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: International Herald Tribune
August 28, 2007
Poland's nationalist-conservative government could claim as much as $20 billion in compensation from Germany for the destruction of its art treasures during the Nazi occupation, in what is becoming a growing dispute between the countries as Polish parliamentary elections approach, officials in Warsaw said Tuesday.
The latest dispute, one of many that have led to a sharp deterioration in relations between Warsaw and Berlin since the Polish government was elected nearly two years ago
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
August 27, 2007
In a final rule published in the Federal Register August 17, 2007, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced across-the-board fee increases for reproduction of archival materials in its facilities nationwide. In addition to Federal records, this includes donated historical materials, Presidential records, and records filed with the Office of the Federal Register. This rule will become effective on October 1, 2007.
The National Archives current fees were estab
Source: Newsday
August 27, 2007
Lewis Greenstein owns a house that stands at the center of a wrenching controversy over the preservation of black history versus the revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn.
His home at 233 Duffield St., which was built in 1847, contains what he says is clear evidence that it was used to shelter and feed black slaves escaping along the legendary Underground Railroad to Canada.
Source: Houston Chronicle
August 26, 2007
Drifting down Buffalo Bayou in a pontoon boat on a humid summer afternoon, Louis Aulbach sees 300 Comanches camping out at the Wortham Center and tall grass rippling south past bumper-to-bumper traffic on Prairie, as far as the eye can see.
Aulbach's not hallucinating from the Bayou City's intense summer heat — he's a history buff.
"In Houston, it's very easy to ignore the history, but that's not to say that there isn't any," said Aulbach, 59. "You just h
Source: Slate
August 27, 2007
Firefighters in Greece narrowly saved the ruins of Olympia from the wildfires that spread across the island nation over the weekend. The blaze torched the edges of the stadium, but officials say the archaeological treasure survived. Can ancient ruins catch on fire?
No, but they can crumble from the heat. Greek ruins made of limestone or marble aren't going to burst into flames, but they can undergo physical and chemical changes when subjected to the heat of burning vegetation nearby
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
August 28, 2007
If Ron Avery has his way, Philadelphia tour guides will stop telling you things that will make you flunk your history test.
They'll stop saying that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln once dined together. Or that Ben Franklin had not one, but 69, illegitimate children. That basement kitchens had outdoor exits so as to spare the furniture should the cook's skirts catch fire. Or that a house would be left to burn if it didn't display an insurance company fire mark.
Mr.
Source: Boston Globe
August 25, 2007
It's been an emotional week for relatives of the 70 men who died aboard the USS Grunion during World War II.
First, late Wednesday, the son of the submarine's commander spotted what is almost definitely its wreckage, in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Kiska, Alaska.
Then yesterday, the mission to inform the crewmembers' relatives that the ship had been found was completed. After articles appeared in Detroit newspapers yesterday, a woman called in to a local radio station and
Source: Toronto Star
August 25, 2007
In the face of damning evidence in the form of a YouTube video and police surveillance footage, Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday to planting undercover police officers amid protesters at this week's North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Que.
To many of the protesters who witnessed three men in masks holding rocks get overpowered by police – the same trio later identified by the Sûreté du Québec as cops in disguise – the implicating video only confirmed what they al
Source: BBC
August 27, 2007
The Government has been accused of failing to deliver on a pledge to fund an investigative unit re-examining murders from the Troubles.
Dave Cox, head of the Historical Enquiries Team, (HET) said last year's funding, worth £4m had to come out of the Chief Constable's policing budget.
This was despite a Government promise two years ago that it would provide £32m for the work over six years.
However, an NIO spokesman insisted the police had not lost out on fu
Source: Asia Times
August 14, 2007
Ho Chi Minh City is set to erect a new 6.3-meter-high bronze-cast statue of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, the ascetic who famously immolated himself in the streets of that city (then called Saigon) in protest against the repressive US-propped South Vietnamese government more than four decades ago.
The statue will next month be symbolically placed on the very spot in the city where the monk was depicted in iconic photographs burning himself to death. With its raising, the Communist
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 26, 2007
As battle raged across the fields of Flanders, British soldiers found brief respite from the horrors of the First World War in "underground towns" far below the mud and gore. Now, more than 90 years after the armies left and the extraordinary networks of tunnels were flooded, the task of finally revealing their secrets has begun.
The prize, archaeologists and historians believe, is an unprecedented insight into the lives of British troops on the Western Front.
Source: CNN
August 24, 2007
German police have charged the leader of a leading far-right political party with inciting racial hatred after he recommended Adolf Hitler's former deputy for the Nobel peace prize.
Police in the eastern city of Jena said on Friday they had filed the charge against Udo Voigt, head of the National Democratic Party (NPD), after he proposed the late Rudolf Hess for the prestigious award during a speech last weekend.
If convicted of incitement, Voigt could face a jail term
Source: Today's Zaman
August 24, 2007
Bavaria, one of Germany’s federal states, has won a legal battle to get the publication and sale of Adolf Hitler’s infamous book “Mein Kampf” banned in Turkey after the book became a best-seller here, a Turkish news report said yesterday.
The court case was the latest attempt on the part of Bavaria to stop Turkish publication and sale of the book written by Hitler in prison before he rose to power, reports the daily Hürriyet. After becoming a best-seller in Turkey earlier this year,
Source: http://www.zwire.com
August 26, 2007
Henry McCabe said it's been more than 30 years since the wreckage of the Acadia, a Confederate side-wheeler, has been visible in the Yazoo River.
Now - with the river's water level so low - this piece of Civil War naval history has once again come into view.
"It was about two and half or three weeks ago when I saw it for the first time. I saw that axle sticking up in the river. Then I started watching the river," said McCabe, a lifelong Civil War buff.
Source: AP
August 27, 2007
fter a 30-year international court fight to stay in the U.S., John Demjanjuk, accused of concealing a past as a Nazi concentration-camp guard, could be out of options if a lone pending ruling goes against him, his attorney said.
"If we lose it, we're sort of at the end of the road, and the Justice Department is going to try and deport him. That's my guess," said John Broadley, Demjanjuk's attorney in Washington.
The Justice Department first brought charges seeking t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 28, 2007
Newsreader [ie: TV anchor] Natasha Kaplinsky has told for the first time how members of her family were massacred in the Holocaust.
The 34-year-old broke down in tears as she discovered the terrible truth about her ancestry while filming BBC1 series Who Do You Think You Are?
Kaplinsky is descended from Polish Jews on her father's side. For the programme she travelled to the small town of Slonim in Belarus, which was part of Poland during the Second World War, to researc
Source: CSM
August 28, 2007
If Ron Avery has his way, Philadelphia tour guides will stop telling you things that will make you flunk your history test.
They'll stop saying that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln once dined together. Or that Ben Franklin had not one, but 69, illegitimate children. That basement kitchens had outdoor exits so as to spare the furniture should the cook's skirts catch fire. Or that a house would be left to burn if it didn't display an insurance company fire mark.
Source: Guardian (UK)
August 27, 2007
South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, has been forced to defend his description of Nicolas Sarkozy as "a citizen of Africa", for a speech by the French president that was widely condemned elsewhere on the continent as racist.Mr Mbeki wrote to the rightwing French leader praising an address to a university audience in Senegal last month in which Mr Sarkozy said that Africans had turned their back on progress.
"The tragedy of Africa is that the Afr
Source: NPR
August 28, 2007
The King Tut exhibition has drawn millions of visitors to museums across the country since it opened two years ago. But some African-American scholars believe the exhibition makes King Tut look too white. The debate over Tut's race led the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, where the show is on display, to sponsor a conference on the subject.The show, Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs has drawn a steady stream of protesters since it opened in Los
Source: CSM
August 24, 2007
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln stood here and gave the speech that was to become his most famous. With brevity and eloquence he spoke of the liberty and equality upon which this country was founded. He looked forward to the Union's salvation, the end of slavery – and "a new birth of freedom."
What he couldn't have foreseen delivering the Gettysburg Address that afternoon was that a Southern colonel would one day claim this hallowed ground in the form of a KFC just beyond its gat
