine tastings are every Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. For more information, e-mail Hawleyville-wines@att.net, or call 203-426-0104.