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
March 12, 2008
Stockholm | It’s hard to find anyplace in Europe today, even here in peaceable Sweden, where people aren’t squabbling over cultural property and the spoils of war. For some time, it turns out, a handful of nationalist Danes have been loudly barking about booty that the Swedes nabbed 350 years ago in a war with Denmark. The cache includes an ornate canopy from Kronborg Castle, of Hamlet lore, and recently people in Skane, a region in the south of Sweden that was ceded by Denmark in 1658 after lo
Source: AP
March 11, 2008
An international coalition dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust announced Tuesday that is has selected Berlin as the site for its headquarters.
The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education coordinates efforts to commemorate the genocide of Europe's Jewish population. Its offices will share the building housing the Topography of Terror, a museum that documents the crimes of Germany's Nazi-era government.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walte
Source: NYT
March 12, 2008
JOSEPH P. WEISS, 57, said he often fantasized about what it might have been like to be in World War II. So on a recent weekend he paid $600 to turn back the clock and participate in the re-enactment of a “fighter sweep.”
Mr. Weiss, a retired office-electronics business owner from Bay Shore, N.Y., strapped on a parachute and rode shotgun in a North American T-6 Texan fighter trainer, the lead plane of three flying wing to wing, pretending to be headed across the English Channel towar
Source: NYT
March 12, 2008
The government and banks agreed to pay $170 million to compensate Jews whose property was looted by the Nazi occupying forces during World War II. Under the arrangement, $54 million will be paid to Holocaust survivors while the rest will go to a foundation to help needy families of victims and toward efforts to assure that the Holocaust is remembered. Belgium collaborated with Nazi Germany, and victims’ relatives said the state should look more closely at its role.
Source: Daily Mail
March 6, 2008
The Pope is planning to rehabilitate Martin Luther - whose actions instigated the Protestant Reformation – by arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity but only to purge the Church of corrupt practices.
Benedict XVI will issue his findings on the 16th-century German theologian after discussing him at the papal summer residence, Castelgandolfo, during his annual seminar of 40 fellow theologians, the Ratzinger Schülerkreis.
Luther was and condemned for heresy a
Source: Catholic News Service
March 10, 2008
Rumors that the Vatican is set to rehabilitate Martin Luther, the 16th-century leader of the Protestant Reformation, are groundless, said the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi.
News reports in early March alleged that Pope Benedict XVI was dedicating a planned September symposium with former doctoral students to re-evaluating Luther, who was excommunicated and condemned for heresy.
The story "does not have any foundation, insofar as no rehabilitat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 12, 2008
German prosecutors have launched a last ditch bid to bring a octogenarian Nazi executioner to justice before he dies of old age.
Heinrich Boere, 86, a member of a notorious Waffen SS death squad in the Netherlands, was sentenced to death in 1949.
But his sentence was commuted to life and German courts have since refused efforts to extradite him to the Netherlands to face prosecution.
Now Ulrich Maass, a state prosecutor in North Rhine-Westphalia, has revi
Source: WaPo
March 12, 2008
Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.
At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh's family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.
"None of the women proteste
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
March 12, 2008
It was three months before the Bicentennial and a group of high school students in Boston were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. One of them held a large American flag. But this was not the commonplace ritual of citizenship that it might sound. The teenagers, all of them white, were just as swept up as their parents in the protests over court-ordered desegregation of the Boston public schools; and much of the rhetoric swirling around the anti-busing movement appealed to the old patriotic tropes o
Source: Times (UK)
March 11, 2008
Adolf Hitler called it Germania, his vision of Berlin as a city full of bloated marble architecture, capital of the Nazi-run world. “Berlin will only be comparable with the Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians or Romans,” the Nazi leader said. “What is London, what is Paris by comparison?”
For decades his plans were regarded as so crazed that they were confined to specialist books and institutes.
Yesterday the taboo was broken. Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, un
Source: NYT
March 11, 2008
The New York Public Library’s venerable lion-guarded building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street is to be renamed for the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has agreed to jump-start a $1 billion expansion of the library system with a guaranteed $100 million of his own.
The project, to be announced on Tuesday, aims to transform the Central Library into a destination for book borrowing as well as research. The Mid-Manhattan branch, on the east side of Fifth Avenue at 40th St
Source: AP
March 10, 2008
Ceremonies are being held in Bulgaria Monday to commemorate the massive protests that saved the country's Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
The laying of flowers at memorials in the capital of Sofia and other large cities is to mark the 65th anniversary of protests by Bulgarian clergymen, intellectuals, politicians and others.
In 1943, the pro-fascist government of Germany's ally, Bulgaria, signed a secret agreement with the Nazis to
Source: BBC
March 9, 2008
Almost 50 years ago, archaeologists searching for the ruined house of Augustus found a tiny clue buried deep in 2,000 years' worth of rubble overlooking the Forum in Rome.
The single fragment of painted plaster, discovered in masonry-filled rooms, led the experts to unearth a series of exquisite frescoes commissioned by the man who would later become Rome's first emperor.
On Sunday following decades of painstaking restoration, the frescoes in vivid shades of blue, red a
Source: http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk
March 10, 2008
AN "EXCEPTIONAL" ancient Roman site has been discovered in woodland near Peterborough.
Despite numerous digs and excavations across the region over the past two centuries, the huge site, hidden deep in woods at Bedford Purlieus, had miraculously gone unnoticed.
Early work has only scratched the surface of the Roman remains, but indications have left experts stunned by how well preserved the remains, of what appears to be a building of some importance, are.
Source: Times (UK)
March 10, 2008
Evidence of pagan rituals involving swans and other birds in the Cornish countryside in the 17th century has been uncovered by archaeologists.
Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.
The finds have been dated to the 1640s, a period of turmoil in England when Cromwellian Puritans destroyed any links to pre-Christian
Source: http://www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk
March 10, 2008
PUB landlord Billy Nettleton was astonished after a 700-year-old grave cover was discovered in his village pub - thanks to the smoking ban.
He knew nothing about the carved stone relic that had been built into an internal passage wall.
But one of his regulars, archaeologist Percival Turnbull, spotted it low in the wall as he stood outside puffing his pipe, because he can no longer smoke in the bar of the Blacksmiths Arms in Mickleton, County Durham.
Though
Source: http://www.bridgwatermercury.co.uk
March 11, 2008
WORKMEN digging below Bridgwater's Castle Street stumbled across an "outstanding" piece of the town's medieval history last week, unseen for more than 700 years.
Wessex Water officials were renovating sewers underneath the street on Monday when they unearthed a smugglers tunnel and part of old curtain wall from Bridgwater Castle - leading one archaeologist to proclaim it "one of the most important finds of the 21st Century".
Bridgwater Castle dates b
Source: New Statesman
March 11, 2008
In the London Borough of Hackney, Jewish secondary-level students at Yesodey Hatorah School who boycotted an exam on The Merchant of Venice because they found it anti-Semitic were backed by their head teacher, Rabbi Abraham Pinter, despite damaging their National Curriculum assessment results and demoting the school from 1st to 274th place in performance league tables. An ex-teacher of the school blogging on the Talkback message board for the online edition of Israeli newspaper Haaretz
Source: NYT
March 10, 2008
SCRANTON, Pa. — She is about 3 1/2 years old, a prim little blonde in a light dress, road-testing her white anklets and Mary Janes. Her mother, slim and stylish in a 1940s fitted suit, hat and strapped white heels, clutches her hand and guides her down some outdoor steps.
Then the daughter breaks free and rushes exuberantly toward the camera, an uninhibited assertion by little Hillary Rodham that she is ready for her close-up.
The scene unspools in a grainy black-and-wh
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
March 14, 2008
Katyn, a name that haunts Poland, may gain greater familiarity in the West. A new book from Yale University Press and a new, Oscar-nominated film from director Andrzej Wajda offer different takes on the Stalinist mass murder of Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940 and its 50-year cover-up.
In April and May 1940, some 14,500 Polish prisoners were shot by their Soviet captors. The POW's, chiefly military officers and policemen, were taken prisoner during the Soviet invasion o
