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: National Geographic News
Jan 26, 2007
Archaeologists say they have unearthed Lupercale—the sacred cave where, according to legend, a she-wolf nursed the twin founders of Rome and where the city itself was born.
The long-lost underground chamber was found beneath the remains of Emperor Augustus' palace on the Palatine, a 230-foot-tall (70-meter-tall) hill in the center of the city.
Archaeologists from the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Rome Municipality came across the 50-foot-deep (15-meter-deep) ca
Source: Reuters
Jan 26, 2007
The U.N. General Assembly condemned on Friday denials of the Holocaust in a U.S.-drafted resolution responding to a Tehran conference dominated by speakers questioning the extermination of 6 million Jews in World War Two.
The measure, co-sponsored by more than 100 countries, including all Western nations as well as Rwanda, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, was approved by consensus, without a vote. Iran disassociated itself from the action, calling the resolution a political exercise Is
Source: AP
Jan 26, 2007
OSWIECIM, Poland -- As they do on every anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, witnesses to the Holocaust will gather Saturday -- growing older, frailer and fewer each year. After 62 years, the camp itself is also showing signs of aging under the pressures of tourism and time.
Its new director is searching for ways to preserve vital evidence of Nazi crimes and update the exhibits without chipping away at Auschwitz's authenticity -- or giving fodder for Holocaus
Source: The Independent
Jan 26, 2007
It was thought to be one of the most romantic love affairs in the history of Spanish art, but the liaison between the rough and ready genius Francisco de Goya and the beautiful, capricious Duchess of Alba, the grandest grandee in Spain, has now been described as an "urban legend".
According to a new book by Manuela Mena, a Goya specialist at the Prado museum, in Madrid, the social gulf between the two was never bridged. "It was an inequality he tried to overcome, but
Source: The Guardian
Jan 26, 2007
From the Holocaust to 9/11, from Berlin to New York, the world is now studded with memorials to human suffering. But does this really mean we care more than we used to? And does our obsession with terrible events make it any less likely that we will repeat them? [The Guardian's] Jonathan Jones joins the strange new tourist trail...
Source: St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press
Jan 26, 2007
MADISON — Wisconsin lawmakers on Thursday proposed requiring schools to teach about the Hmong people, saying suspicion of the community could be eased by an understanding of their past as U.S. allies in the Vietnam War.
The bill, backed by a group of state Assembly Democrats, is identical to one proposed in April 2005 that died when lawmakers adjourned last year. Sponsors said racial tensions rekindled by this month's homicide of a Hmong hunter could build support for passage this y
Source: CBC
Jan 26, 2007
Ken Milburn knows he could have sold a pair of boxing gloves that once belonged to late heavyweight champion Joe Louis for a princely sum. But the Windsor man wanted to see this piece of American cultural and political history preserved in what he saw as the proper place — Washington's Smithsonian Institution.The gloves, worn by Louis in his first fight with German Max Schmeling in 1936, have been in Milburn's family since then. And he wasn't going to sell them.
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 26, 2007
German prosecutors in Mannheim demanded a five-year jail sentence Friday for one of the most high-profile figures in the Holocaust denial movement, Ernst Zündel, in closing arguments at his trial. As one of the most famous Holocaust deniers goes on trial in Germany, the EU takes steps to criminalize denying the Shoah.Zündel, a 67-year-old German citizen, stands accused of inciting racial hatred for disputing the historical fact that Nazi Germany systematically slaughtered si
Source: Telegraph
Jan 26, 2007
A Nazi storm trooper has arranged to have his ashes scattered in Scotland where he was a prisoner of war.
Heinrich Steinmeyer was a 20-year-old grenadier in the Waffen SS when he was captured in Normandy and taken to a prison camp in Perthshire in 1944.
He spent the last months of the war incarcerated with 4,000 others at the Cultybraggan camp near Comrie. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, was kept there after he crash-landed in Scotland, and the ringleaders of a 1944 plot
Source: Telegraph
Jan 26, 2007
In life, the only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge kept her light under a bushel, dying at 49 with her work largely unknown. Now, 150 years on, she is emerging as a considerable poet in her own right.
A British academic has discovered 120 unknown poems by Sara Coleridge at a university in Texas which, he says, rank her as a significant poet.
Though Dr Peter Swaab does not make extravagent claims for the Lake Poet's daughter – he ranks her as "an important minor
Source: UPI
Jan 26, 2007
TOKYO -- A Japanese director plans a documentary blaming Chinese propaganda for reports that 200,000 people were slaughtered in Nanking during World War II.
Satoru Mizushima, director and producer of "Nanking No Shinjitsu," or "The Truth About Nanking," announced his project Thursday at a news conference in Tokyo. About 40 people, including two members of parliament, academics and film critics, came to the announcement to give him their support, the Japan Times r
Source: Reuters
Jan 26, 2007
VIENNA -- The Congress of Vienna famously re-drew the map of the world in 1815 to suit the major powers bidding farewell to the Napoleonic era.
This Friday the Austrian capital will host the beginnings of a 21st century diplomatic carve-up, without swords and feathered hats and on a far more modest scale, to bury the disastrous era of Slobodan Milosevic and the last vestige of Yugoslavia.
The state created in 1918 is no more. Slovenia and Macedonia walked off in 1991. C
Source: AP
Jan 26, 2007
NEW YORK -- A rare Nazi-era race car hidden in a German mine shaft during World War II and said to be worth millions of dollars went on display Thursday.
The sleek silver D-Type from Audi forerunner Auto Union was to be on display for two days at the car company's fancy showroom on Park Avenue. It will be auctioned as part of Christie's Retromobile auto sale on Feb. 17 in Paris and is expected to fetch $12 million to $15 million.
While Adolph Hitler gave about 500,000 r
Source: AP
Jan 26, 2007
TOKYO -- Japan must overhaul its pacifist constitution, beef up its role in international security and free itself of the political remnants of World War II, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Parliament on Friday.
"Now is the time for us to boldly revise this postwar regime and make a new start," he told Parliament, which opened Thursday for a five-month session.
Abe's constitutional revision plan is focused on eliminating a clause in the current document, writte
Source: Times Education Supplement
Jan 26, 2007
Lessons on the two world wars, the Holocaust, slavery, and the British Empire will be compulsory under a new [UK] curriculum published next month, The [Times Education Supplement] can reveal.
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority officials have denied reports of a row with the Government over the content for 11 to 14-year-olds. But the extra emphasis given to the world wars and slavery in the latest drafts has followed public ministerial pressure.
The authority warned
Source: Nature
Jan 25, 2007
The Allianoi archaeological site could soon be under water if authorities carry out their plans to flood a newly constructed reservoir. Located in western Turkey, the site is a well-preserved example of an ancient Roman health spa.
Archaeologist Ahmet Yaras, head of the Allianoi excavation team, is spearheading a campaign to save the site from being submerged. They are trying to rally international support to pressure the authorities to move the reservoir — or at least delay the fl
Source: The Guardian
Jan 25, 2007
China has reacted angrily to plans by Japanese nationalists to make a documentary describing as a myth the massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in 1937...
"We have seen the reports," said Jiang Yu, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman.
"I think that there is irrefutable evidence for the Nanjing massacre, and international society has long ago come to a conclusion about it. Japan's taking of a correct and responsible atti
Source: AP
Jan 25, 2007
A 2,500-year-old city influenced by the Olmecs – often referred to as the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica – has been discovered hundreds of miles away from the Olmecs' Gulf coast territory, archaeologists said.
The remains of Zazacatla are providing insight into the early arrival of advanced civilizations in central Mexico, while also providing lessons about the risks to ruins posed by modern development that now cover much of the ancient city.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jan 25, 2007
PHNOM PENH -- The Cambodian judges were on one side and the foreign judges on the other this week in a dispute that captures a decade of difficulties in bringing to trial the last surviving leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge.
If they cannot agree on procedural rules soon, analysts and officials at the tribunal say, some foreign judges could walk out, casting a further shadow over a process that some critics say is already so compromised as to be of doubtful value.
Sev
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jan 25, 2007
ROME -- From his window, as a boy in October 1943, Pacifico Disegni watched as two German trucks hauled people from the ghetto in Rome, a city where Jews have lived for 2,000 years.
Last year, in blessedly more peaceful times, a rich visitor from Boston took in the view from that same window. A magnificent front-row onto the Theater of Marcellus, first planned by Julius Caesar, somehow salves the stings of history. Disegni, now 78, said the visitor produced a blank check and offered
