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: Reuters
Jul 7, 2008
Nazi hunters arrived in Chile on Monday on the trail of Aribert Heim, nicknamed Dr. Death for killing hundreds of inmates at an Austrian concentration camp during World War Two, who they believe may be lurking in picturesque Patagonia.
Heim, who kept the skull of a man he decapitated as a paperweight, is the most wanted Nazi war criminal still thought to be alive. He would be 94 and his family says he died in 1993.
"We are not here thinking that his capture is immi
Source: IHT
Jul 7, 2008
The Gettysburg Cyclorama is to reopen Sept. 26 after a five-year restoration, and for the first time in more than a century, viewers standing in the middle of the wraparound canvas will see it as its artist originally intended.The cyclorama, which a 19th-century poster promoted as a "sublime spectacle" presenting "glorious Gettysburg in all the awful splendor of real war," had become less than that over the decades. The U.S. National Park Service and its
Source: AP
Jul 7, 2008
In the early days of the Korean War, American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.
Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbat
Source: BBC
Jul 7, 2008
The UN has added the Mauritian mountain of Le Morne, which long served as a shelter for fugitive slaves, to its world heritage list.Fleeing slaves used settlements in the mountain's caves and on its summit in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
At the time, Mauritius was an important stopover in the eastern slave trade.
Source: Newsweek
Jul 7, 2008
How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809. As historical facts go, it amounts to little more than a footnote. Still, while it's just a coincidence, it's a coincidence that's guaranteed to make you do a double take the first time you run across it. Everybody knows Darwin and Lincoln were near-mythic figures in the 19th century. But who ever thinks of them in tandem? Who puts the theory of evolution and the Civil War
Source: Telegraph
Jul 6, 2008
Amid the horror, camp officers and staff went about their lives: sunbathing, going on picnics, putting up decorations. As these astonishing photographs show, Auschwitz was not hell for everyone. By Alec Wilkinson
In June of 1945, after the war with Germany had ended, an American Army officer arriving in Frankfurt was told to look for a place to live within a part of the city which the Allies had enclosed with barbed wire. He found an abandoned apartment and did what he could to mak
Source: Evansville Courier & Press
Jul 6, 2008
DACHAU, Germany — The crow leads the way to the crematorium.
Past the "Arbeit macht frei" (Work will make you free) sign at the front gate of the former Nazi concentration camp that's a 20-minute train ride from Munich.
Past the 10-meter-by-100-meter rows of gravel that once held the wooden barracks where the enslaved were kept between 1933 and 1945 and where an estimated 32,000 persons lost their lives.
Past the guard towers and barbed-wire fence
Source: WaPo
Jul 6, 2008
Under pressure from fundamentalist forms of Islam and bursts of sectarian violence, the most populous Christian community in the Middle East is seeking safety by turning inward, cutting day-to-day social ties that have bound Muslim to Christian in Egypt for centuries, members of both communities say.
Attacks this summer on monks and shopkeepers belonging to Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, and scattered clashes between Muslims and Christians, have compelled many of Egypt's estima
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 6, 2008
Parish churches are to be marketed as tourist attractions under plans agreed by the Church of England's governing body.
A tourism officer will be appointed in every diocese of the country to encourage more people to look around the historic buildings.
It is hoped the move will raise money for cash-strapped churches, but may also result in casual visitors learning more about religion and becoming worshippers.
Source: AFP
Jul 6, 2008
UNESCO's World Heritage Committee on Sunday added three new sites to its heritage list, including a former slave hideout in Mauritius, the Nabataean archaeological site in Saudi Arabia, and China's Fujian Tulou earthen houses.
The Archaeological Site of Al-Hijr, the largest conserved site of the civilization of the Nabataeans south of Petra in Jordan, is the first World Heritage site in Saudi Arabia.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization a
Source: WaPo
Jul 6, 2008
The presidential candidate needed to prove beyond a doubt that he loved his country and could appeal to a wide range of skeptical voters. So he wrapped himself in red, white and blue.
No, not Sen. Barack Obama, who took to a flag-adorned stage to orate on patriotism last week. The candidate in question was William McKinley, whose campaign manager, Mark Hanna, draped the Civil War veteran in the Stars and Stripes during the presidential election of 1896. In McKinley's contest against
Source: AP
Jul 6, 2008
Fort Monroe, a Union oasis where fugitive slaves flocked during the Civil War, will return to Virginia’s control in 2011 when the Army pulls out, and historians are trying to protect the future of the so-called Freedom Fortress.
Many slave descendants trace the arrival of slavery in the United States in 1619 to Old Point Comfort, the hatchet-shaped peninsula where Fort Monroe sits, and where slavery would be ushered into its final stages nearly 250 years later.
“When y
Source: BBC
Jul 6, 2008
Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient tomb in northern Peru that could throw light on the pre-Columbian Moche Indian culture.
The tomb in Ucupe, 670km (416 miles) from the capital Lima, contained well-preserved human remains along with jewellery and ceramics.
The finds suggested the tomb related to nobility, experts said. The Moche Indians thrived from 100-800 AD and were famed for their ceramics, architecture and irrigation.
Source: NYT
Jul 6, 2008
IN April 1959, Fidel Castro, fresh from his victory roll through the streets of Havana, came to the United States on a charm offensive.
The youthful Mr. Castro — he was only 32 — hired a public relations firm, held news conferences, answered questions, ate hot dogs. He repeatedly disavowed Communism. But he was refused a meeting with President Dwight Eisenhower, and after leaving the United States he returned to Cuba and joined forces with the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev.
Source: Tim Weiner in the NYT
Jul 6, 2008
In the early 1950s, American troops were being killed and captured by the thousands in Korea. Panic spread that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war.
The technique was called “brainwashing.” And suddenly it’s worth recalling what brainwashing was about. Because now we know, from an article in The New York Times last week, that in a new time of anxiety America’s own interrogators drew lessons from China’s treatment of Amer
Source: NYT
Jul 6, 2008
— A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrectio
Source: WaPo
Jul 5, 2008
[HNN Editor: This headline, from the Post, is misleading and contradicts the article itself, which makes no claim that Weaver was the "first" to literally run (perhaps walk is the better word) for the presidency. As Gil Troy notes in his estimable,
See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate, William Henry Harrison was the first candiate to actively campaign for president by venturing out on the hustings.]
In the early hours of July 5, 1892
Source: NYT
Jul 5, 2008
One of early America’s most important documents — written in an angry frame of mind — is on display at the New York Public Library.
A draft of the Declaration of Independence, written in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand, suggests that the man who became the third president of the United States was unhappy with Congress in the days after July 4, 1776, when the Declaration was ratified.
On June 11, 1776, Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, was one of five men ask
Source: NYT
Jul 5, 2008
Citing their free speech rights, three tour guides in Philadelphia filed a lawsuit this week challenging an ordinance that will require them to pass a history test and get a license. Mayor Michael Nutter signed the measure into law in April amid concern that some guides were perpetuating gross inaccuracies, including the false claims that Benjamin Franklin had 69 illegitimate children and that Betsy Ross, a three-time widow, killed her husbands. But the three guides, Ann Boulais, Michael Tait an
Source: LAT
Jul 5, 2008
Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.
In a letter sent from
