This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: Latin American Herald Tribune
March 29, 2009
The archbishop of the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, Dadeus Grings, accused Jews of running the world’s propaganda and said that was why not everything has been revealed about the Holocaust in which, he says, more Catholics died than Jews.
“More Catholics died than Jews in the Holocaust, but that is never mentioned because Jews run the world’s propaganda,” the prelate said in an interview published Friday in the final edition of the Brazilian trade publication Press &
Source: CNN
March 1, 2009
Kaing Guek Eav is an elderly former math teacher and a born-again Christian.
He is also -- prosecutors contend -- a former prison chief with Cambodia's ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge movement who oversaw the torture and killing of more than 15,000 men, women and children three decades ago.
The trial of the 66-year-old man, better known as Duch, resumes Monday in front of a U.N.-backed tribunal just outside the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
He faces charges that
Source: AP
March 1, 2009
He was one of the greatest mass killers of the 20th century, but that doesn't stop the hopeful from praying at Pol Pot's hillside grave for lucky lottery numbers, job promotions and beautiful brides.
Nor does it stop tourists from picking clean the bones and ashes from the Khmer Rouge leader's burial ground in this remote town in northwestern Cambodia.
The grave is among a slew of Khmer Rouge landmarks in Anlong Veng, where the movement's guerrillas made their last stan
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
March 28, 2009
The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange.
But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War.
There were 210 such bookcase-like Bombes that gave Britain advance warning of Hitler’s plans and shortened the conflict by two years.
A
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 27, 2009
Reforms to the laws of succession are put forward as a fair way to end discrimination against women and Roman Catholics that would make the country a better place.
But had the changes taken place just over a century ago, some experts believe they would have led to Britain becoming part of Germany's Second Reich and ending up on the other side in the Great War.
Queen Victoria's eldest child was female, but because of the rule of male primogeniture, she was bypassed as heir
Source: Mail on Sunday (UK)
March 29, 2009
Their voices have not been heard since the First World War.
The soldiers in these photographs are all long dead – some meeting their fate only minutes after the pictures were taken. But now, thanks to a lipreader, we know what the Tommies were saying.
The stills are taken from a silent movie shot at the bloody Battle of the Somme in 1916, which on its opening day, July 1, alone claimed the lives of 20,000 British and Empire troops.
One wounded soldier swea
Source: Fredericksburg.com
March 25, 2009
Virginia is leading the nation's efforts to save Civil War battlefields, Gov. Tim Kaine made plain during a visit in Spotsylvania County yesterday.
Speaking at Slaughter Pen Farm--epicenter of the Fredericksburg battlefield--Kaine praised the public-private work that is protecting some of these unique historic resources.
In terms of sheer dollars, Virginia leads the United States in its battlefield preservation efforts, according to the national, nonprofit Civil War Pre
Source: IHT
February 27, 2009
For some Japanese, the national flag — a red sun on a white background — is a patriotic symbol. For others, it is an abhorrent relic of Japan’s past imperialism.
The longstanding debate came to a head Thursday, when a Tokyo court rejected a lawsuit filed by teachers who say they were unjustly punished for refusing to salute and sing the national anthem at school functions.
Since 2003, the Tokyo Board of Education has required public school teachers to stand and face the
Source: AP
March 1, 2009
Palestinian authorities disbanded a youth orchestra from a West Bank refugee camp after it played for a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel, a local official said Sunday.
Adnan Hindi of the Jenin camp called the Holocaust a ‘‘political issue’’ and accused the orchestra’s conductor, Wafaa Younis, of unknowingly dragging the children into a political dispute.
He added that Ms. Younis had been barred from the camp and that the apartment where she taught the 13-member
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 28, 2009
A private detective has been hired to investigate an alleged murder of a Jewish underground fighter in 1947 by a British major.
He was a founder member of the SAS, was one of the most decorated officers of the Second World War, and has been hailed as a "legend among fighting men".
The heroism on the battlefield of Major Roy Farran, who died in 2006, earned him a Distinguished Service Order, three Military Crosses, the Croix de Guerre and the American Legion
Source: BBC
March 1, 2009
The UK's oldest man has reached a new milestone by becoming the oldest ever British man, after clocking up 112 years and 296 days.
Henry Allingham has lived longer than Welshman John Evans, who died in 1990 aged 112 years and 295 days.
Mr Allingham is one of two surviving World War I veterans in the UK and is also the oldest Royal Navy veteran.
He is spending the day quietly at St Dunstan's care home for blind ex-service personnel near Brighton.
Source: BBC
February 27, 2009
The US collector who this month sold rare belongings of Mahatma Gandhi has apologised in Delhi for "unintentional hurt" to Indian sentiments.
James Otis said the money raised from the auction would go to groups promoting Gandhian values.
He said the items had not arrived in India because of a row over taxes.
"I need to apologise because it hurt me that anyone would see my name and think I was doing it for profit," Mr Otis said in the
Source: History Today
March 27, 2009
A great deal of exploding gunpowder and a hectic pageant involving actors and ordinary citizens jostling the narrow streets in period costume, will today sound the climax to a series of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the Reconquest of Vigo, a little-known but significant local episode in the Peninsular War. This unlikely popular uprising of March 28th, 1809, in the coastal town in northwest Spain was the first successful attempt to see off French rule in the region of Galicia, fol
Source: Civil War News
April 1, 2009
The entrance to the harbor in Charleston – the scene of much naval activity during the Civil War – will be mapped to produce the nautical equivalent of a detailed map of a large battlefield on land.
The Maritime Research Division (MRD) of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) at the University of South Carolina is running the project, supported by a $28,348 grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program.
Th
Source: The Hindu News (India)
February 27, 2009
A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site is about 4,000 years old, making it the world's oldest steel, Japanese archaeologists said on Thursday.
Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the 5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000. The ironware piece is believed to be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 B.C., acco
Source: IHT
February 28, 2009
China celebrated 50 years of direct control over Tibet with a lavish international Buddhist conference Saturday featuring a rare appearance by Beijing's hand-picked Buddhist leader — underscoring efforts to promote its image as a protector of the faith.
March 28 marks the date when China ended the 1959 Tibetan uprising, sending Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama over the Himalayas into exile in India and placing Tibet under its direct rule for the first time.
In Ch
Source: IHT
February 28, 2009
It looked like the kind of toy telescope a child might have made with scissors and tape — a lumpy, mottled tube about as long as a golf club and barely wider in girth, the color of 400-year-old cardboard.
But near one knobby end was a bit of writing that sent Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute here, into rapture.
The tube's focal length is "piedi 3," the inscription said, or 3 feet. It was in the hand of Galileo, one of history's great t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 27, 2009
The hunt for Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader wanted in connection with the massacre of an estimated 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, found itself centred on an idyllic Kenyan beach.
The great sweep of Bamburi beach, its sands lapped by the Indian Ocean north of the Kenyan port of Mombasa, is a world away from the hills and valleys of Bosnia.
Outwardly there is little to suggest that the Blue Lagoon watersports centre, which offers glass-botto
Source: AP
February 28, 2009
Just as the chief Khmer Rouge torturer takes the stand before a United Nations-backed genocide tribunal, a mausoleum fit for a king will be unveiled for another murderous leader from the same regime.
The entombed Ta Mok, known to his victims as "The Butcher," remains a revered figure in Anlong Veng because practically everyone here _ from the district chief to the tourism promoter, from the wealthiest businessmen to dirt-poor farmers _ was once Khmer Rouge.
Th
Source: NYT
March 27, 2009
Jewish prisoners at Philadelphia’s notorious Eastern State Penitentiary in the mid-20th century had one gleam of light in their hard lives.
Within the prison walls stood a synagogue, a tiny room created from exercise yards by volunteers from Philadelphia’s Jewish community who believed that Jewish convicts should be able to practice their faith, regardless of their crimes.
The synagogue was built in 1924 and was used until the prison closed in 1970. It was then abandone
