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: AFP
Mar 12, 2008
Archaeologists have unearthed the skull of a young woman in northern Greece who is believed to have undergone head surgery in the third century, Greek news media reported Wednesday.
A Greek team discovered the skeleton at an ancient cemetery in Veria, with the skull including an injury that led them to conclude the surgery had been performed.
"We think that there was a complex surgical intervention that only an experienced doctor could have performed," said Io
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 12, 2008
They are unseen photographs of one of the most infamous men in history and a remarkable insight into the brutality of the Nazi regime in its final days.
But mystery surrounds how these black and white snaps of Adolf Hitler, taken by a German soldier standing just a few feet away, ended up at a stately home in Derby.The photos, which are to go on sale at auction next month, are thought to have been taken during the summer of 1944 in occupied Belgium.
In one of them, the
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 12, 2008
A backpacker hostel in Alice Springs faces possible legal action after allegedly evicting a group of Aboriginal people because of their race.
The 16 women and children had travelled 120 miles from the desert community of Yuendumu. Six were to train as lifeguards for their town's new swimming pool but soon after arriving at the Haven Backpacker Resort they were all asked to leave because other guests were scared of them.
"The manager came out and told me that we wer
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 12, 2008
Martina Navratilova has regained Czech nationality more than 30 years after fleeing a Communist regime she now compares favourably to that of her adopted country America under President George Bush.
The nine-time Wimbledon champion and one of the world's greatest ever tennis players, Ms Navratilova was born in Prague. She fled in 1975 at the height of the Cold War after being denied the right to compete in professional tennis in the US, where most major tournaments were then played
Source: NYT
Mar 12, 2008
MAYOR L. DOUGLAS WILDER used to beg his reluctant father, born in 1886, to tell him stories about how his parents fared during slavery.
After some urging, “my father used to talk about how his father and mother were separated,” Mr. Wilder said. According to the family’s oral history, Mr. Wilder’s grandfather walked 18 miles each way every weekend to see his wife and children in Ashland, Va. Because he never got a travel pass, the white overseer at his Richmond plantation threatened
Source: NYT
Mar 12, 2008
Stockholm | It’s hard to find anyplace in Europe today, even here in peaceable Sweden, where people aren’t squabbling over cultural property and the spoils of war. For some time, it turns out, a handful of nationalist Danes have been loudly barking about booty that the Swedes nabbed 350 years ago in a war with Denmark. The cache includes an ornate canopy from Kronborg Castle, of Hamlet lore, and recently people in Skane, a region in the south of Sweden that was ceded by Denmark in 1658 after lo
Source: NYT
Mar 12, 2008
JOSEPH P. WEISS, 57, said he often fantasized about what it might have been like to be in World War II. So on a recent weekend he paid $600 to turn back the clock and participate in the re-enactment of a “fighter sweep.”
Mr. Weiss, a retired office-electronics business owner from Bay Shore, N.Y., strapped on a parachute and rode shotgun in a North American T-6 Texan fighter trainer, the lead plane of three flying wing to wing, pretending to be headed across the English Channel towar
Source: NYT
Mar 12, 2008
The government and banks agreed to pay $170 million to compensate Jews whose property was looted by the Nazi occupying forces during World War II. Under the arrangement, $54 million will be paid to Holocaust survivors while the rest will go to a foundation to help needy families of victims and toward efforts to assure that the Holocaust is remembered. Belgium collaborated with Nazi Germany, and victims’ relatives said the state should look more closely at its role.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 12, 2008
German prosecutors have launched a last ditch bid to bring a octogenarian Nazi executioner to justice before he dies of old age.
Heinrich Boere, 86, a member of a notorious Waffen SS death squad in the Netherlands, was sentenced to death in 1949.
But his sentence was commuted to life and German courts have since refused efforts to extradite him to the Netherlands to face prosecution.
Now Ulrich Maass, a state prosecutor in North Rhine-Westphalia, has revi
Source: WaPo
Mar 12, 2008
Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.
At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh's family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.
"None of the women proteste
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Mar 12, 2008
It was three months before the Bicentennial and a group of high school students in Boston were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. One of them held a large American flag. But this was not the commonplace ritual of citizenship that it might sound. The teenagers, all of them white, were just as swept up as their parents in the protests over court-ordered desegregation of the Boston public schools; and much of the rhetoric swirling around the anti-busing movement appealed to the old patriotic tropes o
Source: Michael Crowley in the New Republic
Mar 12, 2008
During Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, after all, [David] Duke said Jackson's election "would be the greatest tragedy ever to befall this country." Warning that "the white majority in this country are losing their rights," Duke announced his own counter-candidacy, one whose main purpose seemed to be hounding Jackson.
Yet, far from railing at Obama's rise, Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explain
Source: BBC
Mar 11, 2008
The Gulf emirate of Dubai has said it is to set up the world's first museum dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad.
It aims to shed light on his life in 7th Century Arabia, as well as his legacy for the world's 1.3bn Muslims.
There will also be a wing explaining the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, and another for the other pillars of Islam.
Source: http://www.wienerzeitung.at
Mar 11, 2008
A telephone poll of 509 Austrians by the Social Science Studies Society (SWS) reveals that 60 per cent of Austrians oppose continued investigation of the country's Nazi past whereas 36 per cent support continued study of it.
The percentage opposing it hasn't changed since 2000, but that supporting it has increased by four percentage points since then.
People with low educational levels are more opposed to it than those with higher levels.
Source: Liverpool Daily Post
Mar 11, 2008
DESPITE the predictions of howling gales and stormy weather hitting the Mersey yesterday, one of the most unusual removal jobs successfully got under way.
The fate of the historic submarine U534 had hung in the balance after the closure of the Historic Warships collection, until Merseytravel bought it up.
The organisation wants to use it as the basis for a novel visitor attraction at Woodside ferry terminal in Birkenhead, to complement the Spaceport in Seacombe and the Beatle
Source: Tennessean
Mar 11, 2008
Archaeologists at The Hermitage can catalog nearly a million artifacts from the plantation's slaves after a $285,000 grant was awarded to the historic museum Monday.
The grant, one of 149 awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will allow archeologists to document and re-analyze some 800,000 slave artifacts that have been found on the property since excavations began in 1970.
Source: AP
Mar 11, 2008
An international coalition dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust announced Tuesday that is has selected Berlin as the site for its headquarters.
The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education coordinates efforts to commemorate the genocide of Europe's Jewish population. Its offices will share the building housing the Topography of Terror, a museum that documents the crimes of Germany's Nazi-era government.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walte
Source: NYT
Mar 11, 2008
The New York Public Library’s venerable lion-guarded building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street is to be renamed for the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has agreed to jump-start a $1 billion expansion of the library system with a guaranteed $100 million of his own.
The project, to be announced on Tuesday, aims to transform the Central Library into a destination for book borrowing as well as research. The Mid-Manhattan branch, on the east side of Fifth Avenue at 40th St
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 11, 2008
Adolf Hitler called it Germania, his vision of Berlin as a city full of bloated marble architecture, capital of the Nazi-run world. “Berlin will only be comparable with the Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians or Romans,” the Nazi leader said. “What is London, what is Paris by comparison?”
For decades his plans were regarded as so crazed that they were confined to specialist books and institutes.
Yesterday the taboo was broken. Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, un
Source: http://www.bridgwatermercury.co.uk
Mar 11, 2008
WORKMEN digging below Bridgwater's Castle Street stumbled across an "outstanding" piece of the town's medieval history last week, unseen for more than 700 years.
Wessex Water officials were renovating sewers underneath the street on Monday when they unearthed a smugglers tunnel and part of old curtain wall from Bridgwater Castle - leading one archaeologist to proclaim it "one of the most important finds of the 21st Century".
Bridgwater Castle dates b
