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: Times Online (UK)
Jul 14, 2006
PRIVATE handwritten notes by the man who led the hunt for Jack the Ripper naming the chief suspect were given to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum yesterday.
Chief Inspector Donald Swanson kept quiet for years but in retirement, frustrated that the murderer had escaped justice, could not resist scribbling notes in the margin of his boss’s memoirs, naming the man that they both believed had become the world’s most famous serial killer.
The m
Source: scotsman
Jul 14, 2006
His face is one of the best known in the art world, and as the Netherlands celebrates the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth, his life and work retain few secrets. But did you know he was once a Nazi icon?
An exhibition at the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam recalls the Nazis' largely forgotten mission to incorporate the Dutch painter into fascist ideology, and win sympathy in the Netherlands, which they occupied in 1940.
Source: Gettysburg Times
Jul 14, 2006
Another round of rehabilitative tree cuts are scheduled to commence next week at Gettysburg National Military Park — the biggest parcel to be axed, Park Service officials say, comprises about 50 acres adjacent to West Confederate Avenue. The rehabilitation project, which officially began during the summer of 2000, relates to GNMP’s ongoing initiative of reshaping prominent battlefield portions to their 1863 Civil War appearances.In the 143 years since the Battle of Gettysbur
Source: The Independent
Jul 14, 2006
Seventy years on from the start of the Spanish Civil War, Madrid is trying to come to terms with its past by rescuing - and making public - millions of documents from around the world that help shed light on one of the darkest periods in its history. As the country prepares to remember the beginning of the war next week, the government has published an array of diplomatic reports, personal letters, documentary films and secret police files held in 12 countries including Britain, Russia, France,
Source: The Independent
Jul 14, 2006
A couple of handwritten sentences in the margins of a book are claimed to have solved Britain's greatest murder mystery: the identity of Jack the Ripper. The notes, written more than 80 years ago by the detective leading the hunt for the serial killer, name a Polish barber called Aaron Kosminski as the chief suspect for the multiple murders.
The Metropolitan Police officer wrote that Kosminski was identified as the Ripper by a witness but because the suspect was insane he could not
Source: The Guardian
Jul 14, 2006
Like Wittgenstein, Sukru Haluk Akalin thinks the limits of your language are the limits of your world. Head of the Turkish Language Institute, Turkey's state-run language watchdog, Akalin has announced bold plans to ban sexist expressions from a dictionary of proverbs soon due for publication. "Women are society's most valuable individuals," he says. "By excluding expressions that demean them, we are showing young people the way."
Unsurprisingly in a country wher
Source: The Courier Mail
Jul 14, 2006
The United Nations has agreed to rename Auschwitz concentration camp to stress that Nazi Germans, not Poles, were responsible for the world's most notorious death camp.
Poland's Culture Ministry said on Wednesday that ''Auschwitz Concentration Camp'' would be renamed ''the Former Nazi German Concentration Camp of Auschwitz''.Poland asked the UN in April to rename Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were executed or worked to death during Worl
Source: NYT
Jul 13, 2006
The far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is headed to court for injudicious comments he made last year about the Nazis’ wartime activities in France. The trial will decide whether he is guilty of “complicity in contesting crimes against humanity and complicity in justifying war crimes” by telling a right-wing weekly magazine last year that “in France, at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, although there were some blunders, inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilomete
Source: CBC
Jul 13, 2006
A mint-condition First Folio edition of William Shakespeare's collected plays fetched nearly $6 million at a British auction on Thursday.A mint-condition First Folio edition of William Shakespeare's collected plays fetched nearly $6 million at a British auction on Thursday.
"This is the Holy Grail in terms of printed books," Peter Selley, the English literature specialist for the auction house Sotheby's, told CBC News.
"Certainly in t
Source: HNN summary of an article in Pressbox
Jul 13, 2006
Pressbox.co.uk reports that "A group which stubbornly refuses to identify itself is launching the world's first survey of the attitudes of academic historians to Holocaust revisionism." Holocaust deniers appear to be behind the survey. A spokesperson told Pressbox: 'We read daily in our newspapers and online news sources about Holocaust revisionists being arrested, put on trial or imprisoned for their views, and we get told a lot how very awful these people are and so on, but no one s
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Jul 13, 2006
The bones of Farinelli, the castrato whose voice thrilled the courts of 18th century Europe, were dug up yesterday in an attempt by scientists to discover more about the man, and thousands of others castrated to help their singing.
Researchers including David Howard, of the University of York, and Nicholas Clapton, of the Royal Academy of Music, want to know what anatomical effects castration had on the legion of young boys who underwent the process in order to become opera stars.
Source: NYT
Jul 13, 2006
This is how the 2005 edition of “A History of the United States,” a high school history textbook by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, relates the cataclysmic attacks of 9/11 for a new generation of young adults:
“In New York City, the impact of the fully fueled jets caused the twin towers to burst into flames. The fires led to the catastrophic collapse of both 110-story buildings as well as other buildings in the area. The numbers of p
Source: Wa Po
Jul 12, 2006
Pungo, Va., may have to come up with some other historical tidbit as its claim to fame. The Witch of Pungo -- who supposedly accursed Tidewater farms in the 17th and 18th centuries -- has been cleared of all charges, namely that she was ever a witch.
On Monday, 300 years after Grace Sherwood was convicted at a trial that saw her thrown into the Lynnhaven River with her thumbs tied to her feet, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine pardoned her. The rules of the trial were simple: If you floated, yo
Source: NYT
Jul 12, 2006
The National Park Service plans to move the Hamilton Grange National Memorial from Convent Avenue and 141st Street, where it is so boxed in by neighboring buildings that two of its porches had to be cut off, to St. Nicholas Park, about 300 feet to the southeast.
There, it can be reassembled in a form that Hamilton would have recognized, with porches — and trees — all around.
Designed by John McComb Jr., an architect of City Hall, the Grange was the seat of a 32-acre Ma
Source: Times Online (UK)
Jul 12, 2006
A LOST masterpiece by Rubens that inspired many of his greatest hunting scenes has been sold to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The Calydonian Boar Hunt, painted in 1611 or 1612 and for years mistakenly attributed to a follower of Rubens, surfaced at the Paris auctioneers Jean-Marc Delvaux. Instead of its estimate of €10,000 (£7,000) it sold to an unknown buyer for more than €300,000 — at which point other bidders started to realise its true provenance.
That figure p
Source: The Independent (UK)
Jul 12, 2006
President Jacques Chirac will attempt today to close a controversy which has divided France for more than a century - the case of the jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of spying for the Germans in 1894. In a "national ceremony" described by the Elysée Palace as " a great moment in history", M. Chirac will make a speech to mark the centenary of the final acquittal of Captain Dreyfus on 12 July 1906.
The speech will take plac
Source: Summary in the Chronicle of Higher Ed of an article in Political Psychology
Jul 12, 2006
President Bush is definitely intelligent, but his IQ is "below average" when compared to that of his 41 predecessors, according to a new study by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis.
Using statistical methods to translate several personality traits associated with intelligence, Mr. Simonton has compiled IQ estimates for every American president. General acuity is a crucial measure of a leader's performance, he says, but
Source: Common Dreams
Jul 12, 2006
The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union today released new documents that indicate the government is broadly interpreting and using a controversial Patriot Act power known as the "ideological exclusion" provision to block people from entering the country. The ACLU is concerned that the provision is increasingly being used to target foreign scholars and others whose politics the government disfavors. Among those who are being blocked from entry is Dr.
Source: BBC
Jul 12, 2006
He was a war hero - but his family say he was abandoned by his country and left to die in the murky waters of Portsmouth Harbour.
Lionel "Buster" Crabb vanished while spying on Soviet warships visiting the city at the height of the Cold War.
The frogman's fate has remained one of the country's most closely-guarded secrets, but the BBC has obtained the report into his final mission on 19 April, 1956.
The secret document was the subject of a Freedom Of
Source: History Today
Jul 11, 2006
English Heritage has released its annual Buildings at Risk Register listing the nation’s most vulnerable Grade l and Grade ll* properties and Scheduled Ancient Monuments most urgently in need attention and renovation. The list is a working tool by which the degree of degeneration of a building can be assessed and the necessary resources required to bring it back into good repair and beneficial use, established. It also serves to prioritise action taken by English Heritage, building preservation
