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: http://www.gazette.net
Apr 30, 2008
More than 100,000 Civil War-era artifacts were recently unearthed from a small, wooded stretch of land in Silver Spring that is slated to be paved over and made part of the Intercounty Connector.
Archaeologists called the former home of Melinda Jackson one of the best-preserved archaeology sites ever found in Maryland. Jackson, a black woman born into slavery in 1828 who gained her freedom and raised a family, has descendants still living in the area.
Source: http://www.winchesterstar.com
Apr 30, 2008
Virginia was central to the Civil War, and a state commission plans to make the commonwealth central to a multi-year commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States.
"It’s a commemoration, not a celebration," said Speaker of the House of Delegates William J. Howell Jr., R-Fredericksburg, who chairs the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission.
The commission was set up two years ago to plan how the state’s role in the
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2008
BAD AROLSEN, Germany - A vast archive of concentration camp logs detailing Nazi horrors and other German wartime documents formally opened to visitors Wednesday, more than six decades after it was founded to provide information about the victims of the Holocaust.
"We are turning over a new leaf in the history of the ITS," Reto Meister, director of the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross, said at a ceremony. "This opening will contribute to keeping alive the
Source: JTA
Apr 30, 2008
Hitler's "Mein Kampf" should be released in Germany, says a German Jewish leader.
Stephan Kramer, the secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has urged that a
critically annotated edition be issued online of Hitler's diatribe, which has been banned in Germany since 1945.
Kramer told Deutschlandfunk Radio that the Central Council would work on such an annotation, even for an Internet publication, of the volume Hitler wrote in prison
Source: USA Today
Apr 30, 2008
Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela is flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and needs special permission to visit the USA. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the situation "embarrassing," and some members of Congress vow to fix it.
The requirement applies to former South African leader Mandela and other members of South Africa's governing African National Congress (ANC), the once-banned anti-Apartheid organization. In the 197
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2008
DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that remains exhumed last year belong to two children of Czar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia's last royal family, a regional governor said Wednesday.
The bone fragments dug up are those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, whose remains had been missing since the family was murdered in 1918 as Russia descended into civil war, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region.
Source: NYT
Apr 30, 2008
The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”
It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four care
Source: Press Release--http://www.hallowedground.org
Apr 30, 2008
Today, the House of Representatives joined the United States Senate in passing legislation to designate the Journey Through Hallowed Ground a National Heritage Area (JTHG NHA). The legislation, S. 2739, passed the Senate on April 10, 2008, by a vote of 91 to 4 and in the House today by a vote of 291 to 117. This Act of Congress recognizes the unparalleled cultural, historic and scenic resources within the entire JTHG corridor—the region that generally follows the Old Carolina Road (Rt. 15/231)
Source: Bloomberg News
Apr 30, 2008
De Beers, the world's biggest undersea diamond miner, said its geologists in Namibia found the wreckage of an ancient sailing ship still laden with treasure, including six bronze cannons, thousands of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins and more than 50 elephant tusks.
The wreckage was discovered in the area behind a sea wall used to push back the Atlantic Ocean in order to search for diamonds in Namibia's Sperrgebiet or "Forbidden Zone."
"If the experts' a
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2008
Supreme Court Justice David Souter says it took a trip to the Gettysburg battlefield to change his perspective on handling difficult cases.
In a rare public address yesterday, the justice from New Hampshire admitted that at least one Supreme Court case prompted him to ask, "Why do I have to resolve that case?"
He said he found an answer last year while visiting the Pennsylvania battlefield where the Civil War changed course in 1863. Souter noted that the comma
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 30, 2008
Residents of the Greek island of Lesbos launched a legal action yesterday against a homosexual group, insisting that only islanders had the right to call themselves lesbians.
The inhabitants of the island said they were attempting to ban the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union (Olke) from bearing the name "lesbian".
Source: Daily Mail
Apr 30, 2008
An SS concentration camp doctor accused of murdering hundreds of prisoners is to be named as the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal.
Aribert Heim tops the list of 10 suspects, to be published by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, today.
Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen, and now he is the most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal among hundreds who the Simon Wiesenthal Centre estimates are still
Source: WaPo
Apr 30, 2008
Senior Air Force officers proposed using 10-to-15-kiloton nuclear bombs against targets in Communist China in 1958, in the event that Beijing blockaded the Taiwan Strait, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled out that option, according to a newly declassified Pentagon document.
At a Cabinet meeting in mid-August 1958, as the threat of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan was developing, Air Force Gen. Nathan F. Twining, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained "that at
Source: Bloomberg News
Apr 29, 2008
Most of us may believe that Robert Mugabe's undermining of democracy is bad news for Zimbabwe's economy.
But if we conclude that China created material prosperity and spawned wildly successful entrepreneurial ventures such as computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd. without constitutional democracy and its appurtenances, then we can't -- at least on purely economic grounds -- argue that Zimbabwe needs them.
Equally useless then would be the heaps of empirical evidence that econ
Source: Mirror
Apr 29, 2008
Royal Navy divers admit they may never find a 1,100lb Second World War bomb which they lost on the seabed.
Experts towed the device two miles offshore after it was washed up on a beach. But they lost its position when a marker buoy broke free and it was moved by tides.
The Navy said: "We're still committed to looking for it.
"But it might get to the stage where we have to see if it comes ashore again."
The German bomb was scooped up eight days ago
Source: AP
Apr 29, 2008
Israel's official memorial day for the Holocaust, which begins at sundown Wednesday, finds many elderly survivors of the Nazi genocide turning their anger on a group that is meant to help them.
For more than five decades, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — better known as the Claims Conference — has been the central channel for billions of dollars in restitution and reparations payments from Germany to Jewish victims of the Third Reich.
Sixty-thr
Source: Fox News
Apr 29, 2008
A Republican congressional candidate in Indiana is defending himself after speaking to a group that was celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
The Northwest Indiana Times published a photo of candidate Tony Zirkle last week speaking in Chicago to the American National Socialist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group. He spoke in front of a portrait of Hitler and was flanked by large swastika banners.
Zirkle wrote on his Web site Tuesday that the criticism he’s received is undese
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 29, 2008
Researchers have long been puzzled by the strong rural drawl spoken by the inhabitants of Palmerston Atoll, one of the smallest and most remote of the Cook Islands with a land mass of less than one square mile.
The island is home to 63 people, who are all descended from William Marsters, an English carpenter and barrelmaker who settled there in 1863.
Now linguists have matched their accent to that of their very distant cousins 12,000 miles away in Gloucestershire.
Source: NYT
Apr 29, 2008
Spain’s National Court has decided against extraditing the former Argentine president María Estela Martínez de Perón, 77, to Argentina, where she is wanted on charges of human rights abuses during her presidency in the 1970s.
Source: Guardian
Apr 29, 2008
The lawyer for US vice-president Dick Cheney claimed today that the Congress lacks any authority to examine his behaviour on the job.
The exception claimed by Cheney's counsel came in response to requests from congressional Democrats that David Addington, the vice-president's chief of staff, testify about his involvement in the approval of interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay.
Ruling out voluntary cooperation by Addington, Cheney lawyer Kathryn Wheelbarger said
