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)
Nov 23, 2009
The Pope, who died five years ago, is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.
As part of the Vatican's investigation thousands of documents have been collected and examined by officials from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Among them is the testimony of Tobiana Sobodka, a Polish nun of the Sacred Heart of Jesus order, who worked for Pope John Paul in his private Vatican apartments and at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 23, 2009
Munich prosecutors who built the case against former death camp guard Mr Demjanjuk, 89, put 23 witnesses on their list, some of them from Russia and Ukraine.
But all members of the list are dead. It means that Demjanjuk, charged with assisting in 27,900 murders during his time as an SS guard at the extermination camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland, will be judged on records such as his identity card and on the statements of the dead.
His lawyer Guenther Maull said the de
Source: Kompas
Nov 23, 2009
KOMPAS.com - Precise as a hole punch through a sheet of paper, craters surround a Nazi doodlebug factory in an extraordinary image showing the devastation wreaked by an Allied bombing raid.
The date is September 2, 1944 and the place Peenemunde, a village on the Baltic, where the terrifying weapons Adolf Hitler hoped would win the war for Germany were designed and tested. The image is astonishing enough, but how it was taken is even more startling.
For it comes from an
Source: Secrecy News
Nov 23, 2009
Development of a new executive order on classification of national security information is now proceeding at an accelerated pace in order to preempt a deadline that would require the declassification of millions of pages of historical records next month.A revised draft executive order was circulated to executive branch agencies by the Office of Management and Budget on November 16, with agency comments due back today, November 23. A final order is likely to be issued by the end o
Source: LA Times
Nov 23, 2009
The challah was blessed, the Manischewitz wine was poured, the candles were lighted. It could have been any Shabbat dinner in Los Angeles, were it not for the fact that it took place midweek and the room was full of Catholic schoolteachers.
The 34 teachers were participants in Bearing Witness, a seminar designed for educators in Catholic schools learning to teach about anti-Semitism and the history of the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Created in 1996 by the Anti-Defamatio
Source: Politico
Nov 23, 2009
When former Indiana congressman Timothy Roemer arrived in New Delhi in July as President Barack Obama’s new ambassador to India, he inherited one of the few U.S. international relationships that had dramatically improved during the Bush administration.
Bush had reversed course from the sanctions and hectoring the Clinton administration employed toward India after its 1998 nuclear tests, and left it to India and Pakistan to resolve their dispute over Kashmir. Most of all, under Bush,
Source: Politico
Nov 23, 2009
If you’ve been hoping to see Sen. Joe Lieberman star in a sequel to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” this holiday season, you can put away the microwave popcorn.
Fury over the Connecticut senator’s announcement that he might join Republicans to filibuster a vote on the Senate health care bill has Democrats clamoring for Majority Leader Harry Reid to grab his teddy bear and let ’em talk all night.
But the public isn’t likely to see Lieberman offer a dramatic reading of the
Source: WSJ
Nov 23, 2009
PRAGUE -- Persistent unemployment and a growing distrust of the political class has taken some of the gloss off the Velvet Revolution that restored democracy to this country 20 years ago.
Celebrations marking the anniversary of the event have been subdued. Polls show that most Czechs don't regret the revolution; they just don't like what has happened since then.
On Nov. 27, 1989, waves of Czechoslovak factory workers marched into Prague to join student protesters in a n
Source: BBC
Nov 23, 2009
The body of Alec Collett was one of two dug up by British experts last week in Bekaa Valley, the Foreign Office said.
The freelance journalist was 64 when he was snatched at gunpoint from a car near Beirut airport in 1985.
The United Nations is to transport the body home. UK embassy staff in Beirut are assisting Mr Collett's family.
Source: Spiegel Online
Nov 23, 2009
Michael Fröhlich, a German dealer in classic cars, has sold John Lennon's Mercedes 600, Marlene Dietrich's Rolls Royce Cabriolet and Charlie Chaplin's Bentley S3 in his time but has just arranged his most unusual deal yet -- a five-tonne armored limousine that, he says, was used by Adolf Hitler.
Fröhlich, 59, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that he managed to trace the vehicle to a collector in northern Germany on behalf of a Russian investor willing to shell out millions of euros for the open-
Source: BBC
Nov 23, 2009
Coded plans for "The Great Escape" have been found in the diary of a World War II airman from Greater Manchester.
Ted Nestor was a prisoner of war (POW) at the camp where 77 Allied officers managed to dig a tunnel and escape.
His journal includes stories of camp life, cartoons and even a coded reference to the mass breakout.
Now, 20 years after his death, his daughter Sharon Cottam has visited Stalag Luft III in Poland and learned that her fathe
Source: BBC
Nov 23, 2009
The first trial at Cambodia's Khmer Rouge tribunal is entering its final week, with lawyers due to give closing arguments after months of testimony.
Kaing Guek Euv, better known as Comrade Duch, ran a prison where thousands of people were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s.
He is accused of crimes against humanity and faces a lifetime prison sentence if convicted.
But the defence is likely to repeat its argument that he was following orders.
Source: Truthout
Nov 22, 2009
This weekend, thousands of people gathered at the gates of Ft. Benning to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the killings of 14-year-old Celia Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos and the six Jesuit priests with whom she worked at the Central American University in San Salvador.
Nearly 5,000 people are gathered in the pouring rain according to Larry White, a protester who spoke to Truthout. Earlier in the day, following a rally featuring a performance by the Indigo Girls, activists partici
Source: Salon
Nov 22, 2009
An engineering technician who works on burials at Arlington National Cemetery provided a startling sworn statement about misplaced remains at the cemetery to an Army investigating officer in late July.
The Army launched an internal investigation last summer after Salon began exposing burial errors at the cemetery, including a fiasco in May 2003 in which the cemetery went to bury a Navy captain in grave 449 of section 68 of the cemetery, only to find unknown, unmarked remains already
Source: NYT
Nov 22, 2009
President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the remains of the writer Albert Camus to one of the most hallowed burial places in France, but the plan has run into opposition from the Nobel laureate’s son, who does not think his father would have wanted the honor.
Camus’s son, Jean, says interring his father’s remains at the Panthéon, the Paris monument to some of the great men and women of France, would be contrary to his father’s wishes and does not want to have his legacy put to wo
Source: Chicago Tribune
Nov 22, 2009
ALBANY, Ind. - A former auto worker and history buff is keeping a Civil War soldier's memory alive by restoring the fallen soldier's marble gravestone.
Doug Cross of Albany came across Thomas Kent's grave last September while looking for a site where Civil War soldiers had used limestone slabs to cross the Mississinewa River.
He spotted Kent's gravestone in a clearing in the old Steubenville Cemetery and quickly suspected it belonged to a soldier.
"It
Source: Slate
Nov 22, 2009
Pop quiz: Which of the following names represents a nonsectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?
If you answered"none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered"Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered"Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee.
Hamilton, nominated last March, has seen his confirmation s
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 22, 2009
TAXILA, Pakistan (AFP) – Archaeologists warn that the Taliban are destroying Pakistan's ancient Gandhara heritage and rich Buddhist legacy as pilgrimage and foreign research dries up in the country's northwest.
"Militants are the enemies of culture," said Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of Taxila Museum, one of the premier archaeological collections in Pakistan.
"It is very clear that if the situation carries on like this, it will destroy our culture and will d
Source: Time (November 30 issue)
Nov 22, 2009
If he holds his handy lead in the polls, Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo will be the next President of Honduras. Problem is, the last man elected to that office, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted last summer in a military coup. That makes it unlikely that any nation — except maybe the U.S. — will recognize Lobo if he wins the Nov. 29 election. But as he relaxes in his opulent house near Honduras' capital Tegucigalpa after a day of campaigning, Lobo sounds unfazed. "I practice Taekwondo for serenity," he
Source: BBC
Nov 22, 2009
The USSR's first civilian cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov, a crew member of the Voskhod spaceship in 1964, has died in Moscow aged 83, Russian media say.
Feoktistov also designed and tested spaceships himself, and has a crater on the Moon named after him.
He worked on the design of both the Salyut and Mir space stations.
The 1964 flight is famous for being the first in which crew members were sent into space without wearing special space suits.
