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: AP
January 27, 2007
STOCKHOLM -- There are places on the Moon named after him. His face appears on Swedish currency, and an era of scientific history bears his name. But Carl Linnaeus is best known for creating the system of classifying living organisms that became the international standard.
Sweden on Saturday began yearlong celebrations that will mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of its most famous scientist, launching festivities with music and fireworks in Linnaeus' hometown.
''H
Source: AP
January 27, 2007
Israel's Holocaust memorial has launched a version of its Web site in Farsi to educate the country's most bitter enemy — Iran — about the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.
Iran has faced widespread condemnation for hosting a conference last month that questioned whether the Holocaust took place. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a "myth" and said Israel should be "wiped off the map."
The Web site was unveiled this week to
Source: Washington Post
January 28, 2007
About half a mile to the east of the bustle of the Kennedy Space Center visitors' center at Cape Canaveral is a little-visited part of American space history. Here the Atlantic breeze sighs among the stunted palms and the palmetto grass and whines through the twisted steel gridwork of abandoned skeletal launch gantries.
It is Launch Pad 34, site of one of the first -- and worst -- disasters in space history. It was here 40 years ago this weekend, on Jan. 27, 1967, that astronauts Vi
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
January 27, 2007
BERLIN -- Germans held services around the country on Saturday to mark the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, while the country's Jewish community issued a stern warning about the danger of denying the crime in which some six million Jews were murdered.
Politicians led the way in the ceremonies at various Holocaust sites in marking the day set up to coincide with the January 27, 1945 liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.
In Berlin, the Greens party l
Source: The Guardian
January 25, 2007
China has reacted angrily to plans by Japanese nationalists to make a documentary describing as a myth the massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in 1937...
"We have seen the reports," said Jiang Yu, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman.
"I think that there is irrefutable evidence for the Nanjing massacre, and international society has long ago come to a conclusion about it. Japan's taking of a correct and responsible atti
Source: The Guardian
January 27, 2007
Senior leaders within the Muslim Council of Britain tried to reverse the controversial decision to stay away from Holocaust memorial day, the Guardian has learned.
Key figures such as Sir Iqbal Sacranie were desperate for the organisation to change tack, arguing that the current stance was damaging the MCB's reputation among the government and public.
A secret meeting of the ruling committee saw more than a third of its senior figures vote to join Jewish leaders and tho
Source: International Herald Tribune
January 26, 2007
BUCHAREST -- King Michael I of the Romanians was sitting alone at his desk here, looking over some correspondence, when a visitor arrived. He had evidently been sitting there for some time because the sun had set and the room had dimmed to near darkness around him. His personal secretary, Oana Carbunescu, flipped on a light and he stirred.
Michael, 85, is the last living head of state from World War II. He lunched with Hitler, shook Churchill's hand and lived briefly under Stalin's
Source: AP
January 27, 2007
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- Argentina on Friday authorized officials to reveal state secrets if called to testify in human rights trials, a move intended to speed up prosecution of atrocities committed during the country's 1976-1983 military dictatorship...
President Nestor Kirchner's decree lifts the ban on former and current military, police and government officials from revealing state secrets in certain court cases...
Encouraged by Kirchner, who took office in 2003,
Source: AP
January 26, 2007
DENVER -- A federal judge on Friday proposed keeping secret for 25 years the sworn statements made by the parents of the Columbine High School gunmen for a civil lawsuit settled more than three years ago.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock suggested the plan to settle a dispute over whether the depositions should be destroyed. His proposal calls for the material to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration. It was not immediately clear what would happen to th
Source: AP
January 25, 2007
A 2,500-year-old city influenced by the Olmecs – often referred to as the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica – has been discovered hundreds of miles away from the Olmecs' Gulf coast territory, archaeologists said.
The remains of Zazacatla are providing insight into the early arrival of advanced civilizations in central Mexico, while also providing lessons about the risks to ruins posed by modern development that now cover much of the ancient city.
Source: Daily Press
January 24, 2007
YORKTOWN -- Six feet beneath the grassy lawn outside the circa 1720 Custom House, archaeologists have stumbled upon one of this old colonial port's most deeply buried secrets.
Tracing the path for a new drain line, the scientists knew they might encounter the foundations of the historic Ambler House, which was constructed in the 1740s and destroyed during the Civil War. But no one expected to find the kind of complex structure that has emerged since the first brick foundations began
Source: National Geographic News
January 26, 2007
Archaeologists say they have unearthed Lupercale—the sacred cave where, according to legend, a she-wolf nursed the twin founders of Rome and where the city itself was born.
The long-lost underground chamber was found beneath the remains of Emperor Augustus' palace on the Palatine, a 230-foot-tall (70-meter-tall) hill in the center of the city.
Archaeologists from the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Rome Municipality came across the 50-foot-deep (15-meter-deep) ca
Source: Reuters
January 26, 2007
The U.N. General Assembly condemned on Friday denials of the Holocaust in a U.S.-drafted resolution responding to a Tehran conference dominated by speakers questioning the extermination of 6 million Jews in World War Two.
The measure, co-sponsored by more than 100 countries, including all Western nations as well as Rwanda, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, was approved by consensus, without a vote. Iran disassociated itself from the action, calling the resolution a political exercise Is
Source: AP
January 26, 2007
OSWIECIM, Poland -- As they do on every anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, witnesses to the Holocaust will gather Saturday -- growing older, frailer and fewer each year. After 62 years, the camp itself is also showing signs of aging under the pressures of tourism and time.
Its new director is searching for ways to preserve vital evidence of Nazi crimes and update the exhibits without chipping away at Auschwitz's authenticity -- or giving fodder for Holocaus
Source: The Independent
January 26, 2007
It was thought to be one of the most romantic love affairs in the history of Spanish art, but the liaison between the rough and ready genius Francisco de Goya and the beautiful, capricious Duchess of Alba, the grandest grandee in Spain, has now been described as an "urban legend".
According to a new book by Manuela Mena, a Goya specialist at the Prado museum, in Madrid, the social gulf between the two was never bridged. "It was an inequality he tried to overcome, but
Source: The Guardian
January 26, 2007
From the Holocaust to 9/11, from Berlin to New York, the world is now studded with memorials to human suffering. But does this really mean we care more than we used to? And does our obsession with terrible events make it any less likely that we will repeat them? [The Guardian's] Jonathan Jones joins the strange new tourist trail...
Source: St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press
January 26, 2007
MADISON — Wisconsin lawmakers on Thursday proposed requiring schools to teach about the Hmong people, saying suspicion of the community could be eased by an understanding of their past as U.S. allies in the Vietnam War.
The bill, backed by a group of state Assembly Democrats, is identical to one proposed in April 2005 that died when lawmakers adjourned last year. Sponsors said racial tensions rekindled by this month's homicide of a Hmong hunter could build support for passage this y
Source: CBC
January 26, 2007
Ken Milburn knows he could have sold a pair of boxing gloves that once belonged to late heavyweight champion Joe Louis for a princely sum. But the Windsor man wanted to see this piece of American cultural and political history preserved in what he saw as the proper place — Washington's Smithsonian Institution.The gloves, worn by Louis in his first fight with German Max Schmeling in 1936, have been in Milburn's family since then. And he wasn't going to sell them.
Source: Deutsche Welle
January 26, 2007
German prosecutors in Mannheim demanded a five-year jail sentence Friday for one of the most high-profile figures in the Holocaust denial movement, Ernst Zündel, in closing arguments at his trial. As one of the most famous Holocaust deniers goes on trial in Germany, the EU takes steps to criminalize denying the Shoah.Zündel, a 67-year-old German citizen, stands accused of inciting racial hatred for disputing the historical fact that Nazi Germany systematically slaughtered si
Source: Telegraph
January 26, 2007
A Nazi storm trooper has arranged to have his ashes scattered in Scotland where he was a prisoner of war.
Heinrich Steinmeyer was a 20-year-old grenadier in the Waffen SS when he was captured in Normandy and taken to a prison camp in Perthshire in 1944.
He spent the last months of the war incarcerated with 4,000 others at the Cultybraggan camp near Comrie. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, was kept there after he crash-landed in Scotland, and the ringleaders of a 1944 plot
