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: Jerusalem Post
Oct 29, 2007
For the first time, Yad Vashem will inaugurate an exhibition this week on Muslims who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
The exhibition, which opens on Thursday, focuses on more than a dozen of the scores of Muslim Albanians previously recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" - the Holocaust center's highest honor - for risking their lives to save Jews during World War II.
The exhibit, titled "BESA: A Code of Honor - Muslim Albanians Who Rescued Jews Dur
Source: CNN
Oct 29, 2007
Former President Gerald Ford suggested to a reporter in 2004 that Vice President Dick Cheney should be dumped from the Republican ticket, according to a new book to be published Tuesday.
Ford preferred former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani because he feared Cheney had become a "liability" to President Bush, according to the book's author.
CNN obtained an advance copy of "Write It When I'm Gone," and interviewed author Thomas DeFrank.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 28, 2007
A new memorial exhibition center at a former Nazi camp in central Germany reflects the experiences of inmates when it was a prisoner of war facility, a concentration camp and then a holding center for displaced Jews after World War II.
The new center, which opened Sunday, is the first stage in an overall makeover of the Bergen-Belsen camp — razed by the Allies in the postwar years — to more accurately document prisoners' experiences there. It draws on archive material that came to l
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 28, 2007
In the early stages of its planning, the European Digital Library held the promise of a counterstrike to Google domination of digital archives through the search engine's vast book search project and powerful alliances with American universities.
But as the European project prepares for its debut early next year, the 80 museums, film institutes and national libraries involved are facing the reality of limited government funding for the enormous task of digitizing material, and they
Source: Chicago Tribune
Oct 28, 2007
Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor's office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from City Hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.
Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.
That record
Source: Fox News
Oct 28, 2007
A vacant Manhattan building that played a part in an infamous Gilded Age murder case partially collapsed Saturday night, less than two weeks after city officials expressed concerns about the building's stability....
The building became a salacious footnote in a sensational 1907 trial involving a teenage showgirl, a jealous husband, and renowned architect Stanford White. He designed the original Madison Square Garden, the famous arch at Washington Square Park and several other city
Source: NYT
Oct 28, 2007
Marcos Ana does not remember everything about his 23 years in prison during Franco’s dictatorship.
Marcos Ana was jailed for 23 years during Franco’s rule.
But the 87-year-old poet remembers the electric shocks and brutal whippings that left his body covered in sores; the hunger that compelled him to eat grass sprouting between the stones of the prison patio; his crumpled mother, clinging to the shins of a prison guard, begging mercy for her bloodied and beaten son....
Source: NYT
Oct 28, 2007
Nothing expresses American ambivalence about government secrecy as vividly as the old Washington craft of redaction, the selective removal of passages from once-secret papers or books by spies. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of lingerie, covering the very parts you most want to see.
In every nook of the national security agencies, redactors labor anonymously. The federal Information Security Oversight Office says 460 million pages of previously classified records have been made p
Source: NYT
Oct 28, 2007
YOU could put together a pretty decent little law firm drawing on just the leading presidential candidates.
It would have two former prosecutors, one intense and the other folksy, a civil litigator from a tony regional firm, a superstar trial lawyer and that scrappy kid from Harvard who gave up the big money to do civil rights work. (O.K., it would also sound like a pitch for a doomed TV show.)
Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Barack Obama, Mit
Source: AP
Oct 28, 2007
U.S. and Puerto Rican archaeologists say they have found the best-preserved pre-Columbian site in the Caribbean, which could shed light on virtually every aspect of Indian life in the region, from sacred rituals to eating habits.
The archaeologists believe the site in southern Puerto Rico may have belonged to the Taino or pre-Taino people that inhabited the island before European colonization, although other tribes are a possibility. It contains stones etched with ancient petroglyph
Source: Russia Today
Oct 27, 2007
Legendary Soviet spy Aleksandr Feklisov, who helped the Soviet Union get the secret formula for an atomic bomb, has died in Moscow at the age of 93. Feklisov was responsible for stealing nuclear technology from the U.S. His efforts cut by half the amount of time it took the Soviets to test an atomic weapon.
The KGB handler also played a key role in bringing the USSR and the U.S. back from the brink of a nuclear conflict during the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s.
A year bef
Source: AP
Oct 27, 2007
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is looking to the past for lessons on how to make next month's Mideast peace conference a success.
As she prepares to host the international meeting in Annapolis, Md., Rice has delved into the history of U.S. attempts to mediate peace in the region, plunging into the diplomatic annals and seeking out the major players responsible for both successes and failures.
"She's trying to draw on the historical record and the experiences of othe
Source: Seattle Times
Oct 27, 2007
FORT WORTH, Texas — Nearly 40 years ago, Beth-El Congregation obtained a Torah — a parchment scroll containing the first five books of the Bible — that survived the Holocaust, although most of the Czech Jews who treasured it did not.
Beth-El, in Fort Worth, Texas, recently installed an exhibit paying tribute to the scroll's poignant history.
The Torah, from a small farming community called Uhrineves in Czechoslovakia, is one of 1,564 such scrolls seized by Nazis as they
Source: AP
Oct 27, 2007
Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.
The lawmakers said that Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."
Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, was responding to arguments that the United States should
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2007
Ukrainian authorities have reburied near the capital, Kiev, the bodies of some 2,000 people killed by the Soviet secret police more than 60 years ago.
Relatives of the victims watched as red coffins were lowered into graves and blessed by a priest at the ceremony.
The bodies, including 474 Poles, were dug up this year in Bykovnya, where tens of thousands are thought to have been dumped during the 1930s and 1940s.
Source: NYT
Oct 27, 2007
Rome | Princeton University announced on Friday that its art museum had reached an agreement to return eight ancient works to Italy that the Italian government says were looted and illicitly exported.
The pact calls for the Princeton University Art Museum to send back four of the objects immediately and to keep four on loan for the next four years, the university said in a statement. In a partial victory of sorts, Princeton will keep seven other pieces that had been part of negotiat
Source: NYT
Oct 27, 2007
MILAN — Not 15 months ago, they were staring each other down at a negotiating table, bargaining tensely over who should have title to 13 archaeological artifacts. But on a recent afternoon they seemed the best of colleagues, amicably discussing how museums might cope with demands for the restitution of cultural property....
But the ownership issue is not always clear-cut. And even when museums draw up codes of ethics to help ensure that they won’t abet the plunder of another nation’
Source: NYT
Oct 27, 2007
Guglielmo Olivotto, an Italian prisoner of war, died with a noose around his neck, lynched at a military post on Puget Sound 63 years ago. Samuel Snow, 83, hopes that people will stop blaming him and the 27 other black soldiers convicted of starting the riot that led to Mr. Olivotto’s death. It was one of the largest Army courts-martial of World War II.
This week, a review board issued a ruling that could lead to overturning the convictions of all 28 soldiers, granting honorable dis
Source: Reuters
Oct 26, 2007
An Austrian farmer beheaded by the Nazis for refusing to serve in Hitler's army was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church on Friday in a ceremony attended by his 94-year-old widow.
Around 5,000 people joined 27 bishops and cardinals to honour Franz Jaegerstaetter, a devout Catholic who died in 1943, aged 37.
"He gave his life in mighty-hearted self-denial and with an upright conscience, in loyalty to the gospel and for the dignity of mankind," Pope Benedict w
Source: Herald Sun (Australia)
Oct 26, 2007
THE Memorial rights group has compiled a database on over 2.6 million victims of Joseph Stalin's purges, to be distributed in schools and public organisations, the group's chief said.
"Our database this far is only 20-25 percent of the total number. This is a result of the work conducted by hundreds of people in many regions throughout nearly 20 years," Arseny Roginsky said as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.
The group issued 5000 copies of the database,
