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
September 19, 2007
Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.
Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month,
Source: NYT
September 18, 2007
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.
The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.
In addition to opening the entire site to a
Source: Hispanic Link
September 17, 2007
It took 403 years after immigrants from Spain first settled in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 for the United States to proclaim Hispanic Heritage Week as an official annual national celebration.
In 1968, at the behest of Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the commemorative event, which was extended to a full month — from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 — 20 years later.
With deep roots in the Great Society and some successful campaigns to insert Latinos into president
Source: Guardian
September 16, 2007
In the vast, agonising mosaic of the Holocaust, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was simply one more piece, one of millions of the Nazis' victims lost to obscurity without a funeral or a grave.
Now bin Adam is to make history in Germany by becoming the first black person to be given a memorial in his adopted country as an individual victim of the genocide of the Third Reich. A Stolperstein - a bronze 'stumbling block' - will be erected on the ground outside the house in Berlin where he lived
Source: http://www.allheadlinenews.com
September 17, 2007
Libya celebrated the 76-year anniversary of the death of national hero Omar Al Mukhtar. On August 16, 1931, Italian forces in the city of Solouq, in the North African country, executed Mukhtar.
Mukhtar is one of the most influential national heroes the Libyan people cherish. He led the resistance movement against the Italian for over 20 years. Mukhtar was an Islamic teacher before founding and organizing a resistance movement that led successful attacks against the Italians.
Source: BBC
September 17, 2007
Forensic experts have unearthed the remains of dozens of German soldiers buried in Montenegro's capital during World War II, officials say.
The remains were discovered during construction work a few kilometres from the centre of Podgorica.
Many more soldiers are believed to be buried in the area, German and Montenegrin experts say.
Source: NYT
September 16, 2007
Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it’s not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.
Neither is it the one in the Märkisches Museum, the Berlin history museum nearby, nor the one in a geographical institute across town, which first caught Mr. Pobanz’s eye 40-odd years ago when he was a student.
“We called it the Führer globe,” he remembered. It planted the seed of h
Source: USA Today
September 18, 2007
Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.
The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to
Source: Jerusalem Post
September 17, 2007
A building from the Late Bronze Age apparently constructed for Egyptian authorities before the Israelite settlement in the Land of Israel has been uncovered in an excavation on the edge of the Negev desert near the Gaza Strip, Ben-Gurion University announced Monday.
The month-long summer dig on the eastern section of the Besor Stream, about 12 kilometers east of Gaza, revealed the 3,000-year-old site buried underneath a 7th century Philistine rural village from the Second Iron Age,
Source: Chicago Tribune
September 18, 2007
A defendant is shown sporting judicial robes and reading in court. Another drawing, shaded in murky brown, depicts a celebrity poet testifying in Sanskrit. A third captures an indignant defendant describing how he was bound and gagged in the courtroom for calling the judge a "fascist" and a "dog."
These images are among 483 courtroom sketches from the 1969-70 Chicago Seven conspiracy trial recently acquired by the Chicago History Museum. The pictures, the work of
Source: NYT
September 18, 2007
A lock of hair and wool leggings belonging to Sitting Bull, below, leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, are to be returned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to his closest living relatives. In an announcement yesterday, the museum said that after Sitting Bull was killed in 1890 while being arrested by tribal police, his body was in temporary possession of Horace Deeble, an Army doctor at the Fort Yates military post in North Dakota, who obtained the hair and leggings from t
Source: NYT
September 18, 2007
Beginning next month, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission will collect testimony on Staten Island, home to one of the largest populations of Liberians outside Africa, many of them survivors of 14 years of civil war.
The commission aims to construct a permanent historical record for Liberia, a country that has been wracked by power struggles and waves of savage violence.
Truth commissions have become a popular way to confront the crimes of crumbling regimes aro
Source: NYT
September 18, 2007
Sometimes the maturity of a field of science can be measured by the heft of its ambition in the face of the next daunting unknown, the mystery yet to be cracked.
Neurobiology probes the circuitry of the brain for the secrets of behaviors and thoughts that make humans human. High-energy physics seeks and may be on the verge of finding the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson thought to endow elementary particles with their mass. Cosmology is confounded by dark matter and dark ener
Source: Evan Thomas in Newsweek
September 17, 2007
Bush and Clinton have this in common: they spend time worrying about their place in history. As president, Clinton spent hours fretting he could never be in the "top tier" because he'd never been a "war president." Bush initially suggested to [biographer Robert] Draper he'd be long dead before anyone knew his place in history. But he was thinking about it. Competing with political adviser Karl Rove to read the most books, Bush compared himself to Lincoln, winning the confiden
Source: NYT
September 18, 2007
Maria Smirnova barreled past the heavy granite walls of the 16th-century Solovetsky Monastery, blaring French hip-hop in her oversized truck to the consternation of the nearby monks whose long, black cloaks billowed in the northerly breeze.
Ms. Smirnova, 23, runs an adventure tour company on the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the White Sea of northwestern Russia, about 100 miles from the Arctic Circle.
Though growing in popularity, her business has roiled the mon
Source: NYT
September 17, 2007
After nearly two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan wants to solidify his standing in history.
In an interview timed with the release of his memoir Monday, Mr. Greenspan sought to distance himself from the economic policies of President Bush and refute critics who say his policies at the Fed contributed to the housing bubble and bust that is now roiling the economy....
Mr. Greenspan, 81, acknowledged that the housing frenzy had been pumped up in
Source: Independent (UK)
September 17, 2007
The headline that the advertising (and political) world never thought it would see appeared in Campaign last week: "Labour turns to Saatchis". Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency so integrally associated with the Conservative Party, in particular the three successive electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher, had been appointed to handle the Labour party's advertising account in the next election.
Thirty years ago, Saatchi & Saatchi made history with a politic
Source: Independent (UK)
September 16, 2007
Almost a century after it steamed to the rescue of the stricken Titanic,
saving the lives of more than 700 stranded passengers, and 89 years after it
was sunk, the wreckage of the RMS Carpathia has finally been explored,
yielding precious artefacts.
An amateur dive team performed a record-breaking feat of underwater
archaeology to salvage objects such as the telegraph machine used on the
liner to communicate between the bridge and the engine room. They also
brought up crockery
Source: BBC
September 17, 2007
An exploratory dive to assess the chances of recovering a sunken U-boat is to take place off the Donegal coast.
The vessel - which did not see any war action - sank while being towed from Scotland to Londonderry to be scrapped.
Derry City Council plans to raise the Nazi submarine - U-778 - which lies 16 miles north west of Malin Head in about 70 metres of water.
Source: Newsday
September 14, 2007
Anthony Manno stood proud and teary-eyed, surrounded by his newly reacquainted family and holding the medals of his older brother, who was killed in World War II more than 60 years ago.
Army Pfc. Joseph Manno was one of two World War II veterans honored Friday with medals commemorating their service. For Anthony Manno, 80, the event in Rep. Tim Bishop's Coram office also was a family reunion, after having gone six decades without seeing his brother's family.
"All t
