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: Los Angeles Times
Mar 31, 2007
The Census Bureau turned over confidential information, including names and addresses, to help the U.S. government identify individual Japanese Americans during World War II, according to government documents released by two scholars Friday...
In 2000, the Census Bureau acknowledged and apologized for its role in sharing aggregate data with the U.S. military to help relocate Japanese Americans from the West Coast to inland camps after Japan's 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.
B
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 31, 2007
NANJING, China -- Lei Guiying is slight and stooped with age. She is poor and illiterate. But the 79-year-old Chinese peasant says she knows that Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, was wrong this month to deny that the Imperial Army coerced women into army-run brothels during the Second World War.
She was barely 13 when she was raped by a Japanese soldier and, for the next two years, forced to work in a Japanese-run brothel on the edge of the southern city of Nanjing.
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 31, 2007
HEATHROW -- A landmark image for millions of travellers disappeared when the British Airways Concorde model was removed from the gateway to Heathrow Airport.
BA decided not to renew the £1.5 million annual rent to advertise at the airport’s entrance.
Emirates Airlines has signed a six-year deal for the site. The Concorde will be replaced by a model of a double-deck Airbus A380 superjumbo.
Source: AP
Mar 31, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Hispanic groups unhappy with an upcoming Ken Burns documentary on World War II are stepping up pressure on PBS because they say the series omits mention of the role Latinos played in the war.
The latest group to take their grievance to PBS is the American GI Forum, [which] is appealing to Hispanic veterans and other Latino groups to write members of Congress and their local PBS affiliates about the documentary,"The War," which has been six years in the making...the 14-hour Burns
Source: China View
Mar 30, 2007
SHIJIAZHUANG, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists working in Shexian county in north China's Hebei province have discovered a group of 800-year-old tombs from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).
Archaeologists with the Hebei provincial cultural relic research institute say that the tomb group, which covers an area of 2,600 square meters, comprises 17 tombs.
Source: Slate
Mar 30, 2007
Welcome to Memoir Week at Slate. Over the next three days, our critics will be weighing in on new memoirs. What has been most striking to us at Slate is how many memoirs these days are anything but coming-of-age stories; instead, they tackle issues and subjects larger than the self. Elizabeth Rubin and Mike Vazquez dissect the story of Ishmael Beah, who became a child soldier in Sierra Leone at the age of 12. Ann Hulbert looks at two memoirs about autism and asks why autism has become a metaphor
Source: LAT
Mar 30, 2007
Josef Stalin is speaking to his son Yakov, who has just telephoned to say that he will soon head off to battle the Nazi invaders.
"I sometimes was not fair to you. Forgive me. I devoted little time to you," the Soviet dictator apologizes. "Son, go and fight. This is your duty." He then switches to Georgian, the language of his childhood, and adds with even greater feeling: "If you have to die, do it with dignity. And you must be confident that your father, S
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2007
DETROIT —- A federal judge has revoked the citizenship of an 85-year-old Michigan man after finding that he shot Jews as a member of a Nazi police unit.
U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani ruled Thursday that John Kalymon, of Troy, served as a member of the Nazi-operated Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during World War II in the city of Lviv.
Kalymon's unit rounded up Jews, imprisoned them in a ghetto, oversaw forced labor, killed those attempting to escape, and delivere
Source: Scientific American Science News
Mar 30, 2007
Do you sometimes have memories of a mysterious past life? Recall odd experiences such as being abducted by aliens? Wonder where these memories come from and if, in fact, you were really once whisked off in a flying saucer by ETs?
Seems the answer may be simpler than you think—or remember. A new study shows that people with memories of past lives are more likely than others to misremember the source of any given piece of information.
Study author Maarten Peters of Maastr
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Mar 30, 2007
NEW YORK -- In the historic Great Hall of Ellis Island, where 12 million immigrants once trudged through to build a nation, top government officials Friday tried to recharge a campaign to solve the modern dilemmas of immigration.
Bush administration security officials, including Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar, along with an historian, demographer, economist and former officials grappled with the biggest problem: what to do with another 12 million people -- the estimated number of
Source: Daijiworld (Mangalore, India)
Mar 30, 2007
PANAJI, Goa, India -- Scientists from Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) have found stunning artifacts off the Gujarat coast, near Dwarka island, which development focuses on Indian civilization's ties with Roman civilization more than two thousand years back.
"During the excavation, we found artefacts which are dating 3,500 years back which indicates that India's maritime history is much-much older and Indians used to travel by sea even before Vasco da Gama tou
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2007
MEXICO CITY -- Archaeologists in Mexico City announced plans Friday to hold tours of inaccessible buried ruins via glass-covered shafts looking down on the sites.
Two daylong guided tours of the sites, known as "archaeological windows," are scheduled for April, and will take visitors to about 20 sites currently open to the public, as well as 20 more "windows" hidden beneath stairwells, floors and patios of buildings normally not open to the public.
T
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2007
LIMA, Peru -- A village near Peru's famed Machu Picchu ruins has built a bridge over the turbulent Vilcanota River, opening a cheap backdoor route for adventurous, cash-strapped backpackers.
The bridge was inaugurated Saturday in the village of Santa Teresa despite the objections of government cultural experts, who fear increased tourism could threaten the UNESCO World Heritage site as hostels and restaurants spring up to serve travelers.
They also say increased tourism
Source: Guardian
Mar 30, 2007
Ancient history will disappear as an A-level [in the UK education system] if recommendations from an examination board are approved later this year.
The OCR board announced today it proposed to abolish the qualification as part of its plans to reorganise its four classics A-levels.
The exam board wants to replace its four existing classics subjects -- ancient history, classical civilisation, Greek and Latin -- with new models.
Ancient history will disappear
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2007
BERLIN -- A leading retailer said Friday that it will pay $117.5 million to compensate a Jewish family for real estate that was taken by the Nazis and eventually resold to the German firm.
The Jewish Claims Conference said it will use an unspecified amount of the money from KarstadtQuelle AG to fund programs for Holocaust victims, and give the rest to heirs of the Wertheim family, which was been seeking compensation for 15 years.
The Wertheims once ran a grand departmen
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- Twenty-five years after hostilities ceased, Argentina is opening a new front in the Falklands War.
Rather than jets and mortar rounds, however, this salvo involves diplomats appealing for help at the United Nations and the government reasserting long-standing claims to the island chain where far more sheep than people huddle against the forbidding South Atlantic winds.
London, however, maintains its hold on the island, which Argentina invaded 25 years ag
Source: Reuters
Mar 30, 2007
CAIRO -- Egypt sent an archaeological team to France on Thursday to retrieve 3,200-year-old strands of hair from the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II, who presided over an era of great military expansion in Egypt, state media said.
The existence of the hair came to light last year when some of the strands were offered for sale on the Internet for between 2,000 and 2,500 euros ($2,668 and $3,336), in addition to tiny pieces of resin and embalmed cloth taken from the mummy.
The
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2007
PHILADELPHIA -- Paid tour guides on public property would have to pass history tests and be certified under a new bill introduced in City Council, drawing objections from some tourism groups and praise from history buffs.
Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown said the bill she introduced Thursday, like measures in Williamsburg, Va., and Savannah, Ga., would require certification and require the city to offer a study guide or class.
Source: USA Today
Mar 30, 2007
The news that no national ceremonies are planned once the last of three World War I veterans has died prompted the National World War I Museum on Thursday to make plans for a national tribute.
“It would really be a shame if we didn’t do something,” said retired Marine Gen. Steve Berkheiser, who heads the museum in Kansas City, Mo. Two of the remaining five U.S. veterans of that war died this week...
[Charlotte Winters, 109, of Boonsboro, Md., died Tuesday and Lloyd Brow
Source: Discovery News
Mar 30, 2007
The Vatican is expected to announce its decision to keep some fragments of the Parthenon housed in the Vatican Museums, dashing Greek hopes that the artifacts would be returned to their homeland, according to the Italian press...
The horsemen, deities and other creatures — carved by Phidias in the 5th century B.C. -— are scattered throughout several European museums, including the Louvre in Paris. But most of the marbles are kept in London's British Museum.
Greece has
