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 26, 2011
A Canadian singer has become the first person in the world to graduate with a Masters degree in The Beatles.
Former Miss Canada finalist Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy signed up for the course at Liverpool Hope University when it launched in March 2009.
The 53-year-old, who has recorded three albums, was the first to graduate of the 12 full-time students who joined the Master of Arts course.
She said: "I am so proud of my achievement."
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Source: BBC News
January 27, 2011
The first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust remembrance day ceremony has said his people face new threats.
Zoni Weisz told German MPs that Roma in western Europe again faced discrimination and were living "in inhumane conditions in ghettos".
The Dutch-born speaker is the sole survivor of a family killed in 1944.
He was speaking on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops in 1945.
Source: BBC News
January 27, 2011
It was an audacious double-cross that fooled the Nazis and shortened World War II. Now a document, here published for the first time, reveals the crucial role played by Britain's code-breaking experts in the 1944 invasion of France.
All the ingredients of a gripping spy thriller are there - intrigue, espionage, lies and black propaganda.
An elaborate British wartime plot succeeded in convincing Hitler that the Allies were about to stage the bulk of the D-Day landings in
Source: NYT
January 27, 2011
CARPINTERIA, Calif. — The last time Barnaby Conrad saw Sinclair Lewis, three years after he served as Lewis’s personal secretary, they were at a bar in Paris and, by Mr. Conrad’s account, Lewis was thoroughly drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t chastise his former secretary for failing to execute a book idea that Lewis had handed him one morning at breakfast: a novel based on the conceit that John Wilkes Booth had escaped capture after assassinating Lincoln and had embarked on a secret life
Source: WaPo
January 26, 2011
A coalition of rabbis wants Fox News chief Roger Ailes and conservative host Glenn Beck to cut out all their talk about Nazis and the Holocaust, and it's making its views known in an unusual place.
The rabbis have called on Fox News's owner, Rupert Murdoch, to sanction his two famous employees via a full-page ad in Thursday's editions of the Wall Street Journal - one of many other media properties controlled by Murdoch's News Corp.
The ad is signed by the heads of the
Source: CNN
January 26, 2011
Nestled in the mountain foothills of a remote province in central Vietnam, one of the country's most important archaeological discoveries in a century has recently come to light.
After five years of exploration and excavation, a team of archaeologists has uncovered a 127-kilometer (79-mile) wall -- which locals have called "Vietnam's Great Wall."
The wall is built of alternating sections of stone and earth, with some sections reaching a height of up to four me
Source: LA Times
January 26, 2011
The first lady's pink suit and pillbox hat are a symbol of JFK's assassination and became treasured by a nation. The suit is stored away for safekeeping, but the hat is nowhere to be found.
An expanded collection of Kennedy treasures and trivia was unveiled this month on exhibit and online to coincide with the 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration; it includes the fabric of his top hat (beaver fur) down to his shoe size (10C).
But missing and hardly mentioned are what
Source: BBC
January 26, 2011
Two councillors have said they will not sign a memorial book dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.
Kassem Al-Khatib, a Palestinian, and Gavin Webb will not add their signatures to the Stoke-on-Trent City Council book for different reasons.
The book was opened a year ago and is part of events in the city to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Mr Al-Khatib said if a Palestinian genocide memorial was erected nearby, he would happily sign the book....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 26, 2011
Nelson Mandela, South Africa's former president, was admitted to hospital on Wednesday but aides moved quickly to scupper fears about his health, saying he was undergoing "routine" tests.
The confirmation by the Nelson Mandela Foundation of the 92-year-old's admission to the private Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg came after his grandchildren were spotted visiting the facility.
Mr Mandela's wife Graca Machel, and his personal assistant Zelda La Grange were a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 26, 2011
Tony Blair came across as paternalistic and biased towards Israel in his role as the Middle East Quartet's special envoy, Palestinian officials claimed.
The former British prime minister was frequently scorned for his efforts to develop the economy of the West Bank, according to confidential memos obtained by Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television network.
Mr Blair was seen as focusing too much on winning small concessions from Israel for minor development projects, wh
Source: National Parks Traveler
January 26, 2011
In a development that apparently ends a long dispute over whether a key vestige of the Wilderness Battlefield near Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park would be paved over, Walmart officials have abandoned their plans for a supercenter on the parcel.
The corporate giant's decision was announced by the Civil War Trust, which long has fought Walmart's plans, and came as a trial was to begin in Virginia's Orange County Circuit Court into the legality of a special use
Source: AFP
January 25, 2011
Israeli archaeologists have finished work on a tunnel which starts at a site near the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound inside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, officials said on Tuesday.
The controversial 600-metre (-yard) tunnel, originally built as a drainage channel during the Second Temple period, starts at an archaeological site just south of the area known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, which houses the third holiest site in Islam.
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Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 25, 2011
Museum openings, a big dig and a new film make this an ideal time to visit Hadrian's bequest to Britain, says Sophie Campbell.
Mist, dripping trees, stones black with wet. Thank Jupiter I’m not in a tunic; this is the sort of damp that rusts your armour and dribbles down your greaves into your socks.
Yes, the Romans wore socks. I don’t know why I find that so hilarious, but I do. They wore socks and hobnail boots in the winter and you could hear a legion coming for mil
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 25, 2011
British intelligence advised the Palestinian Authority to crush Hamas and other violent groups in the West Bank by detaining some of their leading figures, leaked documents have shown.
In an effort to restore peace during the Second Palestinian Intifada against Israel, MI6 drew up a strategy in 2004 to help Yasser Arafat's security forces neutralise "rejectionists" opposed to a Middle East peace deal.
Two strategy papers recommended "the detention of key
Source: The State (South Carolina)
January 21, 2011
For the past two days, a sign on the cafeteria door at Hammond School read, “Jews and dogs not allowed.”
The sign was part of the sixth-grade’s simulation of 1930s Germany in which students were divided into two groups – Nazis and Jews.
The students portraying Nazis spent a day as a privileged class, sitting in front rows, serving as teachers’ pets and being told they were smart. Meanwhile, the students who portrayed Jews ate in silence in the hallways, sat on the floor
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 25, 2011
Germany's central Nazi war crimes body said on Tuesday it had launched an inquiry after an envelope with photos of killings in the Soviet Union in World War II was handed in anonymously.
"In total there are 50 photos, some of which show very drastic deaths, such as hangings, as well as corpses on the ground and bodies piled into German army trucks," spokesman Andreas Brendel said.
"There are German army soldiers in some of the photos but it is unclear if
Source: BBC News
January 26, 2011
There is now even more evidence that life on Earth may have been seeded by material from asteroids or comets.
Prior research has shown how amino acids - the building blocks of life - could form elsewhere in the cosmos.
These molecules can form in two versions, but life on Earth exclusively uses just one of them.
Now an Astrophysical Journal Letters paper shows how conditions around a far-flung star could favour the formation of one type over another.
Source: NYT
January 25, 2011
PARIS — The head of France’s national railway company, known as the S.N.C.F., on Tuesday made the company’s first formal public apology directly to Holocaust victims. The regrets came just a few months after American lawmakers, survivors and their descendants moved to block the company from winning contracts in the United States if it did not acknowledge its role in the shipping of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps and make amends.
“In the name of the S.N.C.F., I bow down before
Source: AFP
January 25, 2011
Israeli archaeologists have finished work on a tunnel which starts at a site near the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound inside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, officials said on Tuesday.
The controversial 600-metre (-yard) tunnel, originally built as a drainage channel during the Second Temple period, starts at an archaeological site just south of the area known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, which houses the third holiest site in Islam.
The tu
Source: Reuters
January 24, 2011
A German foundation rejected Monday an Egyptian request to return the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, a sculpture which draws over one million viewers annually to a Berlin museum.
Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) sent the request to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which runs the Neues Museum in the German capital where the bust is kept.
Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, appealed to the foundation seeking the return of the bust, famed
