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: The Orion: The student-run newspaper of the journalism department at Chico State
February 4, 2009
The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has become a landmark in both American and black history. With Obama's inauguration just a few weeks ago, the significance of Black History Month is especially prominent this year.
"Everything changed with the last election," said Nicholas Smith, a recording arts major. "There is no reason why a black person can't be president. The opportunity is there - it's been there - but now it's more access
Source: Inquirer
February 4, 2009
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has skeletons though not in the closet but in its compound.
Skeletal remains were dug up about at a construction site inside the DoJ compound, said Edgar Jalata, the justice department’s administrative aide
DoJ Information Chief Alex Lactao tried to provide a possible explanation, saying the area was an execution site during World War II.
The skeletal remains will be turned over to the National Bureau of Investigation.
Source: BBC
February 4, 2009
The remains of a 1,500-year-old Saxon burial ground have been uncovered by two Sussex metal detector enthusiasts.
Bob White and Cliff Smith unearthed brooches, a bronze bowl, a spear and a shield from the graves of a man and two women on farmland near Lewes.
East Sussex County archaeologists, confirmed they were Saxon burials and decided to excavate the graves immediately to avoid the risk of looting.
The most impressive grave contained the remains of a
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 5, 2009
Knut Hamsun, the Nobel prize-winning Norwegian author who fell from grace for supporting the Nazi occupation of Norway, is to be put on a commemorative coin by his homeland's central bank.
The coin is the first to celebrate Hamsun, a Norwegian national hero until his sympathy for the Nazi party emerged. "NORWEGIANS! Throw down your rifles and go home again," he wrote in a newspaper article after the Nazis arrived in Norway in 1940. "The Germans are fighting for us all
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
February 5, 2009
Three chilling telegrams have been uncovered which reveal the brutal sinking of a defenceless British passenger ship by a U-boat just hours after World War II was declared.
The Athenia carrying 1,103 passengers was attacked in September 3rd 1939 when the German captain mistook her for an armed merchant ship.
Her sinking led to the deaths of 118 people including a Canadian child which brought the Commonwealth country into the conflict.
Source: IHT
February 5, 2009
Some 60 million years ago, well after the demise of the dinosaurs, a giant relative of today's boa constrictors, weighing more than a ton and measuring 13 meters long, hunted crocodiles in rain-washed tropical forests in northern South America, according to a new fossil discovery.
The fossil find - a batch of super-size vertebrae pulled from an open-pit coal mine in northeastern Colombia - is remarkable enough just as a paleontological extreme. The species, given the name Titanoboa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 5, 2009
Ten Nazi war criminals are still at large and on a "most wanted" list published by Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
Top of the list and still thought to be living and sheltered in Syria is Alois Brunner, a "key operative" of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi leader who orchestrated the Holocaust.
Brunner was convicted in absentia for the deportation to Nazi death camps of 128,500 Jews from Austria, Greece, France and Slovakia.
Syria has rebuffe
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 5, 2009
Aribert Heim, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals known as Dr Death, led a secret life in Cairo under the name of Tarek Hussein Farid, his son has confessed.
His admission in a German television programme sparked a frenzy of activity yesterday as Nazi hunters, governments and bemused Egyptians sought to unravel the final years of a man who eluded a global manhunt for nearly half a century and is said to have become a Muslim convert before his death from cancer in 1992.
Source: BBC
February 5, 2009
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has expressed doubts about a report that Aribert Heim, one of the most-wanted Nazi criminals, died in Egypt in 1992.
"There's no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave," Efraim Zuroff, the centre's leading Nazi hunter, told AP agency.
In its report, ZDF quoted witnesses, including Heim's son, as confirming that Aribert Heim, who was also known as Doctor Death, died in 1992.
It said it had found a number of Heim's personal
Source: AP
February 4, 2009
WASHINGTON –- Barack Obama is heading back to his home state for the first time as president.
The White House says Obama will travel to Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 12 in honor of one of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln.
Presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday that Obama will attend the commemoration of Lincoln's 200th birthday and speak at a banquet in Springfield. The spokesman says Obama is returning to Illinois for the festivities at the request of Illinois Sen. Di
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 4, 2009
In a graveyard in Al-Kadada, north of Khartoum, the archaeologists have dug up the tomb of a man and a woman facing each other in a ditch, with bodies of two women, two goats and a dog buried nearby.
The discovery of the group "confirms" excavations last year which found traces of the oldest human sacrifice ever identified in Africa, Jacques Reinold, a researcher for the French section of the Sudanese antiquities department, said.
The ancient unearthed bones d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 5, 2009
Rudiger Heim will avoid criminal charges for sheltering his father from the police because of a German law that excuses people from giving evidence against their family members.
Dr Aribert Ferdinand Heim, the world's most wanted Nazi fugitive, performed horrific experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
He eluded a global manhunt for nearly half a century, living in Cairo as a Muslim convert before his death from cancer in 1992.
Source: AP
February 5, 2009
BERLIN -– German investigators who have hunted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim for decades said Thursday that new information indicating the former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt in 1992 appears credible and that they will attempt to locate his corpse to rule out any doubt.
The Baden-Wuerttemberg state police unit that investigates Nazi-era crimes is preparing a request asking Egyptian authorities to allow them to pursue the case in Cairo, unit spokesman Horst Haug said.
Source: AFP
February 4, 2009
One of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, Aribert Heim or"Doctor Death", thought to be in his 90s and in South America, actually died in Cairo in 1992, media reports said Wednesday.
Heim was wanted for killing hundreds of concentration camp victims with horrific medical experiments, including performing operations without anaesthetics and injecting petrol directly into their hearts.
German public TV channel ZDF said in a statement that Heim died of bowel cancer in 1992, citing his
Source: Spiegel Online
February 4, 2009
Germany will station troops in France as part their joint crisis reaction force, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy have said. In a joint opinion piece published ahead of the Munich Security Conference on Friday, the two leaders call for greater European and world cooperation on security.
The leaders of Germany and France urged greater European and trans-Atlantic unity on global security on Wednesday and underscored their call by announcing that German troops will be stationed in Fr
Source: Spiegel Online
February 4, 2009
A new study shows that several German schools are still named after Nazis, including proponents of racial hygiene, rocket scientists and high-ranking party officials. But local authorities are often reluctant to change the names.
Throughout his life, teacher Max Kästner dedicated himself to the study of the history and vegetation of the Ore Mountain region. Even as a pensioner, Kästner, who died in 1959, often instructed new teachers in local history.
Kästner was honore
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
February 3, 2009
He loathed vanity so much that he insisted his portraits depict him faithfully, 'warts and all'.
And even after his death, Oliver Cromwell's instructions were followed to the letter.
This death mask shows the puritanical Lord Protector of England in all his grizzled, lumpy glory.
There has been no attempt to conceal the growth on his lower lip or straighten his crooked nose.
All in all, the mask doesn't make an attractive artwork - though
Source: NYT
February 4, 2009
ROME — Responding to global outrage, especially in Pope Benedict XVI’s native Germany, the Vatican for the first time on Wednesday called on a recently rehabilitated bishop to take back his statements denying the Holocaust.
Late last month, the pope revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, including British-born Richard Williamson, who in an interview broadcast last month denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.
A statement issued on Wednesday by th
Source: Politico.com
February 4, 2009
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects. ...
The interview, l
Source: Tehran Times
February 4, 2009
About 700 Iranologists and Iranian cultural heritage lovers have recently signed a petition asking President Barack Obama to prevent confiscation of Iran’s 300 Achaemenid clay tablets loaned to the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.
The petition has been organized by the European Iranologist Society (Societas Iranologica Europaea, SIE) in its website www.societasiranologicaeu.org.
The petition reads the artif
