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)
Aug 15, 2009
A newly discovered catalogue of artworks stolen by Nazis compiled for Adolf Hitler could help unravel the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of lost materpieces seized during the Second World War.
As they marched through Europe, Adolf Hitler's Nazis pillaged the world's finest art collections. Thousands of art works were stolen for the Führer's personal enjoyment, many of which are still missing.
Now, a newly discovered document could unravel the mystery surrounding t
Source: Fox News
Aug 15, 2009
Prime Minister Taro Aso joined some 4,800 bereaved families to pay respect to 3.1 million Japanese war dead — 2.3 million soldiers and 800,000 civilians — at the Nihon Budokan hall in Tokyo. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko also attended the ceremony, leading a one-minute silence at noon.
"Our country inflicted tremendous damage and suffering on many countries, particularly people in Asia. As a representative of the Japanese people, I humbly express my remorse for the victim
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Aug 15, 2009
Archaeologists in Perthshire (Scotland) have unearthed a spectacular early Bronze Age grave containing a gold-banded dagger still wrapped in its 4,000-year-old sheath. The discovery was made by archaeologists from Glasgow and Aberdeen universities. In 2008 they found a large sandstone slab, weighing four tons, measuring 2m x 2m and 40cm thick, but had to wait a year for it to be lifted. Last week, a crane was brought in and the 4,000 year old grave was revealed.
Beneath the capstone
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Aug 15, 2009
The finds archaeologists have uncovered in Mikulovice in the Pardubice region (Czech Republic) prove that the local prehistoric people had contacts with the Black Sea area in the 6-5th centuries BCE, archeologist Jan Frolik said. The experts have uncovered remnants of ancient pottery people's settlements including bone decorations and a saddle of Scythian origin, which proves that the people were in contact with the remote Black Sea region, situated some 1000 km away in the southeast direction..
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Aug 15, 2009
Archaeologists have unearthed eight neolithic sites in Derry (Northern Ireland), some more than 5,000 years old. The exciting discoveries were made during work on the new Maydown dual carriageway and include a pair of well-preserved 5,000 years-old Neolithic houses and 4,000 years-old Bronze Age burial places known as 'ring-ditches'. The discoveries also include Bronze age pottery, flint tools and human bones.
Archaeology firm John Cronin & Associates found the ancient remains i
Source: Deutsche Welle
Aug 15, 2009
Los Angeles may be the movie capital of the world today, but the very first cinema went into business far from the Hollywood hills in what is now Poland. The landmark theater turns 100 this year.
When the first moving picture was projected on the screen in the Kino Pionier cinema - then called Helios - tickets cost just two pennies and Germany was ruled by an emperor. What is now the Polish city of Szczecin on
the Baltic coast was then the German city of Stettin, just an hour
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 15, 2009
The mother of the policewoman murdered by a Libyan gunman in London 25 years ago has condemned as 'sickening' the reported deal to send the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing back to Tripoli.
Queenie Fletcher branded the plan to let Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi leave a Scottish prison an 'insult' to the memory of her daughter Yvonne.
'What is going on is absolutely sickening,' the 76-year- old said from her home in Semley, Dorset.
She accused
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 14, 2009
Fredrick Toben, an Australian man who was convicted earlier this year of publishing anti-Semitic material on the internet, has started a three-month jail term after his appeal was quashed.
Toben who is wanted in Germany on charges of denying the Holocaust was found guilty in May of 24 counts of contempt of a 2002 court ruling that barred him from publishing anti-Semitic material on the website of his organisation, the Adelaide Institute.
The material found to be in bre
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Aug 14, 2009
Hebrew University of Jersualem has apologized for saying that a donor who bequeathed it more than $100,000 was a homeless woman in New York, the Daily News reports. Rather, Ida Fischer was an Austrian Jewish refugee who fled Vienna with her mother in 1938 after the Nazis killed her father.
Newspapers around the world had initially quoted a Hebrew University spokesman as saying that the late donor had lived out of a shopping cart in Manhattan. In its article last week, The Jerusalem
Source: Times Online (UK)
Aug 14, 2009
A huge Neolithic cathedral, unlike anything else which can be seen in Britain, has been found in Orkney.
Archaeologists said that the building would have dwarfed the island’s landmarks from the Stone Age — the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness. Nick Card, who is leading the dig at the Ness of Brodgar, said that the cathedral, which would have served the whole of the north of Scotland, would have been constructed to “amaze” and “create a sense of awe” among those w
Source: BBC
Aug 14, 2009
The funeral has taken place in Cyprus of one of five Greek Cypriot prisoners of war killed during the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974.
Ioannis Papayiannis was one of five soldiers photographed surrendering to Turkish forces during the invasion.
The soldiers' bodies were identified this week, 35 years after they were killed and thrown down a well.
The remains were recovered from a well in Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus in 2006 along with 14 othe
Source: BBC
Aug 14, 2009
A rare signed copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf owned by an unnamed Londonderry collector has been sold at auction for £21,000.
The 1925 copy of the Nazi leader's political manifesto went under the hammer at Ludlow Racecourse in Shropshire on Thursday.
Historical documents expert Richard Westwood-Brookes, from the auctioneers Mullock's, said the volume was "a legendary copy of Mein Kampf".
This particular edition was presented to Johann Maurer a
Source: BBC
Aug 14, 2009
The remains of more than 2,000 people discovered in Poland's largest mass grave from World War II have been reburied in a military cemetery.
Polish and German officials presided over the ceremony at a cemetery for German soldiers in north-west Poland, near the border between the countries.
The victims are believed to be German civilians who died in the last months of the conflict, in early 1945.
The mass grave was discovered in the Polish city of Malbork
Source: BBC
Aug 14, 2009
British documentary makers Robin Forestier-Walker and Oliver Owen have been tracing Nigerians who fought against the Japanese in Burma during World War II.
On VJ Day, the anniversary of victory over Japan, they tell the veterans' story.
The contribution of West Africans was played down in official versions of the Allied war in Asia, and until now, few have had an opportunity to tell their tale.
In fact, only two in 10 of the soldiers who fought in Burma we
Source: NYT
Aug 14, 2009
President Asif Ali Zardari announced Friday that he was lifting a longtime ban on political activities in the restive tribal regions in the northwest, hoping to reduce the influence of the Taliban and Islamic militancy in the areas.
The seven semiautonomous tribal regions have never been fully incorporated into the country’s legal and political system. They are instead still governed by a set of 100-year-old rules, known as Frontier Crimes Regulations, dating from the British empire
Source: NYT
Aug 14, 2009
For years, there was not much difference between a civilian and a soldier in South Ossetia, which was embroiled in a long struggle to separate from Georgia.
David G. Sanakoyev, for example, wore a tie during the day. As South Ossetia’s ombudsman for human rights, he handled complaints about prison conditions or unlawful firings. Three times a week, after work, he changed into camouflage and took up a position at the territory’s border, rotating in and out of combat duty until mornin
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Aug 14, 2009
King George VI privately wrote of his "relief" at the fact that war
had finally broken out between Britain and Germany, in a diary entry to go on public display for the first time.
On the evening of 3 September 1939 - the day that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war - the monarch wrote: "As 11 o'clock struck that fateful morning I had a certain feeling of relief that those 10 anxious days of intensive negotiations with Germany over Poland, which at moment
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 14, 2009
The prospect of mediated talks between the two sides has provoked fury in Baghdad, where the new government is dominated by parties that were ruthlessly repressed under Saddam's dictatorship.
Officials said an American military delegation that wrapped up a two-day visit to Damascus yesterday was given details of a Syrian-sponsored negotiation process that would end in the rehabilitation of most or all of the Ba'ath Party Iraqi regional command, which has remained loyal to Saddam's
Source: Deutsche Welle
Aug 14, 2009
The victims are believed to have been caught up in the Russian army's offensive in what was then the German province of East Prussia in the final stages of World War II; a province split between Poland and Russia after the war.
The ceremony was attended by a group of Germans who fled the area, as well as Polish officials who meant to make the event a symbol of reconciliation.
One of those survivors, a 74-year-old Hamburg resident named Sabina, lived in Germany's easte
Source: BBC
Aug 14, 2009
A spokesman said she "expressed strongly" the view to Kenny MacAskill that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland.
Earlier it was confirmed the Libyan had applied to abandon his appeal against his conviction.
Terminally-ill Megrahi is serving a life sentence at Greenock Prison.
On Wednesday BBC News revealed that Kenny MacAskill was likely to announce next week that Megrahi, who is gravely ill with prostate cancer,
