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: The Daily Telegraph
Apr 12, 2006
THE president of Austria has become the country's first head of state to admit that a large number of its citizens welcomed Adolf Hitler with open arms when the dictator annexed the country.
Heinz Fischer said that a "not inconsiderable portion of the population'' greeted the Anschluss or annexation in 1938 with "euphoria'', despite knowing that "Hitler meant war''. In addition many had celebrated Hitler's initial military successes, he said.
Surveys show
Source: The Baltimore Sun
Apr 12, 2006
One of the last remnants of the southeastern Baltimore County battlefield where American troops fought off British invaders in the War of 1812 is in line to be preserved.
Next month, the state Board of Public Works is expected to approve the purchase of nearly 9 acres of undeveloped land on North Point Road near Trappe Road, where British and American troops met in 1814 for the Battle of North Point.The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit land preservation
Source: Reuters
Apr 12, 2006
Japan's envoy to Hong Kong said on Wednesday it was inappropriate to make solving thorny historical issues a precondition to improving Sino-Japanese ties, and hoped Chinese textbooks could give Japan a more balanced treatment. Japanese Consul-General Takanori Kitamura also said China's economic might and fast-growing military expenditures posed big question for Beijing and others in the region.
"We need to handle the history issue carefully, but I find it i
Source: Netscape News
Apr 12, 2006
This month Mexico's government will present a report on an era of government brutality from the 1960s to the 1980s, based on investigations two dozen sociologists, anthropologists, historians and rights experts.They fanned out across the country during the past few years to take testimony, visit mass graves and pore over long-secret papers. Their report will be Mexico's first public document of its kind.
Dirty war prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo says it will detail
Source: National Security Archive
Apr 11, 2006
The National Archives
and Records Administration secretly agreed to a covert
effort, led by the Air Force, the CIA, and other still-
hidden intelligence entities, to remove open-shelf
archival records and reclassify them while disguising
the results so that researchers would not complain,
according to a previously secret Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU). The secret agreement, made between
the Air Force and the National Archives, was
declassified pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act
Source: scotsman.com
Apr 11, 2006
COST-CUTTING plans to close museums and galleries in Glasgow have been dropped after a local property developer donated more than quarter of a million to help keep them open.
In February, local officials decided that, as of mid-April, seven of Glasgow's biggest museums and galleries would have to close on Monday, partly as a cost-saving measure and to fund a scheme to give all Glasgow school pupils at least one museum visit and theatre experience every year.
Source: BBC
Apr 11, 2006
Teenagers in east London are forming their own brand of English and pushing out traditional Cockney slang, according to language experts.
A study by Sue Fox, from London's Queen Mary's College, found words such as "nang" - meaning good - were commonly used by youths in inner London.
Ms Fox said this "Multicultural London English" was influenced by a variety of languages such as Bengali.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 11, 2006
The University of Missouri’s School of Law is trying to award an honorary degree to a black man whom it rejected in the days of legal segregation but whose victory in a U.S. Supreme Court case paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education. According to the Associated Press, Lloyd Gaines will receive an honorary degree, to right a 70-year-old injustice, if the university can find a way to bypass a rule forbidding the awarding of such degrees posthumously.
Source: Seattle PI
Apr 11, 2006
VISOKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Restaurants serving meals in triangle-shaped plates. Artisans crafting wooden key-chains in the shape of pyramids. Shopkeepers hawking T-shirts saying "I have a pyramid in my backyard."
Pyramid-mania has taken hold of this small Bosnian town as residents seek to cash in on claims by an archaeologist that it may host Europe's only ancient pyramid.
"Our expectation are high. This could be our oil well," Vehab Halilovic, wh
Source: Port Folio Weekly
Apr 11, 2006
"In her previous life, she was a warrior," proclaims a Mariner’s Museum ad. "Now she’s an icon." A second poster reads, "Umbrella drinks and shuffleboard on the lido deck? Hardly."
The catchy phrases are part of the museum’s new national marketing campaign for the USS Monitor Center, a $30 million project scheduled for opening March 9, 2007 — one hundred forty five years after the Civil War ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia battled each other in Ha
Source: AP
Apr 11, 2006
Any father of a headstrong 14-year-old girl
might recognize the words:"Just leave me alone, if you don't want me to
stop trusting you for good." The furious letter from Anne Frank to her
father, Otto, was written nearly two years after the Frank family locked
itself into a concealed apartment to escape deportation by the Nazi army
occupying the Netherlands.
Never displayed before, the two-page letter in Anne's careful script is
part of an exhibition of letters, postcards and fa
Source: The Guardian
Apr 11, 2006
More than three decades after the last commemoration of the 1916 Easter Uprising, the Republic of Ireland is again preparing to mark the pivotal moment in its history. Commemorative stamps are being issued. There will be fly-pasts by the air corps and the Proclamation, declaring the nation's independence from Britain, will be read outside the General Post Office on Dublin's O'Connell Street. Even the British ambassador, Stewart Eldon, has signalled his intention to attend.
Ninetieth
Source: The Gazette
Apr 11, 2006
In Algeria, the good news is that citizens no longer live in fear of being butchered by Islamist militants at makeshift roadblocks, or of being "disappeared" by hooded policemen who break down their front doors. The national treasury, heavily indebted a decade ago, is awash with petrodollars.
You might expect these trends to auger more openness and democracy. But after turning the corner on a conflict between government forces and Islamist rebels that since 1992 claimed mo
Source: The Daily Telegraph (Australia)
Apr 11, 2006
The first bodies of the Knights Templar, the mysterious religious order at the heart of The Da Vinci Code, have been found by archaeologists near the River Jordan in northern Israel.British historian Tom Asbridge yesterday hailed the find as the first provable example of actual Knights Templar.
The remains were found beneath the ruined walls of Jacob's Ford, an overthrown castle dating back to the Crusades, which had been lost for centuries.
They ca
Source: Yahoo News
Apr 11, 2006
The National Archives agreed to seal previously public CIA and Pentagon records and to keep silent about U.S. intelligence's role in the reclassification, according to an agreement released under the Freedom of Information Act.The 2002 agreement, requested three years ago by The Associated Press and released this week, shows archivists were concerned about reclassifying previously available documents — many of them more than 50 years old — but nonetheless agreed to keep mum.
Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Apr 11, 2006
International controversy has erupted over a request by Poland to officially specify that the death camp Auschwitz was built and run during the Second World War by Nazi Germany. The most notorious of Nazi death camps which claimed the lives of as many as 1.5 million people, most of them European Jews, is currently officially called the "Auschwitz Concentration Camp."
The Polish government's request to UNESCO for the name of the World Heritage Site to b
Source: The Advertiser (Australia)
Apr 11, 2006
A NEW Zealand war hero broke international rules of combat by killing German soldiers in World War II while disguised as a Nazi, according to a newspaper report about a new book.
Alfred Clive Hulme was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest British and New Zealand bravery award, for his actions in the 1941 Battle of Crete, where he killed 33 German snipers and other soldiers while dressed in a German paratrooper's smock, historian Glyn Harper writes in his book, In the Face of the
Source: LAT
Apr 11, 2006
As the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace readies itself for a shift into federal hands, the National Archives announced Monday that it had selected a Cold War historian and expert on presidential recordings as the library's first federal director.
Timothy Naftali will oversee the controversial library's metamorphosis into a federal institution, which is expected to house a vast archive of material from the Nixon White House that the federal government has for years refused to t
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Apr 11, 2006
THE prune's contribution to Allied victory over Nazi Germany has hitherto been passed over by historians, but all that is set to change. An extraordinary collection of materials used to help prisoners of war and French Resistance fighters in occupied Europe is to go under the hammer later this month. It includes two prunes of the original thousands used by the Special Operations Executive, Churchill's secret army of undercover agents, to smuggle miniature documents into PoW camps.
T
Source: Slate & frontpagemag.com
Apr 11, 2006
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlie
