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: Reuters
Sep 20, 2007
The German government agreed Wednesday to pay workers who labored in the country’s Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era about $2,797 each in compensation.
Compensation for ghetto workers, who generally received a small but often negligible wage, was one of the last outstanding claims dating from the Third Reich. Chancellor Angela Merkel had been keen to settle the claims and asked top officials to work together with Israel on the matter.
Source: WaPo
Sep 20, 2007
He was a sickly orphan who had died of pneumonia as a teenager and then was left behind when the cemetery where he was buried in Northwest Washington moved a decade after his death.
He lay lost and forgotten beneath the sprawl of the city, while six generations and 155 years passed by.
And when his body was accidentally unearthed by a construction crew in 2005 -- still clad in his fine white burial suit and encased in an iron coffin -- researchers at the Smithsonian Ins
Source: WaPo
Sep 20, 2007
Joann Bagnerise couldn't bring herself to visit George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, driving by without stopping, thinking too much about the hundreds of slaves who had labored in the mansion and fields beyond the brick walls. Even yesterday, as the Dumfries resident sat in the warm sun near the estate's new model of a slave cabin, she said she was filled with conflicting emotions.
"It's very solemn," she said from underneath the brim of a wide straw hat. "I'm f
Source: AFP
Sep 20, 2007
A prosecutor in Bolzano, northern Italy seized wine bottle labels on Wednesday bearing a portrait of Hitler and other Nazis from a winery near the Austrian border, the company said.
The 20 labels from the "Der Fuehrer" line show Hitler raising the Nazi salute and his generals, including Hermann Goering, the Reich's economic minister, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy.
The black and white labels are imprinted with the m
Source: BBC
Sep 20, 2007
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has said he would like to see a statue of Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square.
Speaking to BBC London 94.9, he said India was part of British history and Gandhi's achievement must be enshrined.
Gandhi was a political and spiritual leader who led India to freedom from British rule in 1947.
Former South African leader Nelson Mandela's statue was unveiled in Parliament Square last month.
Mr Livingst
Source: NYT
Sep 20, 2007
Several weeks ago, according to the owner of an upstate New York auction company, he and his staff were combing through the belongings of an elderly man about to enter a nursing home. The house was just outside Palmyra, the birthplace of the Mormon religion, and amid the attic clutter, at the bottom of a box of books, was the treasure: a 177-year-old first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon.
At an auction held yesterday in nearby Geneva, an undisclosed bidder from the East Coast pai
Source: Australian
Sep 20, 2007
PAUL Keating has attacked former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's memory of recent history after he failed to recognise the former Labor prime minister's role in modernising the Australian economy.
Mr Keating said yesterday Dr Greenspan's record showed he had legitimate claims to being a substantial US central banker.
"But if his book is any guide, especially as it relates to Australia, those claims do not extend to him being a noteworthy economic histo
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Sep 19, 2007
Nathan Nunn,"The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades," National Bureau of Economic Research, September:
I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that re
Source: Library of Congress Blog
Sep 19, 2007
Some strong but, unfortunately, inaccurate words have been used regarding a small handful of the 50,000+ oral histories of the Veterans History Project (part of the Library’s American Folklife Center).
News reporters and others have been using terms like “fraud” or “misrepresentation” to describe the incorrect listing of 24 veterans on the VHP Web site as having been awarded the Medal of Honor (AKA the Congressional Medal of Honor).
Soon, and elsewhere on the LOC Web si
Source: Fox News
Sep 19, 2007
Two reptile-like animals living 290 million years ago are the oldest creatures to have their footprints positively identified after a fortuitous discovery allowed scientists to match fossils to preserved trackways.
Fossils of Diadectes absitus and Orobates pabsti were recently found in the Tambach Formation in central Germany.
Nearby and in the same sediment layer, scientists found well-preserved footprints made by creatures that plodded through the region's soft sedime
Source: BBC
Sep 19, 2007
Volunteers are helping archaeologists search for signs of a medieval castle thought to be under a village car park.
Researchers believe the castle once stood at the site in Maenclochog at the foot of Pembrokeshire's Preseli Hills.
Villagers are working with professional archaeologists for two weeks in a bid to find out more about the land.
A topographical survey of the site last year suggested the site was probably that of the castle and possibly an earlier Iron
Source: Long profile of Romney in the NYT
Sep 19, 2007
Mitt Romney walked onto the Olympic stage in 1999 a rich businessman still smarting from losing his first bid for public office. He walked off, three years later, a star-polished candidate who would be elected governor of Massachusetts in a matter of months. This was the place of his emergence and his transition.
In rescuing the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, which had been tarnished by scandal, Mr. Romney learned the ways of Washington and the hurly-burly of politics, mastered t
Source: MSNBC
Sep 19, 2007
Three of her four kids didn’t live to adulthood, and her husband was shot as he held her hand. If anyone ever deserved to go crazy, it was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the 16th U.S. president. “She had the most tragic public life in American history,” says James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.
But was she truly insane? That question is raised—but not answered—by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and M
Source: BBC
Sep 19, 2007
A team of scientists working in Georgia has unearthed the remains of four human-like creatures dating to 1.8 million years ago.
In the journal Nature, the researchers outline details of the partial skeletons uncovered in a Medieval town.
The bones reveal a mixture of primitive and advanced features, team leader David Lordkipanidze explained.
These early hominids may have been among the first to leave Africa to colonise the rest of the world.
Di
Source: BBC
Sep 19, 2007
A "treasure trove" of 18th Century domestic waste has been unearthed at a town's park.
Fragments of wine bottles, pottery, clay pipes and buttons have been recovered by archaeologists at The Parade in Fort William in Lochaber.
Evidence houses were burned down to give government troops a line of fire against attacking Jacobites has also been found.
The site was a parade ground for a fort, which is now a ruin.
Source: http://www.post-trib.com
Sep 19, 2007
An Illinois-based group named for a local historian thinks it has found the remains of a ship that once carried escaping slaves to freedom before it was destroyed by slave hunters on the shore of Lake Michigan in Ogden Dunes.
Roger Barski, an underwater photographer and ex-Hollywood lighting technician, presented the findings of the Briggs Project to a spellbound audience of two dozen history buffs at a meeting of the Portage Community Historical Society on Tuesday night.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Sep 19, 2007
If you’ve ever ended an e-mail message or an instant message with an emoticon, now might be a good time to pause and reflect on the work of Scott E. Fahlman. After all, it will be 25 years ago tomorrow that Mr. Fahlman, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, invented the digital smiley face.
After a colleague joked about a contaminated elevator on an electronic bulletin board, Mr. Fahlman had his eureka moment: He recommended that future quipsters mark their
Source: AP
Sep 19, 2007
Internet decisions aren't always made at Internet speeds.
The Internet's key oversight agency has approved a plan to phase out the domain name for Yugoslavia, four years after the country dissolved following civil war. It'll take two or three more years for ".yu" users to fully transition to ".rs" for Serbia and ".me" for Montenegro.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Sep 19, 2007
The police in Cambodia arrested on Wednesday the highest ranking surviving leader of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime to face charges in the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979.
The leader, Nuon Chea, 82, was the chief ideologue of the movement and "Brother No. 2" to Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge chieftain who died in 1998.
He was arrested at his home in the northeastern town of Pailin, which has become a sort of retirement haven for Khmer Rouge cadre, and
Source: BBC
Sep 19, 2007
One of the country's leading teaching hospitals is celebrating 250 years since it was founded.
The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, east London, was set up to offer health care to the East End's underprivileged population.
It was founded in a tavern by seven friends "with but a shilling in the bank", according to hospital lore.
It officially opened its doors on 20 September 1757 thanks to £18,000 worth of charitable donations.
