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: BBC News
January 10, 2006
The Austrian birthplace of Adolf Hitler is fighting to contain an outcry over pictures that apparently show local football fans making a Nazi salute. One of the pictures shows teenage fans of Braunau football team offering a straight-armed, open-handed salute at a notorious former concentration camp.
Braunau's mayor said the fan club had not denied publishing the photos on its website - and nor had it apologised. Nazi activity of any kind can lead to a ja
Source: NYT
January 11, 2006
The opinion is more than 50 years old, and it is not even binding precedent. But just minutes into the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., it took center stage and seemed to lay the groundwork for the questions he will face concerning his views on the limits of presidential power.
The 1952 opinion, a concurrence by Justice Robert H. Jackson, rejected President Harry S. Truman's assertion that he had the constitutional power to seize the nation's steel
Source: cronaca.com
January 10, 2006
Hawaiian groups entangled in a dispute over native artifacts obtained from a museum and then buried have agreed to try to settle the case outside of court, one of the groups said Monday.
The director of a group dedicated to the proper treatment of ancestral remains has been in jail since Dec. 27 for refusing to tell a federal judge the exact location of the 83 artifacts from the Bishop Museum. . .
Source: Inside Higher Ed
January 8, 2006
Fewer new historians and more job openings translate into one of the healthiest job markets in the field in years.
Data that will be published this month in Perspectives, the magazine of the American Historical Association, show that 966 history positions were advertised there in the 2004-5 academic year, a 13 percent increase in one year. During the same year, the number of new Ph.D.’s reported by departments fell by 14 percent, to 840.
As a result, the number of posit
Source: cronaca.com
January 9, 2006
More than 60 years ago, a group of Czech and Slovak exiles parachuted into their Nazi-occupied homeland and assassinated SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, the man known as the "Butcher of Prague".
For the first time since the end of the World War Two, a German museum is offering a close look at "Operation Anthropoid", the codename for the only successful assassination of a member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle.Michal Buria
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
January 9, 2006
A planned American Civil War Center in downtown Richmond won a $1 million boost from Congress recently, but it also took some flak.
Critics of "pork-barrel" spending have shelled the Civil War Center, along with numerous other projects nationally, that were included in a $453 billion defense-spending bill for fiscal 2006.
While the $1 million appropriation is only a tiny fraction of the overall annual defense bill, it has become part of a perennial debate over
Source: BBC News
January 7, 2006
Archaeologists have unveiled two Iron Age "bog bodies" which were found in the Republic of Ireland. The bodies, which are both male and have been dated to more than 2,000 years old, probably belong to the victims of a ritual sacrifice.
In common with other bog bodies, they show signs of having been tortured before their deaths. Details of the finds are outlined in a BBC Timewatch documentary to be screened on 20 January.
Hund
Source: NYT
January 9, 2006
BERLIN - Some buildings are harder to love than others. No matter how many good citizens jump to their defense, they can't seem to shake a bad reputation.
But by any standard, the Palace of the Republic here is a particularly tough case. Opened in 1976 as the home of the East German Parliament, the huge steel-and-concrete building, clad in bronze-colored windows, has become an emblem of a failed ideology. The government padlocked it soon after reunification of the two Germanys in 19
Source: NYT
January 9, 2006
Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, has finished serving a prison term in Istanbul on charges in another case and will be freed this week, the semiofficial Anatolia news agency reported Sunday.
Mr. Agca served 19 years in Italy for shooting the pope and then was sent back to Turkey, in 2000, and has been in prison since then for killing Abdi Ipekci, a newspaper editor, in 1979.
Italy pardoned Mr. Agca in 1999, and the Vatican
Source: NYT
January 8, 2006
Slowly, Serbia is prosecuting some of the war crimes cases from the Kosovo fighting of 1999 and the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia, even while it has failed to deliver major suspects to the tribunal in The Hague.
Seven cases have been brought to trial so far. In the past two years, five of them in a war crimes court that has been financed partly by the United States. Prosecutors say they have plans to bring dozens more cases to trial. They and others following the cases say the trials s
Source: NYT
January 8, 2006
A federal appeals court has reversed its own ruling and upheld a $54.6 million jury verdict against two retired generals from El Salvador who were held responsible in a 2002 trial for the torture of three Salvadorans during the country's civil war in the 1980's.
The opinion, issued Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, was a surprising turn in decade-long efforts by American human rights groups to punish abuses that occurred during the con
Source: Hartford Courant
January 10, 2006
Yale Divinity School historian Kenneth P. Minkema wants people to see the warm, fuzzy side of Edwards, the side that wandered through fields and sat on the pristine banks of the Hudson; the side that pondered an "appearance of divine glory, in almost everything."
To that end, Minkema and three more of Edwards' greatest admirers have already spent a good portion of their adult lives bringing the theologian/philosopher/"Renaissance man" to the masses through print.
Source: Armenian News Network Groong
January 9, 2006
According to Aksam, Jean-Louis Debre, the president of the French Assembly who is entrusted with investigating laws concerning colonialism and historical issues, said that the law concerning the
so-called Armenian genocide will be looked at again. Speaking to radio Europe-1, Debre said that he would report on the matter to President Jacques Chirac. Nineteen prominent French historians last month called for annulment of the laws urging recognition of the so-called Armenian genocide and the
Source: NPR
January 10, 2006
If the current bird-flu outbreak becomes a pandemic, fear could turn to panic. Experts say whether that happens will probably depend on how honest governments are with the public.
In the flu pandemic of 1918, there was enough panic that society began to disintegrate in some cities, says historian John Barry, author of The Great Influenza. "Close blood relatives were so frightened that they would not feed a family where people were starving to death," h
Source: The Guardian (London)
January 10, 2006
A 16th-century synagogue has been uncovered in the city of Porto, northern Portugal, after builders tore down walls in a building in the city's historic centre.The synagogue, built when Jews could be burned at the stake for worshipping, was hidden behind a false wall in a four-storey building on a side street in what was once Porto's Jewish quarter.
The synagogue was discovered by a Catholic priest, Father Jardim Moreira, who was in charge of turning the buildin
Source: The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand)
January 10, 2006
Right beside Molly Malones pub on Taranaki St a cleared building site reveals the fragments of the big, thriving Te Aro pa which existed for most of the 19th century.
The discovery of three ponga huts, or whare, and an apparent cannonball on one of Wellington's busiest streets has stunned local Maori -- and the developers.Since last month's find, an archaeological team has pored over the site and people from all over Wellington have taken interest. There have al
Source: New York Times
January 10, 2006
A vertical column of 10 glyphic words, uncovered last year in ruins in Guatemala, is unreadable even by the most expert scholars, but they know what it means - that Maya writing is older than they once thought.
Archaeologists reported last week that the script sample, discovered at San Bartolo, in northeastern Guatemala, is clear evidence that the Maya were writing more than 2,300 years ago. This is a few centuries earlier than previous well-dated Maya writing and 600 years before t
Source: LAT
January 8, 2006
With hundreds, even thousands, of bills to navigate over a career, there is danger in every ambiguous vote, like the one pitting insurgent hordes against caribou herds.
As political handicapper Charlie Cook put it, "A career in the Senate is like a paper trail of little time bombs ready to blow up."
Indeed, in the history of the republic, just two senators have gone directly from the Senate to the White House. John F. Kennedy was one. The other was Warren G. H
Source: CBC
January 9, 2006
Forensic scientists in Austria have been unable to determine if a skull believed to be that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is really that of the composer. Scientists admitted on Austrian public TV Sunday that DNA tests on the skull were inconclusive.A team from the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck and the U.S. Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory analyzed a tooth drawn from the skull, which the Mozarteum foundation in Salzburg obtained in 1902.
The
Source: Globe and Mail
January 9, 2006
On the face of it, Maria Romanova's legal application to Russian prosecutors might seem straightforward. As the self-described head of the surviving family of Nicholas II, Russia's last czar, Ms. Romanova wants rehabilitation for her ancestors, according to her lawyer. Under Russian law, this would mean a formal admission that Nicholas II was unjustly killed along with his wife, children and attendants after revolution swept away Russia's monarchy.Boris Yeltsin went far beyo
