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: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 6, 2007
Forty three years after Ku Klux Klansmen allegedly abducted, beat and drowned two young black men, two of the gang stared at each other across a courtroom yesterday as one broke the Klan's most precious oath and gave evidence against the other.
United not only by their past but also by their need to wear court-supplied hearing aids, James Ford Seale and Charles Edwards both affected a studied nonchalance to their alleged crimes as the latter recounted how they pounced on two local 1
Source: BBC
Jun 5, 2007
Suman Purohit has an uphill struggle, and so do her 13 other companions who are searching Pakistani jails for their relatives, missing since 1971.
"I had been married 18 months, and my son, Vipul, was three months old when the India-Pakistan war of 1971 began," she recalls.
Her husband, Flt Lt Manohar Purohit of the Indian Air Force, flew a number of sorties into Bangladesh, which was then called East Pakistan, and came home a couple of times for brief interva
Source: Fox News
Jun 5, 2007
A rare Old Testament manuscript some 1,300 years old is finally on display for the first time, after making its way from a secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American collector.
The manuscript, containing the "Song of the Sea" section of the Old Testament's Book of Exodus and dating to around the 7th century A.D., comes from what scholars call the "silent era" — a span of 600 years between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebre
Source: Reuters
Jun 5, 2007
The Vatican tried to enroll Roman Jewish men in its security forces in 1943 in order to save them from the Nazis, the Vatican’s second in command said on Tuesday, rejecting charges that wartime Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, who ranks second only to the Pope in the Holy See hierarchy, made his comments at the presentation of a new book about Pius by Italian author Andrea Tornielli.
Bertone called accusations
Source: http://www.news-gazette.com
Jun 5, 2007
A Champaign County judge this morning threw out two lawsuits filed as efforts to get the University of Illinois to retain Chief Illiniwek as its honored symbol.
"I would be telling the university to 'deal with it.' I would be subjecting the UI to many potential consequences and very clearly controlling the actions of the state. This is something that falls within their (the trustees') authority," Judge Michael Jones said. "The relief requested would have this court co
Source: Advertiser (Australia)
Jun 5, 2007
IT'S a once in a century event - but blink and you'll miss it. At 12.34pm today, a sequential phenomenon will eventuate.
For that lonely 60 seconds in history, it will be 12.34pm on the fifth day of the sixth month in the year 2007.
Under the Australian standard time and date format, this means it will be 12.34pm on 5/6/07.
The 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 time and date sequence is rare and happens just once every 100 years.
Mathematically, it is a one-in-100
Source: HNN Staff
Jun 5, 2007
NBC News tonight broadcast a story about the abandoned children conceived by Norwegian women and Nazi soldiers during World War II at Hitler's direction.
It was a dread dark secret. The offspring were often shunned and abandoned even by their own mothers after the Nazis fled Norway.
Today the children, now in their sixties, are demanding an accounting by Norway of their ordeal.
Source: Reuters
Jun 5, 2007
The Vatican tried to enroll Roman Jewish men in its security forces in 1943 in order to save them from the Nazis, the Vatican's second in command said on Tuesday, rejecting charges that wartime Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic.Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's Secretary of State, who ranks second only to the Pope in the Holy See hierarchy, made his comments at the presentation of a new book about Pius by Italian author Andrea Tornielli.
Bertone called accus
Source: NYT
Jun 5, 2007
[A]mid an effort to revive a city mired in a crippling cycle of crime and unemployment, the Campbell Soup Company, Camden’s longtime and most prominent corporate resident, has proposed expanding its presence and transforming the area where the empty store sits into an office park.
The soup company is prepared to spend $72 million to improve its headquarters, and has also promised to help lure developers to an adjacent office park with the help of $26 million in state funds. But the
Source: CNN
Jun 5, 2007
A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community representative says.
The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community, said Tuesday.
The Nazis established two ghettos during World War II near the village and brought Jews there from w
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 5, 2007
The German government announced plans Monday to erect a memorial in Berlin dedicated homosexuals persecuted and killed by the Nazis. The sculpture should be completed this year.
The memorial, to be located in Tiergarten Park, will stand adjacent to the Holocaust Memorial built to honor the lives of the 6 million jews killed under the Nazi regime.
Danish-born Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian Ingar Dragset were selected last year to design the memorial. Their design consist
Source: Independent (UK)
Jun 5, 2007
A Norwegian Nazi who served in the SS and was awarded the Gold Cross by Hitler has been discovered living in Marbella on the Costa del Sol in Spain
Fredrik Jensen, 93, served in a number of SS units during the Second World War, including the SS Panzer-Grenadier der Fuhrer, SS-Panzer-Division -Das Reich, the Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 9 Germania and the Panzer-Division Wiking.
He fought on the front line, which earned him the rare accolade of being one of the few foreigne
Source: NYT
Jun 5, 2007
JERUSALEM, June 4 — Dig nearly anywhere in this city, and you hit the remains of an earlier civilization. One of the latest such finds is a narrow strip of antiquity that runs down the middle of a main road through what is now Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in north Jerusalem.
Soon, it will be covered by tracks for a light railway, part of a new mass transit system for the city. Both the history being unearthed and the planning under way are filled with the kind of controversy
Source: The Australian
Jun 5, 2007
Sitting in court today before a Yale-educated black judge, James Ford Seale, 71, was a long way from the banks of the Mississippi where, 43 years ago, he is alleged to have tortured and drowned two black teenagers.As the prosecution laid out in appalling detail Mr Seale’s alleged crimes, he faced photographs of the teenagers on a computer screen and a white lawyer very different from the local sheriff – and fellow Ku Klux Klansman – who dropped the charges against him in 196
Source: Telegraph
Jun 5, 2007
A soldier's account of life during the Battle of the Somme will be put up for auction this month after his diaries surfaced in a descendant's basement.
The unpublished journals of Sgt Hubert Harding, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, run through the First World War from April 1915 until 1919 and describe how he risked his life on an almost daily basis at Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge and Cambrai.
On the first day of the Somme offensive, July 1, 1916 - a day
Source: Australian
Jun 5, 2007
A POLISH woman who for 60 years had been holding onto the diary of a young Jewish girl killed by the Nazis in 1943, presented the journal to Israel's Holocaust memorial overnight.
"I have a feeling that I'm writing for the last time. There is a (round-up) in town. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house," 14-year-old Rutka Laskier wrote while living in a Jewish ghetto in Bedzin, Poland on February 20, 1943.
Laskier hid her dia
Source: NYT
Jun 5, 2007
Given all the sobering things that have happened since the turn of the millennium — from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration’s efforts to expand executive power and curtail civil liberties — the sex and real estate follies of the Clinton White House now feel as if they belong to an era long ago and far, far away. Indeed, Carl Bernstein’s new biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton often feels like a very long, very slow acid flashback to the 1990s, rehashing a
Source: AP
Jun 4, 2007
Egypt has refused to allow Portugal to feature its ancient Pyramids of Giza on postage stamps the European country wants to issue coinciding with a global contest to name the seven new wonders of the world.
Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the pyramids, which date back more than 4,000 years, would not be shown on any stamps.
"The council totally rejects any attempt to put the pyramids, the wonder of world wonders and the only wo
Source: Oxford Mail
Jun 4, 2007
Archaeologists from Oxford have discovered what are thought to be the oldest examples of human decorations in the world.
The international team of archaeologists, led by Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, have found shell beads believed to be 82,000 years old from a limestone cave in Morocco.
Source: LiveScience
Jun 4, 2007
Which came first–the chicken or the European?
Popular history, and a familiar rhyme about Christopher Columbus, holds that Europeans made contact with the Americas in 1492, with some arguing that the explorer and his crew were the first outsiders to reach the New World.
But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, resear
