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)
May 26, 2011
The three ex-soldiers were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment after the military tribunal in Rome ruled that they bore responsibility for the murder of 184 civilians, including infants, children and old people, in the village of Padule di Fucecchio in Tuscany.They were convicted, in part, on the basis of evidence gathered by a British military policeman, Sgt Charles Edmonson, of Stoke-on-Trent, who was determined to bring the culprits to trial.
Source: Times of India
May 31, 2011
LONDON: It was Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler who actually gave the go-ahead to Rudolf Hess's mission to the UK during World War II to secure peace with Britain's wartime PM Winston Churchill, according to new documents.
Source: New-York Historical Society
May 31, 2011
New York, NY, May 31, 2011—At an auction held on Friday, May 20, at Sotheby’s, the Chairman of the New-York Historical Society, Roger Hertog, purchased the Constitutional Convention notebooks of
Source: Conservation Magazine
April 27, 2011
In 1280, victorious Teutonic Crusaders began building the world’s largest castle on a hill overlooking the River Nogat in what is now northern Poland. Malbork Castle became the hub of a powerful Teutonic state that crushed its pagan enemies and helped remake Medieval Europe. Now, ancient pollen samples show that in addition to converting heathens to Christians, the Crusaders also converted vast swathes of Medieval forests to farmlands.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 29, 2011
A library of 8.7 million digital volumes. A trove of 100,000 ocean-science photos. An archive of 57,000 Mexican-music recordings.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
May 20, 2011
The following post appears courtesy of Neal Katyal, Acting Solicitor General of the United States
Source: NYT
May 30, 2011
KASHIMA, Japan — When the Shimane nuclear plant was first proposed here more than 40 years ago, this rural port town put up such fierce resistance that the plant’s would-be operator, Chugoku Electric, almost scrapped the project. Angry fishermen vowed to defend areas where they had fished and harvested seaweed for generations.
Source: NYT
May 30, 2011
It was a warm, damp day in central Nebraska, heavy and still. The tornado arrived at the Madsen farm just before 3 p.m. Mads Madsen, 63, his wife Minnie, 59, three of their children and five of their grandchildren were in the parlor eating Sunday dinner. Twenty minutes later all 10 of them were dead.
Source: NYT
May 30, 2011
At first it seemed an oddity: a scattering of reports in the spring and early summer of 1981 that young gay men in New York and California were ill with forms of pneumonia and cancer usually seen only in people with
Source: BBC
May 27, 2011
The National Museum of Computing has finished restoring a Tunny machine - a key part of Allied code-cracking during World War II.Tunny machines helped to unscramble Allied interceptions of the encrypted orders Hitler sent to his generals.The rebuild was completed even though almost no circuit diagrams or parts of the original machines survived.Intelligence gathered via code-cracking at Bletchley underpinned the success of Allied operations to end WWII. ....
Source: BBC
May 24, 2011
The severed head of a man said to be the patron saint of genital disease will go on auction in County Meath on Sunday.
The skull is allegedly that of St Vitalis of Assisi, an Italian Benedictine monk from the 14th century.
It belonged to an Anglo-Irish family from County Louth, and is housed in a Queen Anne case dating from the 17th century.
There has been no official verification of the claim. ...
Source: BBC
May 27, 2011
Before his assassination on a dark highway on 30 May 1961, the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ruled with an iron fist for almost 30 years. Tim Mansel meets one of the men who shot him.Rafael Trujillo's rule is considered one of the most brutal periods in the history of the Dominican Republic. Taking power in 1930, his hold over the country was absolute. He brooked no opposition.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 30, 2011
A revolver belonging to Al Capone, the Chicago mobster, could fetch as as much as £70,000 when it is auctioned next month, experts say.
Source: AP
May 30, 2011
Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.
At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.
Underground Jeru
Source: AP
May 30, 2011
The Hamas militant group has turned the modest home of its founder into a museum -- seven years after the wheelchair-bound Palestinian cleric was killed in an Israeli airstrike as he was wheeled out of a mosque.
The Sheik Ahmed Yassin museum, located in an alleyway in the rundown Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, has become a popular destina
Source: CNN
May 30, 2011
Ratko Mladic's lawyer has requested a new medical examination for the former Bosnian Serb general, arguing that Mladic is not healthy enough to face charges of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he said Monday.
Mladic would not be able to participate in a trial because of his ill health, lawyer Milos Saljic said.
Chief prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic denied Monday that Mladic was in poor health, saying that he was "lively and joking," and had asked for Russian classics to read.
Source: CNN
May 28, 2011
Roland Marbaugh wrote 509 pages of his tales of war -- from the swampy Solomon Islands in World War II to the frozen Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
His son typed them all up on an electric typewriter in the 1980s but unpublished, Marbaugh's stories remained largely in his mind. Until now.
Marbaugh's story will soon be among 600 others on Witness to War, a virtual library of Americans in combat.
Source: AP
May 28, 2011
VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth as a child, has made a rare mention of life in Germany under the Nazis, calling it a "dark time."The 84-year-old, German-born pontiff turned his thoughts to 70 years ago, a time "already marked by war" and in which Adolf Hitler "had already subjugated" one country after another, including Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France....
Source: NYT
May 28, 2011
LESS than a mile from the Syrian frontier, in the land of Kemal Ataturk, Ahmed Sheikh Said defies the identities that borders inspire.Mr. Said was born in the Syrian town of Azaz and raised across a line on the map in Kilis, Turkey. A grocer, he speaks Turkish like a native to his customers, while holding an ear open to the Arabic telecasts of Al Jazeera playing in his store. His wife and his mother are Turkish, but Arab blood runs through his veins, he says, “till the end of time.”
Source: NYT
May 28, 2011
BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbian officials vowed on Saturday to track down all those who had helped hide Ratko Mladic and other fugitives accused of war crimes, but their prime interest now is to get the former Bosnian Serb general packed off to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which could happen as early as Tuesday.
