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: BBC
April 14, 2006
Many people might have no doubts about being prepared to kill Hitler. But what if you were a prominent theologian? A noted pacifist? What then? That was exactly the dilemma that faced Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born 100 years ago, and one that led to his own death. In the grey early morning of 9 April 1945, only weeks before the end of the war in Europe, a 39 year-old German Lutheran pastor was led naked to the gallows at Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria.
Source: Baltimore Sun
April 13, 2006
Nearly 60 years after a white mob lynched two black couples on
a summer afternoon and got away with it, the FBI is taking another look at
the case.
FBI agent Stephen Emmett said the case is being reviewed"to insure that
any recent technology or techniques could be used to enhance the prior
investigation." He would not elaborate and said a decision on whether to
actually reopen the investigation has not yet been made.
The bureau refused to say why it had taken a renewed inte
Source: Newsweek
April 17, 2006
When Ernest Hemingway wrote "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," a holiday outing was the last thing he had in mind. Who could have known that this classic tale about a failed writer dying of gangrene in the shadow of Africa's tallest mountain would spark a stampede? Every year, some 10,000 vacationers huff their way to the 5,896-meter peak that untold tour operators have flogged with Hemingway's majestic words: "Wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun."
Source: NYT
April 14, 2006
Gasoline prices are rising. Sales of Detroit's carmakers suffer as Japanese brands carve out a growing share of the American market. One of the nation's largest automobile manufacturers flirts with bankruptcy.
Sound familiar?Just over a quarter of a century ago, the Chrysler Corporation teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, hobbled by falling sales, heavy payroll costs and bloated debt.
Today General Motors and Ford, staggering under th
Source: NYT
April 13, 2006
In following the fossil tracks of human evolution, scientists have for years searched for links between Australopithecus, the kin of the famous "Lucy" skeleton, and even earlier possible ancestors. Now, they think they have found some connections in Ethiopia.
An international team of paleontologists is reporting the discovery of transitional species superimposed in sediments in the neighborhood of a single site. The findings appear today in the journal Nature.
Source: Boston Globe
April 14, 2006
At every corner, the San Francisco area is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the April 18, 1906, earthquake that marked one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.A small band of aged survivors are making public appearances, including at the start of a recent baseball game. Museums and public halls are holding retrospectives, and construction and insurance companies are promoting their services against future earthquakes.
The city has staged a new b
Source: National Security Archive
April 11, 2006
The National Archives
and Records Administration secretly agreed to a covert
effort, led by the Air Force, the CIA, and other still-
hidden intelligence entities, to remove open-shelf
archival records and reclassify them while disguising
the results so that researchers would not complain,
according to a previously secret Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU). The secret agreement, made between
the Air Force and the National Archives, was
declassified pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act
Source: Eric Black in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
April 12, 2006
TRIVIA QUIZ: How are former President Jimmy Carter and Minnesotan Walter Mondale on a pace to knock founding fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson out of the record book next month?
For two centuries, the team of Adams and Jefferson has held the record as the president and vice president who jointly lived the longest after their administration ended.
The Adams administration (in which Jefferson served miserably as vice president, having lost the 1796 election to Adams
Source: BBC
April 12, 2006
Many of Northern Ireland's protected buildings are being left to those who want to change them or even demolish them. Hundreds of listed buildings are losing their legal protection following an ongoing survey by the Environment and Heritage Service, part of the Department of Environment.
Many more are being altered to such a degree that they are no longer worth listing according to the service's policy.
There are about 9,000 protected
Source: Time (Canada)
April 2, 2006
In February, the English cricket team — virtual demigods in their country after defeating Australia last summer — were attending a reception amid the Rembrandts and Rubenses in the Picture Gallery of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth had just pinned medals on the athletes' chests signifying their new status as Members of the Order of the British Empire, and was strolling among them, chatting and laughing with their proud families. She was the star of the show, making people grin — indeed, somet
Source: USA Today
April 13, 2006
The huge stone head is framed by a wooden crate that casts shadows across its vacant eyes and elongated nose. After an odyssey of more than 80 years, the sculpture is set for what should be its final journey — home to Easter Island.
The 7-foot Moai, carved from compressed volcanic ash and decked in a red-rock headdress called a Pukau, is one of almost 900 ancestral statues crafted centuries ago on the remote Pacific island, annexed by Chile in 1888.
It was taken from the isla
Source: rinf.com
April 10, 2006
An Egyptian archaeological team has discovered a series of structures in the southwestern town of Fayoum that could yield vital data as to how a Middle Kingdom temple was built, the culture minister said on Thursday.Farouk Hosni said that the structures included administrative buildings, granaries and residences believed to have belonged to priests of the temple, which was dedicated to Renenutet, the goddess of harvest, as well as the crocodile-god Sobk and falcon-deity Horu
Source: Boston Globe
April 13, 2006
For 66 years, two murals depicting the lynching of an Indian have hung in a now-abandoned county courthouse in Idaho's capital -- reminders of the bloodshed that accompanied America's westward expansion.
Starting in 2008, the Idaho Legislature plans to meet in the old Ada County courthouse while the state Capitol is renovated. And lawmakers, historians, and Indian leaders disagree over whether the murals should be preserved as history or removed or covered up as disturbing and offen
Source: The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)
April 13, 2006
Takamatsuzuka tomb in Asukamura, Nara Prefecture, has seen extensive mold growth since construction workers dispatched by the Cultural Affairs Agency worked in its stone chamber without wearing sterilized protective clothing in 2001, it has been revealed. The mold initially grew on the chamber's exterior and spread to its interior, where wall paintings, a national treasure, are located. The agency is likely to be criticized for its sloppy management of the early eighth-century tomb, as a worker
Source: Guardian (UK)
April 13, 2006
More than three decades after the last commemoration of the 1916 Easter Uprising, the Republic of Ireland is again preparing to mark the pivotal moment in its history.Commemorative stamps are being issued. There will be fly-pasts by the air corps and the Proclamation, declaring the nation's independence from Britain, will be read outside the General Post Office on Dublin's O'Connell Street. Even the British ambassador, Stewart Eldon, has signalled his intention to attend.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 12, 2006
The president of Austria has become the country's first head of state to admit that a large number of its citizens welcomed Adolf Hitler with open arms when the dictator annexed the country.Heinz Fischer said that a "not inconsiderable portion of the population" greeted the Anschluss or annexation in 1938 with "euphoria", despite knowing that "Hitler meant war".
In addition many had celebrated Hitler's initial military successes, he
Source: Guardian (UK)
April 7, 2006
The French president Jacques Chirac is about to unveil what he hopes will be his greatest legacy to the nation - a €260m (£180m) riverside monument to himself as the "great defender" of African and Asian indigenous culture.In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower on Paris's left bank, workmen are putting the finishing touches to Mr Chirac's decade-long pet project, the Musée du Quai Branly - Paris's first major new museum since the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977.
Source: Groong/Armenian News Network
April 13, 2006
A private television station will broadcast a controversial movie on the massacres of Armenians during World War I for the first time in Turkey where the subject still arouses nationalist feelings, a spokesman for the channel said Wednesday.Kanalturk decided to show "Ararat" by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, an ethnic Armenian, after a survey of viewers revealed that 72 percent of the participants wanted to see the film, the spokesman said.
"We wi
Source: Haaretz
April 13, 2006
Plans by the German Protestant Church to honor a former bishop known for his close ties to the Nazis have angered the country's Jewish community.The Church wants to hold a memorial service on June 8 for Hans Meiser, who historians have said made repeated anti-Semitic and racist remarks before and during the Nazi era. Meiser was leader of the Bavarian Protestant Church from 1933 until 1955.
The Jewish community has voiced concern over the event, scheduled for the
Source: Reuters
April 13, 2006
A German town has postponed plans to honor German aviation engineers Willy Messerschmitt and Claude Dornier -- known for their aircraft production in the Nazi era -- after protests by Jewish groups and local leaders.The southern city of Garching, a Munich suburb, planned to honor the two late engineers along with 24 scientists with plaques in a new underground station near Munich's Technical University.
But the Jewish community protested against the proposal, sa
