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: NYT
December 29, 2005
An immigration judge on Wednesday ordered John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard, deported to his native Ukraine, but the 30-year legal battle still may not be over. Mr. Demjanjuk, 85, has been fighting to stay in this country since the 1970's.
The United States first tried to deport him in 1977. Mistakenly suspected of being a guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp, he was
Source: OregonLive
December 29, 2005
Washington's lieutenant governor has been thinking lately about a lynching of a 14-year-old boy 120 years ago in Canada that nearly sparked a cross-border race war.
In 1884, a vigilante mob of more than 100 men from Washington Territory rode into Canada, abducted an Indian boy of the Sto:lo tribe and hanged him from a tree. The boy, Louie Sam, had been accused of killing a shopkeeper in Nooksack, in what is now Whatcom County.Now, more than a century later, Wash
Source: History Today
December 22, 2005
The schools exam watchdog has reported secondary schools in the UK are continuing to concentrate on Nazism and the Tudors, to the detriment of other topics. The annual report of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the Government’s curriculum authority, stated: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and ‘Hitlerisation’ of post-14 history. The option choices made by schools and colleges in GCSE and AS/A level mean that the content of post-14 history continues to be
Source: Boston Globe
December 29, 2005
The head of policy studies at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth wants the university to suspend a student who made up a story about being grilled by federal antiterrorism agents over a library book and to reprimand faculty members who spread the tale.
Following the student's admission Friday that it was a hoax, Clyde Barrow, chairman of the policy studies department, said UMass should punish the student and faculty members, in particular two history professors who repeate
Source: NYT
December 30, 2005
Turkish prosecutors decided Thursday not to file charges against the country's best-known novelist for allegedly denigrating Turkey's armed forces, said lawyers who had sought to bring him to trial. But the writer still faces trial on existing charges that he insulted "Turkishness" by talking about violence against Kurds and genocide against Armenians.
Nationalist lawyers had petitioned prosecutors to file new criminal charges against the novelist, Orhan Pamuk, over a rep
Source: USA Today
December 30, 2005
Loyalty and continuity have marked the Bush White House since early on. After two wars, devastating strikes by terrorists and hurricanes, a bruising re-election and countless legislative battles, President Bush's team is continuing the trend — defying history and shakeup rumors to remain almost entirely intact five years in."They've been there long enough to qualify for the Medicare prescription drug benefit," quipped Paul Light, a professor of organizational studi
Source: Washington Times
December 30, 2005
A Russian historian claims the Kremlin archive holds documents proving Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was poisoned.
Nikolay Dobryukha, described as a historian and publicist, said documents of medical examinations of Stalin disprove the official cause of death as a cerebral hemorrhage caused by hypertension and arteriosclerosis, Pravda reported on its Web site. Stalin died March 5, 1953, at age 73 after a dinner with several other Soviet officials, including Interi
Source: BBC News
December 30, 2005
In November 2003 the British government decided to pay £10,000 ($17,000) to each of its soldiers who were interned in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II.
Among those who were eligible were the Gurkhas of Nepal, who fought for Britain. But the team sent to Kathmandu to discover which Gurkhas were eligible faced an almost insuperable task of identifying who had served in the war. But now that has changed. The sad tale of the Gurkhas wa
Source: scotsman.com
December 30, 2005
SECRET documents detailing the government's emergency response to a nuclear attack have revealed officials had no plans for a mass civilian evacuation - but a strategy was in place for saving treasured works of art.
According to the 30-year-old files - described by historians as the "most secret" to be released by the National Archive at Kew to date - Russia had so many nuclear warheads trained on Britain that around 12 million citizens would have been wiped out.
Source: CNN
December 29, 2005
DURHAM, North Carolina (AP) -- The family ties of nearly 1,000 slaves from a once-sprawling plantation are being pieced together with the help of their owners' records and their descendants.
Jennifer Farley, director of the Stagville state historic site, a plantation that once spanned about 47.5 square miles across parts of North Carolina's Durham, Orange, Wake and Granville counties, restarted the project two years ago, The News & Observer newspaper reported Thursday.
Source: Catholic Online
December 29, 2005
A Catholic saint and martyr has been nominated as one of the nastiest villains in British history by a BBC publication, while in early November an influential Jesuit magazine praised him as a defender of church rights against the state.
St. Thomas Becket, a 12th-century archbishop of Canterbury, was among 10 "worst Britons" of the last millennium, selected by a group of British historians in the BBC compilation. The saint, whose feast is celebrated Dec. 29, was chosen by J
Source: AP
December 29, 2005
Damp seeps through rotting beams and mildew-blackened walls. Roofs sag, balconies crack and shutters dangle from corroded hinges.
Bit by bit, Zanzibar's fabled Stone Town is crumbling. Every year, a few more buildings collapse, leaving yawning gaps in the narrow, winding alleys lined with Arab palaces, Persian baths, British colonial offices, Indian shops and one-time slave chambers.
Relentless sun, rain, wind and neglect have taken a toll on one of the world's cultural
Source: CSM
December 29, 2005
For a month 100 years ago, a quiet New England port held the focus of the world. From Aug. 9 to Sept. 5, diplomats were thrown together with local ladies clubs, and foreign reporters swooped onto picket-fenced streets and called the town a beacon of hope to end the cataclysm between "East" and "West." In fact, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, fought mostly in Manchuria, was so profound in its effect that some historians now call it "World War 0."
Toda
Source: First Amendment Center
December 27, 2005
PITTSFIELD, N.H. — An assignment intended to teach students about tolerance and the Holocaust angered some students at Pittsfield Middle High School, who claimed it violated their religious freedom.
English teacher Harry Mitchell last week asked students to make and wear yellow stars similar to those Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. The graded assignment, part of a lesson on The Diary of Anne Frank, was intended to teach empathy, he said.
But some students protest
Source: NYT
December 29, 2005
Donald S. Dawson, who as a presidential aide marshaled Harry S. Truman's crucial whistle-stop tour in the 1948 election campaign and who later had a long career as a Washington lawyer, died on Sunday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 97. Mr. Dawson was personnel director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created by the government to help fight the Depression, when Truman took him on in 1947 as a special executive assistant. He became perhaps the nation
Source: Times Online (UK)
December 28, 2005
THE German Government angrily rebuked a former hostage yesterday who is determined to return to Iraq despite being held captive for three weeks by a Sunni gang.
Susanne Osthoff, a 43-year-old archaeologist, announced this week on al-Jazeera television that she would go back to her work in northern Iraq, trying to set up a German cultural centre in Arbil. Angela Merkel’s new Government, which regards the freeing of Frau Osthoff this month as its first foreign po
Source: BBC News
December 29, 2005
A Holocaust survivor's support group has said 40% of survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line, Israel Radio has reported.
Most of the 170,000 people affected emigrated from the former Soviet bloc and now get little financial help.
Zeev Factor, the chairman of the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund, says many survivors get no pensions and have to live off $390 a month.
Israel officially sets the poverty line at an income of $400 a month.
Source: BBC News
December 29, 2005
British cabinet papers from 1975 detailing the government's plans in the event of nuclear war are among new documents released by the National Archives. They reveal that government bunkers would be manned by civil servants, emergency legislation would be passed, and hospitals would be emptied.
TV was to close down, and the BBC to begin a wartime service on radio. The prime minister would be taken to his bunker but there were no plans at that time to evacuate civilians.
Source: AP
December 29, 2005
About 3,000 people have been cleared to receive the first payments from an Austrian fund to compensate Holocaust survivors, and another 3,000 should be approved shortly, the fund's chief overseer said Thursday.Hannah Lessing, general secretary of the General Settlement Fund, told the Austria Press Agency that the first cash payments will be made by Saturday.
Lessing said the fund hopes to have processed all of the 19,300 survivors' claims by the end of 2006, alt
Source: Baltimore Jewish Times
December 29, 2005
Fact may be stranger than fiction, but when it comes to espionage, fiction makes for better storytelling. That was the conclusion drawn by many veterans of -- and experts on -- the Israeli intelligence service Mossad when they heard about Steven Spielberg's new thriller "Munich," which opens Friday in North America. "The basis for this film has no relation to reality, though it may be a cracking tale," said Eitan Haber, a Mossad historian.
In his portrayal of the
