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: Wa Po
Feb 22, 2006
For 350 years, coal-black ravens have wandered freely around the Tower of London's grassy inner courtyard as cawing barometers of the monarchy's vitality -- if the ravens ever die or leave the tower, the legend goes, the tower and the kingdom will fall.
Now the fear of bird flu has done what Luftwaffe bombings, blizzards, assassinations and abdications could not, forcing the ravens to be moved inside in isolation for their own safety and to hedge Britain's bets on the future of the
Source: NYT
Feb 22, 2006
It isn't often that Washington generates a memorial structure simultaneously with the era it happens to exemplify. But the dollar-devouring construction pit known as the Capitol Visitors Center deserves a more candid title. The Big Debt Dig, perhaps, as the center's cost overruns mount apace with the egregious mass of deficit, debt and interest run-ups that will mark the larger budget folly of the Bush era for generations to come. The latest word on the center, t
Source: The Post (New Zealand)
Feb 22, 2006
Nazi war criminals could be hiding out in New Zealand, says a leading war crime researcher with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
Dr Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre's Israeli office, is disappointed New Zealand authorities did so little to prosecute suspects he had named in 1990."New Zealand set up a police unit to investigate the problem and decided not to proceed with any form of legal action.
"Unlike the other Anglo-Saxon Western demo
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Feb 22, 2006
Russia's struggle to confront one of the most controversial episodes of its Communist past took a fresh twist yesterday after prosecutors rejected an application to formally exonerate Nicholas II, the country's last czar.The refusal to issue an official rehabilitation decree for the czar and his family, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918, comes after a two-month investigation by prosecutors who said they did not find evidence that the killings were officially
Source: English People's Daily Online
Feb 21, 2006
Chinese archaeologists said that parts of an instrument to make fire, dating back to 8,000 years ago, have been found in east China's Zhejiang Province. The relics, made of bones and wood, were discovered at the Kuahuqiao Relics Site in Xiaoshan, Zhejiang Province, according to Qianjiang Evening News.
Liu Zhiqing, a retired professor from Zhejiang University, was quoted by the newspaper as saying that the relics were part of an instrument to drill w
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 21, 2006
America and Germany are in dispute over the fate of a vast trove of Holocaust archives yet to be seen by historians or the general public.The documents are one of the world's largest collections of Nazi-era papers, and include files on more than 17 million people. The archive is kept at Bad Arolsen in Germany by the International Tracing Service (ITS), a branch of the international committee of the Red Cross established to help families find out what happened to their relati
Source: Times (UK)
Feb 21, 2006
A WAR GRAVE found near Chester has helped to locate the earliest firmly identified battlefield site in England. About 120 corpses, many with horrendous wounds, can be attributed by radiocarbon dating and historical records to the Battle of Chester in AD 616, when the Venerable Bede records that King Aethelfrith of Northumbria defeated a scratch army accompanied by many monks from the nearby monastery at Bangor-on-Dee.
Source: The Australian
Feb 21, 2006
A 17TH-CENTURY death mask claimed to be that of British playwright William Shakespeare could be genuine, according to new research. The mask, discovered in a ragpicker's shop in 1842 and now owned by the German city of Darmstadt, has long been a subject of controversy.
It bears the high forehead and prominent nose and beard associated with the Bard and bears the inscription "+ Ao Dm 1616", apparently meaning "Died Anno Domini 1616", the year
Source: BBC
Feb 21, 2006
An Israeli lawyer, Ervin Shahar, says he has asked Germany to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with denying the Holocaust.Mr Ahmadinejad was widely criticised when he said last year that the Holocaust was a "myth" and that Israel should be "wiped off the map".
Germany passed a law in 1993 forbidding Holocaust denial. It is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World
Source: AP
Feb 21, 2006
Three former makers of lead paint created a public nuisance that continues to poison children, a jury decided Wednesday in the state's landmark lawsuit against the companies.The verdict means the companies that once made lead paint and pigment could be held responsible for millions of dollars in cleanup and mitigation costs, though the state never put a dollar value on its lawsuit.
Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein will decide later how much, if anything,
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Feb 21, 2006
Since the 1970s, Mr. Miller, 48, of Laurel, Md., has pored over books, soldiers' letters and regimental histories for insect references. He found that mosquitoes, body lice and flies were a constant nuisance to Union and Confederate soldiers. Roughly 60,000 soldiers died from malaria on the Union side alone, he said."I think the beauty of looking at the insects is it's a topic that we all can relate to," he said. "Few of us can relate to combat."
Source: Der Spiegel
Feb 21, 2006
Tucked in a small town in central Germany is the world's biggest archive on the fate of millions of Holocaust victims and Nazi era slave laborers. The United States and historians are calling for it to be opened up for research, but claim Germany is refusing to do just that.Germany has vigorously denied that it is obstructing efforts to give historians access to the world's largest archive on the Nazi concentration camp network and the victims of the Holocaust. A spokeswoman
Source: Baltimore Jewish Times
Feb 21, 2006
Schalva Chaimovich Mamistvalov is one of those proud older Soviet men -- and, sometimes, women -- who for big occasions will don the dark blazer upon which they've pinned a chestful of medals for World War II heroics. Mamistvalov is one of a rare breed: a Jew apologetic, even nostalgic, for the iron-fisted ways of Stalin. This sentiment is particularly strong among the Jews of Gori, where worship of the man born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili permeates the entire city.At
Source: The Times (London)
Feb 21, 2006
A repentant soldier who helped interrogate prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma Death Railway wants to make the bridge on the River Kwai a UNESCO World Heritage site.Takashi Nagase, a teacher who has spent the past 60 years attempting to atone for what he and the Japanese Imperial Army did during the Second World War, spent his 88th birthday yesterday arguing that the United Nations should pay homage to those who died working on the bridge.
More than 16,000 Allied
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Feb 21, 2006
DAVID IRVING, the controversial historian, was jailed for three years in Austria yesterday after pleading guilty to charges of denying the Holocaust 17 years ago. "I'm shocked and I will be appealing,'' he said as he was led from a Vienna court by armed police.Irving turned red when the sentence was delivered and told the judge that he had not understood.
During the 10-hour trial he apologised for his "mistakes'' and "errors of judgment'' in
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2006
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to
Source: post-gazette.com
Feb 20, 2006
WHEELING, W.Va. -- On a corner near what was once this city's bustling transportation center is a landscaped lot of about 1.5 acres that civic officials hope can be transformed into a major tourist attraction.But before the tourists who flock to Oglebay Park and the massive Cabela's outdoors store nearby can be persuaded to visit it in downtown Wheeling, millions of dollars will have to be raised for the proposed attraction -- a National Civil War Memorial.
Source: BBC
Feb 20, 2006
The trial of the British historian David Irving has unleashed a debate in Austria about the country's Holocaust denial law, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.The law was enacted after World War II, and was meant to prevent any further Nazi activities.
Austria had been annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938, and was deeply involved in the crimes of the Third Reich.
A few Austrians, such as Lothar Hobelt,
an associate professor
Source: Salon
Feb 20, 2006
Last August in Tahlequah, Okla., Lucy Allen appeared before the Judicial Appeals Tribunal, a three-person court that hears constitutional questions in the Cherokee Nation. Allen is suing to become a Cherokee citizen. Born in Vinita, Okla., within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, she is far from your typical Indian wannabe. She is attempting to overturn a 1987 Cherokee law that makes the descendants of these slaves ineligible for Cherokee citizenship.Depending on the Tr
Source: Press Release -- David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Feb 20, 2006
As reported in today's New York Times, more than seventy leading journalists and journalism professors (see below) have signed a letter urging the Newspaper Association of America to acknowledge the failure of American journalists to aid German Jewish refugee journalists who were trying to flee Hitler in the 1930s.The letter was initiated by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and former New York Times reporter Laurence Zuckerman. It has also been repor
