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: AP
Apr 19, 2009
JERUSALEM – As terrified teenagers 65 years ago, Menachem Sholowicz and Anshel Sieradzki stood in line together in Auschwitz, having serial numbers tattooed on their arms. Sholowicz was B-14594; Sieradzki was B-14595.
The two Polish Jews had never met, they never spoke and they were quickly separated. Each survived the Nazi death camp, moved to Israel, married, and became grandfathers. They didn't meet again until a few weeks ago, having stumbled upon each other through the Internet
Source: The State (South Carolina)
Apr 19, 2009
Bill Green has supervised exploration of more than 250 potentially historic sites around the Southeast.
And he knew the group working atop a bluff along the lower Saluda River was onto something special.
Over eight months, each shovelful of dirt revealed new finds — arrowheads, spear points, eating tools, pottery shards, dwelling posts, a hearth — with eventually more than 35,000 artifacts recovered.
Some items are estimated to be as much as 13,500 years ol
Source: Denver Post
Apr 19, 2009
At 11:21 a.m. on April 20, 1999, the first 911 call alerted authorities to the unfathomable: Two students at Columbine High School, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, had launched what was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.
With shots fired outside the school, they began a spree that left a dozen classmates and a teacher dead, and many more wounded, before the two committed suicide in the school library. A chilling collection of writings and vide
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 19, 2009
Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, has shown off treasures from the site of a tomb which he claims contains the remains of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
Ahead of the start of excavations on Tuesday, Mr Hawass exhibited 22 coins, 10 mummies, an alabaster head and a fragment of a mask with a cleft chin as evidence that the site, a 2,000-year-old temple to the god Osiris, is likely to hold further treasures.
He believes that the Toposiris Magna temple, 30 miles from Egy
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 19, 2009
Fify years ago, terrorists on Cyprus killed nearly 400 British soldiers. Now, with the help of Telegraph readers, they are at last to get a fitting memorial, reports Gordon Rayner.
In an all but forgotten graveyard in the UN-patrolled no man's land which divides Cyprus, a small group of ageing British veterans will gather today to remember 371 servicemen whose sacrifice remains unrecognised 50 years after they fell.
Wayne's Keep Military Cemetery, near Nicosia, is the
Source: AP
Apr 19, 2009
As terrified teenagers 65 years ago, Menachem Sholowicz and Anshel Sieradzki stood in line together in Auschwitz, having serial numbers tattooed on their arms. Sholowicz was B-14594; Sieradzki was B-14595.
The two Polish Jews had never met, they never spoke and they were quickly separated. Each survived the Nazi death camp, moved to Israel, married, and became grandfathers. They didn't meet again until a few weeks ago, having stumbled upon each other through the Internet. Late in li
Source: AP
Apr 19, 2009
Thousands of people have attended the opening of a new Holocaust museum in suburban Chicago, with videotaped remarks by President Barack Obama kicking off the event.
Obama says that when school children visit the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, they'll learn there is no greater obligation than to confront acts of inhumanity.
The new museum is considered the largest of its kind in the Midwest. It houses more than 2,000 Holocaust survivor testimo
Source: News Scotsman (Scotland)
Apr 19, 2009
Legal chiefs have ruled that the name of William Wallace – Scotland's medieval matinee idol – can never be cleared.
Scotland on Sunday can reveal that the body that examines potential miscarriages of justice in Scotland was asked to look into the ADVERTISEMENT700-year-old conviction of Wallace but refused to do so.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) decided it had no jurisdiction over the London court that found him guilty of treason.
And
Source: Time
Apr 19, 2009
Twenty years ago, a question posed by Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrmann prompted an East German official to say the words that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now new facts have emerged that shed a different light on that fateful press conference.
The press conference hosted by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) on Nov. 9, 1989, was about to come to an end when Ehrmann, who worked for the Italian news agency ANSA, inquired about the new travel law for East German c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 19, 2009
The earliest known colour picture of King Edward VII is to go on display after it was discovered lying in a cupboard.
The informal portrait of the king was taken by Lionel de Rothschild, the banker and Conservative MP, in September 1909.
He is shown in Highland costume enjoying the autumn grouse season at Tulchan in Strathspey, about 15 miles from Balmoral. He died eight months after the photograph was taken.It lay in a collection of 70
Source: NYT
Apr 18, 2009
History is what we choose to remember, and there have been many reasons not to remember too much about the Fishkill Encampment and Supply Depot, a sprawling military city that became the most important northern supply center during the Revolutionary War.
No stirring battle was won there. Life was brutish and often short, a place of smallpox, frostbite and mutiny, where wounded soldiers had limbs sawed off and covered with tar, where, as one contemporary account put it, soldiers “pat
Source: NYT
Apr 18, 2009
Capitol Hill has never lacked for humor, inadvertent or otherwise. Over the centuries its denizens have provided the raw material of comedy — their ranks filled with magnificent egos, fakers and philanderers, not to mention the occasional statesman. As to the latter, the 19th-century House Speaker Thomas Reed offered this caution: a statesman “is a successful politician who is dead.”
Many lustrous names have tried their hand at legislative stand-up, or more likely its sophisticated
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 18, 2009
Now, a new issue of stamps is to be released by the Royal Mail, to mark the 500th anniversary of the accession of the dynasty's most famous son, Henry VIII.
The new issue, which will be released on Tuesday, will feature six contemporary portraits of the Tudor monarchs.
Two of them – portraits of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, and Elizabeth I, the last – are exclusively previewed today by The Sunday Telegraph.
The image of Henry VII, who ruled from 1585
Source: New York Times
Apr 18, 2009
History is what we choose to remember, and there have been many reasons not to remember too much about the Fishkill Encampment and Supply Depot, a sprawling military city that became the most important northern supply center during the Revolutionary War.
No stirring battle was won there. Life was brutish and often short, a place of smallpox, frostbite and mutiny, where wounded soldiers had limbs sawed off and covered with tar, where, as one contemporary account put it, soldiers “pat
Source: BBC
Apr 18, 2009
Memorabilia from the Titanic, including a lot from the ship's last living survivor, raised thousands at auction.
The auction in Devizes, Wiltshire, featured memorabilia belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean.
Ms Dean faces monthly bills of £3,000 at her Southampton nursing home and sold a canvas bag from her rescue which raised £1,500.
The bag was used to carry her belongings back to England from New York after she, her mother and two-year-old brother we
Source: The Times (UK)
Apr 18, 2009
In the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate a Soviet soldier issued visa stamps to a short line of people. Until two decades ago the Berlin Wall ran only metres from where he sat, with the famous monument standing forlornly in the no man’s land of border strip between the two Germanys.
The wall is long gone and those in the queue were not nervous East German citizens but tourists. The Soviet soldier was a 29-year-old student in costume offering fake visa stamps as mementoes.
Source: Dallas Morning News
Apr 18, 2009
AUSTIN, Tex. – Gov. Rick Perry appears to have given new life to the state's two-decades-old tourism promotion – Texas: It's like a whole other country.
The empathy Perry has shown this week to those spitting-mad-at-Washington secessionists had newscaster Geraldo Rivera calling him "grossly irresponsible" and ripe for impeachment, while former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said that Perry was being a righteous governor "standing up for the sovereignty of his st
Source: CNN
Apr 18, 2009
The big winner out of this week's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad may be a decades-old book about the exploitation of Latin American people throughout history.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-U.S. rhetoric has included calling former President George W. Bush the devil, approached Obama Friday and handed him a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent."
In just hours, the book, by Uruguayan writer Eduard
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 18, 2009
Kenya is considering setting up a tribunal dedicated to prosecuting pirates to cope with the influx of Somalis detained at sea.
Officials said that it would improve efficiency and transparency as well as easing the burden on an already creaking legal system.
Prosecutors around the world are studying 17th-century piracy laws as navies wonder what to do with suspected pirates caught at sea.
Five Somalis are due to go on trial in the Netherlands next month
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 18, 2009
Lt Col Geoffrey Collingwood Sherman orchestrated the ceremony of Japanese capitulation in Singapore on September 12, 1945, which took place before 50 Allied generals.
Known as Lord Mountbatten's right-hand man, the father of three has died aged 93 at his home in Somerset after a short illness.
Last week around 150 people filled a church in the village of Long Sutton, near Langport, where the Union Flag flew on the tower for the first time since the Japanese ceased hos
