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: AP
December 23, 2006
Within weeks of Hitler's 1933 rise to power, the iron gates slammed shut on inmates of the first Nazi concentration camps. It was the start of an unparalleled experiment in persecution and genocide that expanded over the next 12 years into a pyramid of ghettos, Gestapo prisons, slave labor camps and, ultimately, extermination factories.
Holocaust historians are only now piecing together the scattered research in many languages to understand the vast scope of the camps, prisons and p
Source: AP
December 24, 2006
Preliminary forensic tests conducted on the mummified body of 14th century prince found the 7-year-old may not have been poisoned by an uncle, as historians have suspected for centuries, a newspaper reported Saturday.
The preliminary tests indicated that Prince Sancho de Castilla may have died in 1370 of a lung infection after chronic exposure to smoke, likely to have come from a fireplace, El Pais reported.
Source: AP
December 23, 2006
LIMA, Peru -- Heavy rains damaged several adobe walls in the ancient ruins of Chan Chan, the world's largest mud city on Peru's northern coast, the newspaper El Comercio reported Saturday.
An unusual downpour Friday morning saturated the top seven inches of the walls in a southern portion of the ruins and penetrated the sides, Cristobal Campana, the director of the archaeological site, told the newspaper.
With more rains expected in the usually arid coastal de
Source: BBC
December 23, 2006
Japan's Emperor Akihito has said the practice of mourning Japan's war dead can help younger generations better understand the past.
He said he hoped facts about World War II would be correctly conveyed so the suffering his generation experienced would never be repeated.
The emperor's comments came in a speech marking his 73rd birthday.
Correspondents say teaching Japan's wartime history and remembering the war dead is still highly controversial.
Source: Times Online (UK)
December 24, 2006
IT WAS the night before Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge was facing a succession of supernatural terrors; or, as the latest medical thinking would have it, he was succumbing to a brain disease so obscure that doctors would not give it a name for another 150 years.
A pair of medico-literary sleuths claimed last week to have tracked down the illness that haunted Scrooge. They concluded that Charles Dickens brilliantly observed the symptoms in A Christmas Carol.
Robert Cha
Source: LAT
December 23, 2006
MONTEREY -- A classic struggle is playing out here in the first capital of California, and it's anyone's guess who the victor will be: God or nature.
On one side stands San Carlos Borromeo de Monterey, believed to be the oldest continuously functioning church in California, completed in 1794. On the other, a small stand of stately redwood trees, whose roots have made their way through the chapel's foundation and threaten its survival.
For this clash of California icons,
Source: NYT
December 25, 2006
In a sign of how badly German-Polish relations have frayed in recent months, a long-shot lawsuit by an obscure German claims group has prompted Poland to call into question a treaty meant to settle forever the borders between the countries.
The Polish foreign minister, Anna Fotyga, raised doubts about the treaty in a radio interview last Tuesday, a week after a group representing Germans expelled from present-day Poland after World War II filed suit at the European Court of Human Ri
Source: NYT
December 25, 2006
OSLO, Dec. 24 — The University of Oslo has decided to move three grand Viking ships, probably by truck and barge, to a new museum across town despite dire claims that the thousand-year-old oak vessels could fall apart en route.
A retired curator of Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum said the delicately preserved ships, two of which are nearly 80 feet long, were almost equal in archaeological importance to the Pyramids.
“Even if I have to live till I am 100, I will go on fighting
Source: NYT
December 25, 2006
President Bush marched into his year-end news conference last week with the usual zip in his step. As always, he professed little worry about his legacy or the polls. As always, he said the United States would win in Iraq. The nation might despair, but not Mr. Bush; his presidential armor seemed firmly intact.
Yet a longtime friend of Mr. Bush’s recently spotted a tiny crack in that armor. “He looked tired, for the first time, which I hadn’t seen before,” this friend said.
Source: Australian
December 23, 2006
LAST year Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett's extended autobiography Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist was released, receiving generally favourable reviews from writer Ross Fitzgerald in The Australian and academic historian Stuart Macintyre in the online magazine New Matilda.
I have been interested in Burchett, who died in 1983, for some time and decided to do some research recently, while on a Fulbright fellowship in the US, into the most controversial aspect of his career: the r
Source: http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5851273
December 22, 2006
The British Airways Concorde jet that had been a featured attraction at New York's Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum floated down the Hudson River today to a temporary home in Brooklyn.
The sleek white supersonic aircraft sat atop a barge as it made its way to the historic Floyd Bennett Field. It will remain open to visitors there, while workers rebuild the Intrepid's Manhattan pier.The World War Two aircraft carrier has been docked at Pier 86 since 1982, when it was turned into a
Source: Times Online (UK)
December 23, 2006
A direct descendant of George Washington was held last night in a New York jail, facing extradition to France on charges that he beat a man into a coma with a bottle.
John Augustine Washington V, a history student at Oxford University, is accused of smashing the bottle over the head of Colin Hall, a fellow American, on July 24 in a bar in the French resort of St Tropez.
He was arrested in New York this week after federal police were tipped off about his whereabouts. I
Source: AP
December 22, 2006
BANGOR, Maine -- A woman who had a key role in a little-known incident in World War II -- when she spotted two Nazi spies who arrived by U-boat along the Maine coast -- has died. Mary Forni, of Hancock, was 91.
Forni died Dec. 16, according to Hancock town officials.
Forni recalled the incident in a 2001 story in the Bangor Daily News. She reported that on Nov. 29, 1944, she saw the two men on the side of a rural road as she drove home from a card game in Hancock Poin
Source: http://www.wlns.com
December 22, 2006
The Alabama Supreme Court is blocking a lawsuit against Troy University by the Rosa Parks estate.
The late civil rights leader's Detroit-based institute accused the school of violating an agreement when it expanded a museum bearing her name.The Rosa Parks Library and Museum was developed by Troy on its Montgomery campus and has become a civil rights tourist attraction.
The suit accused the university of exceeding the museum's authorized size and failing to collaborate with the inst
Source: http://thestar.com.my
December 23, 2006
Bok House might have been merely a rich man’s house, but the mansion still warranted conservation, said the Malaysian Institute of Architects.
Its president Dr Tan Loke Mun said the building was among several houses owned by the wealthy and formed the streetscape of Jalan Ampang.
He said such buildings should be preserved if the Government was serious about heritage tourism.
“There is nothing wrong with it being a rich man’s home. It shows the lifestyl
Source: http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php
December 21, 2006
On Wednesday, December 20, Washington-area Muslim leaders met at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to encourage humanity to take the lessons of the Holocaust to reaffirm a commitment to preserving human dignity for all people. Muslim American leaders—including Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Imam Mohamed Magid, and MPAC board member Dr. Hassan Ibrahim—called for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust and commemorated the struggles endured by survivors.
Source: NYT
December 24, 2006
THE predicament: A president wants to end an unpopular war. A potential solution: Negotiate with enemies.
The question confronts President Bush today, in the case of Iraq. The question challenged President Richard Nixon in 1972, when he and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, secretly arranged a summit meeting with Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, in the hope that a grand bargain with Moscow might help the United States negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam.
Source: NYT
December 24, 2006
Gen. Augusto Pinochet died this month without ever being held legally accountable for human rights abuses that occurred during his dictatorship. But his subordinates are now facing a new threat: President Michelle Bachelet is pushing to invalidate an amnesty law that for nearly 30 years has exempted them from prosecution on murder and torture charges.
General Pinochet originally decreed the amnesty in April 1978, four and a half years after he seized power in the coup that overthrew
Source: NYT
December 24, 2006
Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight.
Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?
Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loya
Source: USA Today
December 20, 2006
The most recent fight for Gettysburg ended Wednesday when Pennsylvania gambling regulators rejected a proposal for a slot-machine casino near the Civil War battlefield.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board awarded five licenses for casinos in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Pocono Mountains and Bethlehem. Among the 13 applications was a proposal to build a 3,000-slot casino, a luxury hotel and spa, and several restaurants a little more than a mile from a portion of the Gettysburg Nat
