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: Scotsman
Nov 2, 2007
A SINISTER group of Nazi sympathisers is aiding a former death-camp guard, tracked down by a British historian, to avoid prosecution.
Last month, the historian Guy Walters revealed he had traced Erna Wallisch, 85, who lives alone in a flat outside Vienna.
She looks like a harmless old grandmother, but is wanted for beating prisoners to death at the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland during the Second World War, when she worked as an SS guard.
She is on t
Source: Fox News
Nov 2, 2007
Sen. Barack Obama, trailing in the polls among black Democratic voters, whirled through South Carolina Friday to talk about civil rights and racial disparities, picking up the endorsement of the state's first black Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction along the way.
Ernest Finney, a former state Supreme Court chief justice endorsed Obama Friday, saying the Illinois senator's views on education helped him make up his mind.
Speaking at the Clarendon County Courthous
Source: NYT
Nov 2, 2007
A lovely little piece of subway history on the uptown platform of the No. 1 line at 59th Street-Columbus Circle — so old it actually antedates the trains — was concealed from generations of riders by a false wall.
With the false wall being removed as part of the station renovation, history has come to light again: a blue-and-white Art Nouveau plaque, with a flowery border (worthy of willow ware) encircling the words, “The Tiles in This Exhibit are the product of the American Encaust
Source: CNN
Nov 2, 2007
Saudi Arabia could have helped the United States prevent al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington if American officials had consulted Saudi authorities in a "credible" way, the kingdom's former ambassador said in a documentary aired Thursday.
The comments by Prince Bandar bin Sultan are similar to the remarks this week by Saudi King Abdullah that suggested Britain could have prevented the July 2005 train bombings in London if it had heeded warnings from Riyadh.
Source: WaPo
Nov 2, 2007
A little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight.
Draft House and Senate bills would allow the government to compel any "communications service provider" to provide access to e-mails and other electronic information within the United States as part of federal surveillance of non-U.S. c
Source: NYT
Nov 2, 2007
ORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. — The door to the tumbledown clapboard building, the one with the “Off Limits” sign, creaks open, and Harlan Bradford’s flashlight beam cuts through the shadows inside.
Now in the spotlight, bat droppings on the floor. Up above, drop-ceiling railings dangle like stalactites. A stage curtain in tatters hints at the shows, the many shows that once rocked this place, the former Mountain View Colored Officers Club.
“You can see and hear them and imagine
Source: http://www.avionews.com
Nov 2, 2007
Udine, Italy - Shot down by American fighters on January 30th, 1944
After the rescue of the Messerschmitt BF-109, occured the last October 20th, in the city of Concordia Saggitaria (Venice), also the remains of the German pilot shot down by US fighters on January 30th, 1944, have been identified.
After a first and difficult reading of the pilot's ID, which made think to a different name and grade, now finally there are no doubts anymore. After the necessary cleaning an
Source: National Security Archive
Nov 2, 2007
Then-national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger colluded with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to keep the U.S. Secretary of State in the dark about ongoing secret discussions between the Soviets and the Nixon White House, according to newly released Soviet-era documents, published this week by the Department of State.
In February 1972, with the Moscow summit approaching, Kissinger met with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, who was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State William Rog
Source: LAT
Nov 2, 2007
To the end of his days, Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. believed that dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a justifiable means of shortening World War II and preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen who military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.
For Tibbets, the pilot whose bombing run unleashed the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled two-thirds of the city and killed at least 80,0
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2007
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is beginning a major dig for World War I chemical munitions near American University and the South Korean Ambassador's residence.
It is the fourth excavation on or near the Washington, D.C., campus in nearly 15 years, since the discovery of disposal pits from the Army's former chemical warfare station. Officials say the artillerary could contain toxic agents such as mustard gas.
The station was used for developing and testing weapons.
Source: http://www.happynews.com
Nov 1, 2007
The Coca-Cola Company announced a US $2 million donation to the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) toward the restoration of its site in Ancient Olympia, the cradle of the Olympic Games and the ultimate symbol of Greek and international cultural and sports heritage. The site was severely damaged by the recent forest fires that scorched the grounds of the Peloponnesus in Greece over the summer.
Dominique Reiniche, president of The Coca-Cola Company's European Union Group, met with Mino
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2007
Berlin | A vast archive of Nazi-era documents started accepting online requests Thursday for information from victims of Nazi crimes and people tracing relatives — a move meant to speed up an often-slow process.
The move by the archive, based in the central German town of Bad Arolsen, should make it easier for people to get information from the 50 million files of the International Tracing Service. The site, www.its-arolsen.org, will not, how
Source: Newsweek
Nov 1, 2007
Pisa is famous for its leaning tower, but archeologists there are now uncovering an amazing fleet of ancient ships, some complete with crew and cargo.
The San Rossore train station on the edge of Pisa, Italy, is a lonely stop. Tourists who visit this city to see its famous leaning tower generally use the central station across town. But San Rossore is about to be recognized as one of the country's most significant archeological digs. For nearly a decade archeologists have been worki
Source: http://www.earthtimes.org
Nov 1, 2007
After years of discussion and one false start, work begins Friday on a "Remembrance and Documentation Museum" in Berlin - on the site of the former Prince Albrecht Palais where the Gestapo and the SS had their notorious interrogation and torture cells during World War II. Unlike the city's 2005-built Holocaust Memorial honouring the murdered Jews of Europe, and Daniel Libeskind's daringly designed 1999 museum dealing with Berlin's Jewish tradition and history, the "new" museu
Source: Guardian
Nov 1, 2007
The construction of a large police barracks close to the Great Mosque of Samarra and its famed
spiral minaret is imperilling another of Iraq's precious historical sites, Unesco and senior
archaeologists have warned. Work on the building and a training centre for 1,500 Iraqi policemen
is continuing in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, despite the addition this summer.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Nov 1, 2007
Broad classification restrictions on the disclosure of historical
intelligence information are making it difficult or impossible to
accurately represent the record of U.S. foreign policy, an official
advisory committee warned the Secretary of State last summer.
By law, the Department of State is obliged to publish"a thorough,
accurate and reliable documentary record" of United States foreign
policy in its official Foreign Relations of the United States series.
But due to officia
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 1, 2007
A top secret document outlining Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s concerns about the Vietnam War to the American president was left lying around a high street bank, newly released papers have revealed.
The fax, sent by the Labour leader to Lyndon B Johnson in 1967, voiced his fears that Britain was in danger of being portrayed as America’s “stooge”.
It was accidentally left in the Bank of Scotland on London’s Regent Street by an official of the Foreign Office and later dis
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2007
Winston Churchill had bitter disputes with his Cabinet during the Cold War about building the hydrogen bomb and conducting private diplomacy with the Soviet Union — even threatening to resign at one point, declassified documents showed Thursday.
The aging British prime minister threatened to quit in 1954 in order to quell a revolt by Cabinet ministers, angered at his high-handed leadership style, according to Cabinet notebooks released by the National Archives.
The det
Source: Vanity Fair
Nov 1, 2007
Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, [Sally Bedell Smith] reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into dis
Source: Atlantic Monthly
Nov 1, 2007
With this issue, ... [the] magazine turns 150—declining, with respect, the “battered,” still aspiring to the magical. What, beyond the patient commitment of its owners, can account for this longevity? Consider The Atlantic’s passage: through a permanent revolution in technology, from the telephone, to the practical fountain pen, to the radio, to the note pad, to the television, to the Internet; through financial crises, beginning in 1857 with what The Atlantic called a national “flurry” over cr
