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
June 5, 2007
[A]mid an effort to revive a city mired in a crippling cycle of crime and unemployment, the Campbell Soup Company, Camden’s longtime and most prominent corporate resident, has proposed expanding its presence and transforming the area where the empty store sits into an office park.
The soup company is prepared to spend $72 million to improve its headquarters, and has also promised to help lure developers to an adjacent office park with the help of $26 million in state funds. But the
Source: Oxford Mail
June 4, 2007
Archaeologists from Oxford have discovered what are thought to be the oldest examples of human decorations in the world.
The international team of archaeologists, led by Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, have found shell beads believed to be 82,000 years old from a limestone cave in Morocco.
Source: LiveScience
June 4, 2007
Which came first–the chicken or the European?
Popular history, and a familiar rhyme about Christopher Columbus, holds that Europeans made contact with the Americas in 1492, with some arguing that the explorer and his crew were the first outsiders to reach the New World.
But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, resear
Source: CNN
June 5, 2007
A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community representative says.
The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community, said Tuesday.
The Nazis established two ghettos during World War II near the village and brought Jews there from w
Source: http://www.thetimesonline.com
June 4, 2007
A plane with swastikas on its tail, based at the Gary/Chicago International Airport, won't land a home at Lansing Municipal Airport anytime soon.
Recent rumors about the German Junker Ju 52 moving to the village have been unfounded, said John Kowal, the volunteer public information officer for the Great Lakes Wing of the Commemorative Air Force.
Kowal, who said the Junker Ju 52 is used for historical re-enactments and education, is concerned about recent confusion about
Source: Deutsche Welle
June 5, 2007
The German government announced plans Monday to erect a memorial in Berlin dedicated homosexuals persecuted and killed by the Nazis. The sculpture should be completed this year.
The memorial, to be located in Tiergarten Park, will stand adjacent to the Holocaust Memorial built to honor the lives of the 6 million jews killed under the Nazi regime.
Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian Ingar Dragset were selected last year to design the memorial. Their design consist
Source: Independent (UK)
June 5, 2007
A Norwegian Nazi who served in the SS and was awarded the Gold Cross by Hitler has been discovered living in Marbella on the Costa del Sol in Spain
Fredrik Jensen, 93, served in a number of SS units during the Second World War, including the SS Panzer-Grenadier der Fuhrer, SS-Panzer-Division -Das Reich, the Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 9 Germania and the Panzer-Division Wiking.
He fought on the front line, which earned him the rare accolade of being one of the few foreigne
Source: NYT
June 5, 2007
JERUSALEM, June 4 — Dig nearly anywhere in this city, and you hit the remains of an earlier civilization. One of the latest such finds is a narrow strip of antiquity that runs down the middle of a main road through what is now Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in north Jerusalem.
Soon, it will be covered by tracks for a light railway, part of a new mass transit system for the city. Both the history being unearthed and the planning under way are filled with the kind of controversy
Source: Congressional Quarterly
June 1, 2007
The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs
Source: Sandy Tolan at Salon
June 3, 2007
Little-noticed details in declassified documents from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, indicate that top officials in the Johnson administration -- including Johnson's most pro-Israeli Cabinet members -- did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable, at least until the final hour. In these documents, Israel emerges as a vastly superior military power, its opponents far weaker than the menacing threat Israel portrayed, and war itself something that
Source: The Australian
June 5, 2007
Sitting in court today before a Yale-educated black judge, James Ford Seale, 71, was a long way from the banks of the Mississippi where, 43 years ago, he is alleged to have tortured and drowned two black teenagers.As the prosecution laid out in appalling detail Mr Seale’s alleged crimes, he faced photographs of the teenagers on a computer screen and a white lawyer very different from the local sheriff – and fellow Ku Klux Klansman – who dropped the charges against him in 196
Source: Telegraph
June 2, 2007
A rare ceremony to honour Aboriginal war veterans was held in Sydney yesterday, reviving memories of how shabbily they were treated after they had fought for their country.
About 500 Aborigines volunteered for the First World War - a substantial number, given that the black population was just 80,000, and it was only in 1917 that "half-castes" were allowed to enlist. Up to 5,000 indigenous Australians joined up for the Second World War.
They included four brot
Source: http://www.theage.com.au
May 30, 2007
Searchers have failed to solve the mystery of what happened to Australia's first submarine, lost off Papua New Guinea in 1914.
Navy search teams had hoped an object on the seabed off PNG would be the submarine AE1, lost at the start of World War I.
Instead it turned out to be a submarine-shaped rock formation, Veterans Affairs Minister Bruce Billson said.
Source: Lawrence Journal-World & News
June 3, 2007
Here’s an interesting bit of American Civil War trivia: What many consider the first battle in the bloodiest war in the nation’s history — the Battle of Black Jack near Baldwin City — didn’t claim a single life.
That battle, a small skirmish between bands of pro- and anti-slavery men, occurred about five years before what many textbooks and historians refer to as the first official event in the Civil War at Fort Sumter in South Carolina in 1861.
But for a group of inter
Source: Catholic News Service
June 1, 2007
An SS general close to Adolf Hitler foiled a plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII during World War II and to put the Vatican and its treasures under Nazi control, according to a new book.
The book, "A Special Mission" by Dan Kurzman, refutes arguments that Pope Pius XII maintained a public silence about Nazi actions during World War II because he was anti-Semitic or because he was sympathetic toward Hitler.
"They were bitter, bitter enemies. They despised each ot
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
May 31, 2007
GERMANY may be poised to break a long-standing taboo by charging an entrance fee to concentration camp memorial sites.
Peter Dietz de Loos, president of the International Dachau Committee — named after the first concentration camp of the Nazi regime near Munich — said the camps desperately needed the money for renovations, staff and daily upkeep.
Jewish groups, politicians and former prisoners of the Nazis have spoken out against the plan, calling it shameless.
Source: Telegraph
June 5, 2007
A soldier's account of life during the Battle of the Somme will be put up for auction this month after his diaries surfaced in a descendant's basement.
The unpublished journals of Sgt Hubert Harding, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, run through the First World War from April 1915 until 1919 and describe how he risked his life on an almost daily basis at Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge and Cambrai.
On the first day of the Somme offensive, July 1, 1916 - a day
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 6, 2007
On summer weekends across the country, [Russian youngsters in love with English history] swap their jeans for Regency breeches, their belts for Tudor codpieces and their shirts for medieval breastplates depending on the era that they have chosen to embrace.
It is serious stuff. At a recent meeting of the Hastings Club, which despite its name seeks to recreate the Wars of the Roses, not a sign of modernity was in evidence.
Their camp in the forest near the village of Iv
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 4, 2007
ONE OF the greatest collections of historical letters ever amassed has been found in a laundry room.
Susannah Morris was called in to examine the hoard after the death of the secretive collector and was astonished to be led not into a library or a safe room but to the basement.
In the laundry room, wedged between a washing machine and a tumble dryer, was a plain metal filing cabinet. Miss Morris, who works for the auction house Christie's, opened it and could not belie
Source: Australian
June 5, 2007
A POLISH woman who for 60 years had been holding onto the diary of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis in 1943, presented the journal to Israel's Holocaust memorial overnight.
"I have a feeling that I'm writing for the last time. There is a (round-up) in town. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house," 14-year-old Rutka Laskier wrote while living in a Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, Poland on February 20, 1943.
Laskier hid her dia
