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: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
The orchestra will make musical history playing a piece by Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer at Wagner's Bavarian home town of Bayreuth tomorrow.
Hitler's theories of racial purity and exterminating Jews were said to be partly drawn from Richard Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has observed an informal ban on the composer's music.
The news that Israel Chamber Orchestra and members of the Israel Symphony Orchestra will play a piece by Wagner at Bayreuth Festival, has aroused the hostility of Israeli politicians.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
Glenn Beck, the leading Right-wing American broadcaster, has prompted outrage after comparing the teenage victims of the Utoya Island massacre to the Hitler Youth. Beck said that the Labour party youth camp on the island, where 68 people were murdered, bore "disturbing" similarities to the Nazi party's notorious juvenile wing.Beck, a multimillionaire darling of the Tea Party movement, said on his nationally-syndicated radio show: "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing."
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
Hitler's theories of racial purity and exterminating Jews were said to be partly drawn from Richard Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has observed an informal ban on the composer's music.The news that Israel Chamber Orchestra and members of the Israel Symphony Orchestra will play a piece by Wagner at Bayreuth Festival, has aroused the hostility of Israeli politicians. The ensemble have also been threatened with funding cuts.The heads of the orchestra decided not to rehearse the piece in Israel, out of consideration for the public dispute.The orchestra, conducted by Roberto Paternostro, will play Siegfried Idyll, a twenty minute long symphonic poem which Wagner composed as a birthday present to his second wife....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
• Hitler wrote in his first volume of his book Mein Kampf: "At the age of twelve, I saw ... the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds."• Aged 16, Hitler quit school and spent the next three years being idle. He is said to have spent a tidy proportion of his pocket money on going to the opera. He became passionate about Wagner.• Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings are thought to have had a quasi-religious effect on Hitler. His theories of racial purity were partly drawn from Wagner. According to Wagner: "The Volk has always been the essence of all the individuals who constituted a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the races; then the races united through linguistic equality as a nation."...
Source: AP
July 24, 2011
GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- North Dakota political leaders are asking the NCAA to back off and let the state's flagship university keep its Fighting Sioux name and logo, even at the risk of potential blacklisting and scorn by other universities and its own conference.Lawmaker involvement is a strategy even some University of North Dakota boosters question, and is unique among schools forced to decide whether to drop American Indian nicknames deemed hostile and abusive or accept penalties for keeping them.North Dakota's debate appeared to be resolved when the state Board of Higher Education agreed in 2009 to drop the Fighting Sioux logo and nickname and UND agreed to phase them out by this Aug. 15....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
Two gold medals earned by Captain William Bligh during his exploits at sea during the late 1700s are to be auctioned in Australia and are expected to fetch more than AU$250,000 (£165,000).Captain Bligh, who is best known for being ousted from his post aboard the HMS Bounty by a mutinous crew, won the medals during his long and distinguished career in the Royal Navy....Capt Bligh was on a mission to bring back breadfruit, which the British empire hoped it could cultivate to feed to slaves in the West Indies, in 1789 when the famous mutiny took place and he and a group of his men were set adrift in a 22ft launch without navigation equipment in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.In a remarkable feat of endurance, the celebrated British seaman and his crew spent 47 days at sea, catching fish and seabirds and drinking rainwater to survive while navigating thousands of nautical miles by memory....
Source: AP
July 23, 2011
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Army's flagship hospital where privates to presidents have gone for care, is closing its doors after more than a century.Hundreds of thousands of the nation's war wounded from World War I to today have received treatment at Walter Reed, including 18,000 troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.President Dwight Eisenhower died there. So did Gens. John J. Pershing and Douglas MacArthur.
Source: National Parks Traveler
July 25, 2011
It is an honor to stand with you on one of our most sacred American landscapes. Here, 150 years ago today, the nation got its first real look at civil war. This is where American democracy began its baptism by fire. Where the grueling four-year journey that shaped a nation, began in earnest.The battle of Manassas dispelled the myth that the war would be a quick affair. The Confederate secretary of war, LeRoy Pope Walker, suggested prior to the battle that when all was said and done, he would be able to wipe up the blood that would be spilled with his pocket handkerchief.Historian Shelby Foote liked to point out that it would have made a good doctoral dissertation, calculating how many handkerchiefs it would have taken to clean up the blood that was actually shed.Over 620,000 lives. That was the price exacted by the Civil War. But those were only the military deaths. The war’s impact extended much farther than the battlefield....
Source: Watertown Daily Times (WI)
July 24, 2011
In this Friday, July 22, 2011 photo, Ed Jorgensen, of Woodward Design, inspects one of three sections of Nazi Germany's Atlantic Wall, as they are offloaded at the Port of New Orleans, where they will be on display at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The slabs are part of Nazi Germany's Atlantic Wall, a variety of defenses that stretched 3,200 miles from France to Norway and were designed to stop, or at least slow, the Allies from advancing inland during an invasion.
Source: ynet News (Israel)
July 25, 2011
The German intelligence agency BND admitted Monday to destroying the file of wanted Nazi criminal Alois Brunner in the 1990s and attempting to recruit him, Der Spiegel reported. Brunner was responsible for the deportation of at least 130,000 Jews to concentration camps during the Holocaust. Some reports claimed he had fled to Damascus after World War II and has been hiding there ever since. An email sent to a French news agency stated that the BND recently discovered secret files on Brunner which had mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has observed an informal ban on Wagner’s music because of its use in Nazi propaganda before and during World War II.• In 1953 on a tour to Israel, revered violinist Jascha Heifetz was attacked by a man with an iron bar after playing a violin sonata by Richard Strauss, who had been head of the State Music Bureau for several years under the Third Reich but who, it was later revealed, detested the Nazis and conformed to help protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and Jewish grandchildren. Strauss's music is no longer unofficially banned in Israel and is performed and broadcast regularly.• In 1998, Israel's Tel Aviv opera company shelved plans to perform a Wagner aria after dozens protested.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
• Hitler wrote in his first volume of his book Mein Kampf: "At the age of twelve, I saw ... the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds."• Aged 16, Hitler quit school and spent the next three years being idle. He is said to have spent a tidy proportion of his pocket money on going to the opera. He became passionate about Wagner.• Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings are thought to have had a quasi-religious effect on Hitler. His theories of racial purity were partly drawn from Wagner. According to Wagner: "The Volk has always been the essence of all the individuals who constituted a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the races; then the races united through linguistic equality as a nation."
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 23, 2011
Ettinger preferred to style himself an "immortalist", since he argued that whole body or head-only freezing ("neurological suspension") was only one means of achieving indefinite life. His rationale for pursuing this goal was contained in his book The Prospect Of Immortality (1964), which revealed him as an unquenchable optimist about mankind's technological future.He drew on his experience as a physics teacher and his interest in science fiction to predict the evolution of machines which would manufacture from raw atoms all that man needed. He foresaw intergalactic settlement, and argued that science would produce medical machines which would cure all diseases.What now seemed to be a fatal illness would be no more than a twinge by 2050. From this it followed that the dead might be "cured" by the doctors of the future.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2011
The men have sold the film rights to the Hollywood producer responsible for the Oscar winning movie Black Swan and have promised to give a no-holds-barred account of their ordeal."This is the only official and authorized film about what we lived in the San Jose mine," said Juan Andres Illanes, one of "Los 33", as they have become known. "Much of our story has never been told."Rumours of potential film versions of their time spent trapped 2,000ft below the Atacama desert in northern Chile have circulated since even before the men were brought to the surface in a televised rescue that was watched by an estimated worldwide audience of a billion people.
Source: CNN
July 25, 2011
As most people know by now, incredibly talented singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in her London apartment over the weekend. She joins an unfortunate club of singers who led troubled lives, some who struggled with drugs, and died at age 27.The so-called "27s" is part of the title of a book published a few years ago that examines the deaths of many of these young musicians and the tragic number they have in common.Considered the greatest electric guitarist of all time and an icon of his generation, Jimi Hendrix died in London in 1970 at age 27. He was well known for boozing and drugs, though according to the London Telegraph, the autopsy on him found that he died due to choking on his own vomit but there was little alcohol in his system....
Source: BBC News
July 21, 2011
On Wednesday 20 July 2011 - the anniversary of the attempt on Hitler's life in 1944 - the public was informed that the grave of Rudolf Hess, the "Fuehrer's deputy", had been razed before daybreak.Beyond the fascinating coincidence in the date - there will surely be further speculation on this - the decision by Hess's heirs was surprising.They wanted to commit his mortal remains to the waves and organise a funeral at sea for a man whose mystique and influence on the far-right was strongly linked to the existence of his grave in the Bavarian village of Wunsiedel.He was already one the most interesting figures in post-war Germany, being the only high-ranking Nazi serving a life sentence imposed by the Nuremberg war-crimes court - Albert Speer, for instance, was released in 1966....
Source: BBC News
July 25, 2011
The Israeli Chamber Orchestra will break with tradition to play a work by Hitler's favourite composer, Richard Wagner, in Germany.Roberto Paternostro will conduct classical piece Siegfried Idyll on Tuesday at Bayreuth's Wagner festival.It is rare for Israeli musicians to play the anti-Semitic composer's work, which was appropriated by the Nazis.Paternostro said that while Wagner's ideology was "terrible", the aim was "to divide the man from his art".An unofficial ban on Wagner was introduced in 1938 by the Palestine Orchestra - now the Israel Philharmonic - after Jews were attacked by the Nazis in Germany....
Source: BBC News
July 25, 2011
Actress Linda Christian, a 1940s Hollywood starlet who went on to become the first Bond girl, has died aged 87.She died last Friday in Palm Desert, California, after suffering from colon cancer, her daughter said.Christian starred as Vesper Lynd, the love interest of James Bond in the first TV adaptation of Ian Fleming's debut novel, Casino Royale, in 1954.The actress's curvaceousness led Life magazine to nickname her the "anatomic bomb."Born Blanca Rosa Welter in Mexico, Christian was discovered by Errol Flynn in Acapulco before pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles and eventually signing a contract with MGM.She made her film debut alongside Danny Kaye in the 1944 musical comedy Up In Arms....
Source: NYT
July 24, 2011
PBS has announced plans to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with a mixture of new programs and repeats. The schedule, starting in the week leading up to the anniversary, is to include “America Remembers — 9/11,” a “PBS NewsHour” presentation exploring the lasting effects that the terrorist attacks have had across the United States....
Source: Minnesota Public Radio
July 25, 2011
St. Paul, Minn. — Workers are already laying track for the Central Corridor Light Rail line between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul. The west end of the line will stop at Target Field.The east end of the line line will be the Union Depot in St. Paul, and the renovation of that historic building has begun in earnest....Passenger trains haven't been on the depot's platform since the last Burlington Northern Zephyr pulled out of the station on April 30, 1971.Passenger rail had already been declining when the depot was built in the 1920s, according to John Diers, a railroad buff who's writing a history of the station."Some of the railroad presidents didn't want to build a fancy depot like this. They thought it was a waste of money," Diers said. "And it turned out they were right. Because by the time it was completed in 1924, the passenger train was already in decline."...
