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)
May 25, 2008
A German doctor who allegedly sent 900 children to a Nazi death camp has been given a top medical award.
Dr Hans-Joachim Sewering, 92, a former SS member, was honoured for “services to the nation’s health system”.
The doctor has always denied sending children to Eglfing-Haar, a facility south of Munich where it’s alleged physically and mentally handicapped children were killed.
Despite the allegations, Dr Sewering enjoyed a brilliant career and is a former
Source: Times (UK)
May 25, 2008
A flamboyant archaeologist known worldwide for his trademark Indiana Jones hat believes he has identified the site where Cleopatra is buried.
Now, with a team of 12 archaeologists and 70 excavators, Zahi Hawass, 60, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has begun the search for her tomb.
In addition, after a breakthrough two weeks ago, Hawass hopes to find Cleopatra's lover, the Roman general Mark Antony, sharing her last resting place at the site of a tem
Source: Times (UK)
May 25, 2008
The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.
When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and giving rise to
Source: http://www.knoxnews.com
May 25, 2008
Frank Woodruff Buckles is stooped and bent from his 107 years, but he is not bowed. His spirit glows with the life he has lived.
First and foremost, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Buckles is America's last doughboy.
Of the more than 4 million who served in World War I, called the Great War, he has outlived everyone. His elder, veteran Harry R. Landis, died at 108 in February in Florida.
Buckles is from an era that has almost disappea
Source: NYT Book Review
May 25, 2008
Today one of the last Bowery flophouses leans up against the futuristic steel facade of the New Museum, and a bed at the Bowery Hotel can run $750 a night. After such gentrification, it can be difficult to conjure up the squalid New York that Jacob Riis documented in his groundbreaking 1889 work of photojournalism, “How the Other Half Lives.” Riis was well aware that the “other half” in New York City had become the other three-quarters, with 1.2 million impoverished New Yorkers living in slums,
Source: NYT
May 25, 2008
In an era when much of the 20th century’s lexicon of geopolitical stock phrases — Iron Curtain, “collaborator,” “enemy within” — has lost the power to stir passions, the last 10 days have proven once again that cries of “appeasement” still resonate.
“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals,” President Bush said before the Israeli Parliament. “We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement.”
The White House
Source: NYT
May 25, 2008
In the annals of Congressional history, Representative Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas is remembered for the ignominious end to his long legislative career: a public display of inebriation during a dalliance with a stripper named Fanne Fox.
Before that, he helped create Medicare.
Until his downfall in the 1970s, Mr. Mills, a Democrat, was called the most powerful man in Washington — with good reason. For 18 years, longer than any other lawmaker, he ran the House Ways and M
Source: CNN
May 24, 2008
As president of the Pentagon Memorial Fund, Jim Laychak has been involved in nearly aspect of the project's planning.
The only thing he has not done is visit the bench dedicated to his brother, Dave Laychak, who died on September 11, 2001, when a passenger airplane hit the Pentagon.
"I want to hold off and go and see his bench and touch his bench that day," said Laychak. "I wanted to save something special for me personally on September 11 when we dedicat
Source: LAT
May 24, 2008
Largely obscured in the understandable uproar over Hillary Clinton's Friday reference to the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy has been the fallacy of the basic point she sought to convey -- that there is nothing all that unusual about the trajectory of her battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nod.
Before invoking the Kennedy killing in comments to a South Dakota newspaper that she quickly rued, Clinton said, "My husband did not wrap up the nomination
Source: BBC
May 23, 2008
East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who oversaw some of the Cold War's biggest swaps of captured spies in Berlin, has died at 82, his family says.
Vogel died on Thursday at his home in Schliersee, Bavaria, after recently suffering a heart attack.
His swaps included KGB agent Rudolf Abel for US pilot Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR, in 1962.
He also oversaw the transfer of nearly a quarter of a million people from East to West Germany for billions of mar
Source: Times (UK)
May 23, 2008
In the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, an historian named Emanuel Ringelblum organised and carried out an act of resistance without parallel, a feat of historical heroism that has only come fully to light recently: he set about preserving the present, for the benefit of the future.
Ringelblum was one of 450,000 Jews herded into the ghetto by the Nazis. Over the next three years many died of disease or starvation. Most of the remainder were rounded up and murdered in Treblinka. Those who surv
Source: Reuters
May 23, 2008
History has not been kind to Rezso Kasztner.
He saved more Jews from death in the Holocaust than any other Jew. His reward was the accusation that he sold his soul to the devil and assassination by Jewish extremists.
But Kasztner's reputation may be about to be restored, more than 60 years after he negotiated a "blood for money" deal with an armed, drunk and often ranting Adolf Eichmann to save Jewish lives in exchange for cash, jewels and trucks.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 23, 2008
A fortress described as a "treasure trove of Nazi memorabilia" is to be opened as a museum in northern France.
The complex, which was cut out of a cliff face called La Montagne du Roule by slave labour, overlooks the strategic port of Cherbourg and became a nerve centre of German resistance following D-Day.
About 200 soldiers were able to live inside the fort, which contained medical centres, a mess and dormitories, and was linked by 2,000 ft of corridors to f
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
May 23, 2008
With the help of an early-19th-century insurance map, archaeologists are having an easier time than usual in excavating an important historical site near Montpelier.
The researchers, including 17 students from James Madison University, are unearthing the South Yard, a residential complex where President James Madison's domestic slaves lived and worked.
The insurance map, which came to light in 2002, is proving invaluable.
"It was a perfect roadmap for
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org
May 23, 2008
Research led by the University of Leeds has discovered genetic evidence that overturns existing theories about human migration into Island Southeast Asia (covering the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo) - taking the timeline back by nearly 10,000 years.
Prevailing theory suggests that the present-day populations of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) originate largely from a Neolithic expansion from Taiwan driven by rice agriculture about 4,000 years ago - the so-called "Out
Source: NYT
May 23, 2008
A memorial dedicated to gay men and lesbians persecuted and killed under the Nazis will be inaugurated on May 27, the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany said. The $935,000 monument, designed by Michael Elmgreen of Denmark and Ingar Dragset of Norway, will be in Berlin on the edge of its Tiergarten park and near the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It features a concrete slab with a window that will allow visitors to view a looped video that will alternate every two years between a cli
Source: WaPo's The Fix (blog)
May 23, 2008
Update: The Sioux Falls Argus Leader executive editor Randell Beck has just released a statement in regards the controversy caused by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (N.Y.) comments about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Here's Beck's statement:
"The context of the question and answer with Sen. Clinton was whether her continued candidacy jeopardized party unity this close to the Democratic convention. Her reference to Mr. Kennedy's assassination appeared to fo
Source: Guardian
May 23, 2008
The last surviving Mitford sister is 88 now, but does not look it. Her sight is not as good as it used to be, though, and her voice comes from another time, the Noël Coward vowels shifting between kind but business-like answers and sudden girlish animation. An old-fashioned deference is alive here (her staff call her Her Grace) and I am not the first interviewer to be struck by her impeccable politeness, the kind of forceful politeness that both puts people at their ease and keeps them at a firm
Source: BBC
May 23, 2008
The victims of the Irish Famine are to be remembered in an annual official memorial day, which is to be established in the Republic of Ireland.
It is believed that about one million people in Ireland starved in the 1840s after the failure of the potato crop.
Hundreds of thousands of others emigrated during the disaster, sparking a worldwide Irish diaspora.
The Irish government has set up an expert group to organise a yearly event.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 23, 2008
The crumpled ruins of Beichuan, the most seriously damaged major town in the Sichuan earthquake zone, are to be preserved and turned into a museum and memorial.
The local government wants it to become not just a place to remember the 8,600 dead of the town, almost half its population, but somewhere the Chinese people can learn to prevent similar disasters.
After securing the town's collapsed and leaning homes, schools and office blocks, it wants to leave them as they ar
