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: AP
Jun 18, 2013
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungarian prosecutors indicted a 98-year-old former police officer Tuesday for abusing Jews and assisting in their deportation to Nazi death camps during World War II.They said Laszlo Csatary was the chief of an internment camp for 12,000 Jews at a brick factory in Kosice – a Slovak city then part of Hungary – in May 1944, and that he beat them with his bare hands and a dog whip.He also allegedly refused to allow ventilation holes to be cut into the walls of a railcar crammed with 80 Jews being deported.With his actions, Csatary "willfully assisted in the unlawful execution and torture of the Jews deported from (Kosice) to concentration camps in territories occupied by the Germans," the prosecution said in a statement....
Source: NYT
Jun 17, 2013
SERRAVAL, France — As a European proposal to bolster digital privacy safeguards faces intense lobbying from Silicon Valley and other powerful groups in Brussels, an obscure but committed group has joined in the campaign to keep personal data flourishing online.One of the European Union’s measures would grant Internet users a “right to be forgotten,” letting them delete damaging references to themselves in search engines, or drunken party photos from social networks. But a group of French archivists, the people whose job it is to keep society’s records, is asking: What about our collective right to keep a record even of some things that others might prefer to forget?The archivists and their counteroffensive might seem out of step, as concern grows about American surveillance of Internet traffic around the world. But the archivists say the right to be forgotten, as it has become known, could complicate the collection and digitization of mundane public documents — birth reports, death notices, real estate transactions and the like — that form a first draft of history....
Source: NYT
Jun 17, 2013
BERLIN — The German president recalls it as an electrifying moment. One of Berlin’s most resplendent avenues is named simply the “Street of June 17” in remembrance. But the heady, short-lived uprising by hundreds of thousands of East Germans 60 years ago on Monday has never lived in history as the more famous anti-Communist revolts that followed — in Hungary and Poland in 1956, in Prague in 1968 and in Poland again in 1980-81.Joachim Gauck, the first Easterner to be president of the reunited Germany, was 13 at the time, living in the Baltic port of Rostock, he told Parliament in a quietly emotional speech on Friday. “But I remember very clearly the sense of euphoria that the dockworkers were on strike,” Mr. Gauck said. “I was sure that something new was under way.”It took 36 more years before East Germans rose up en masse again, and the Berlin Wall fell. And now, almost 24 years after that, Mr. Gauck sits in Bellevue Palace, and Angela Merkel, another Easterner, in the Chancellery. So commemorations of the 60th anniversary were infused not just by Germans’ penchant for marking round dates but also by a sense of putting the 1953 uprising on more of a pedestal....
Source: WaPo
Jun 17, 2013
Senior North Korean officials received copies of “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler’s rambling prison memoir, as gifts for Kim Jong Un’s birthday this January, according to a report by New Focus International, a North Korean news organization that sources from defectors and volunteer citizens within the country.The famous Nazi autobiography was reportedly distributed as what’s called a “hundred-copy book,” which refers to Pyongyang’s practice of circulating an extremely limited number of copies among top officials, though most books are forbidden in North Korea. Gifts marking the leader’s birthday are typically imbued with special political significance.The book was apparently not distributed to endorse Nazism so much as to draw attention to Germany’s economic and military reconstruction after World War One. A North Korean who works on behalf of the country in China told New Focus that Kim gave a speech endorsing Germany’s inter-war revival and encouraging officials to read “Mein Kampf.”...
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Jun 17, 2013
Bruce Lee has been memorialized with a seven-foot bronze statue in L.A.'s Chinatown.The statue of the late actor and martial arts expert was unveiled Saturday to a crowd of several hundred people in historic Central Plaza, according to the Los Angeles Times....
Source: Detroit Free Press
Jun 17, 2013
FAIRPORT, MICH. — Commercial fisherman Larry Barbeau’s comings and goings usually don’t create much of a stir in this wind-swept Lake Michigan outpost, but in the past few days, his phone jangles the minute he arrives home.Barbeau’s 46-foot boat is the offshore nerve center for an expedition seeking the underwater grave of the Griffin, the first ship of European design to traverse the upper Great Lakes. Built on orders of legendary French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle, it ventured from Niagara Falls to Lake Michigan’s Green Bay but disappeared during its return in 1679.Divers this weekend opened a pit at the base of a wooden beam that juts nearly 11 feet from the lake bottom, believing it could be a section of the vessel, the rest presumably entombed in mud. They picked up the pace Monday with more powerful equipment after a weekend of probing showed that whatever is buried is deeper than sonar readings indicated....
Source: BBC News
Jun 17, 2013
New details have emerged about the air crash on 27 March 1968 that killed Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space.Fellow cosmonaut Alexey Leonov claims an "unauthorised" plane flew too close to Gagarin's fighter jet, sending it into a spin.Gagarin and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin died when their MiG-15 went down near the town of Novoselovo, about 90km from Moscow.Secrecy surrounding the crash has led to vigorous speculation down the years....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jun 16, 2013
Spying on visiting foreign dignitaries is a longstanding habit not only of the British, but of many other countries as well. Most embassies in foreign capitals are designed with windowless safe rooms, on the assumption that their host country will be doing its best to monitor all their communications.In 1985, the British government obtained injunctions attempting to gag the Guardian and Observer after they published disclosures by the renegade MI5 officer Peter Wright of wholesale British bugging. He and his colleagues had "bugged and burgled their way across London", during the cold war, he said.He disclosed that MI5 bugged all diplomatic conferences at Lancaster House in London throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the Zimbabwe independence negotiations in 1979....
Source: BBC News
Jun 16, 2013
Napoleonic semaphore was the world's first telegraph network, carrying messages across 18th Century France faster than ever before. Now a group of enthusiastic amateurs are reviving the ingenious system.Before the web, before the computer, before the phone, even before Morse code, there was le systeme Chappe. Not for the first time or for the last, at the end of the 18th Century France made an important technological advance - only to see it overtaken by newer science.In this case, it was the world's first ever system of telegraphy.According to most accounts, the very word "telegraph" - distance writing, in Greek - was coined to describe Claude Chappe's nationwide network of semaphore....
Source: Toronto Star
Jun 15, 2013
A Sarnia couple who set out to build a fence dug up more than they bargained for recently when they unearthed a 400-year-old skeleton and got stuck with a $5,000 bill from the province.The archeological misadventure began two weeks ago when Ken Campbell came across some bones while digging post holes in their backyard.He put them aside, thinking they must have belonged to an animal. The following week, his wife, Nicole Sauve, asked about the bones, which sat unceremoniously atop a bucket of earth“I said, ‘They’re not animal bones, Ken. Let’s dig some more and see what we can find,’ ”she said....
Source: BBC News
Jun 14, 2013
A peace treaty sealed in Runnymede in 1215, signalling the end of a conflict between King John and barons who were in revolt, has once again got passions running high in Surrey.Events are being organised across the world to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta - in the UK, the US, Australia, France, Spain and Trinidad.But a debate is raging on what to do in the place where the charter- hailed by some as the foundation of English democracy - was sealed....
Source: Israel National News
Jun 13, 2013
Brig. Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Pundak is celebrating his hundredth birthday. Pundak was the commander of the 53rd Battalion of the Givati Brigade in the War of Independence and went on to supervise the establishment of the Armored Corps. He was also Ambassador in Tanzania and a founder of Arad.In an interview on IDF Radio, Pundak confirmed that forces under his command razed Arab villages in 1948. “My conscience is at ease with that, because if we hadn't done so, then there would be no state by now. There would be a million more Arabs,” he said.Asked why he still finds it so important to lecture to soldiers, at his advanced age, he explained: "Just like in 1948, the country is in a state of danger – and if the Jews do not fight as we did in the War of Independence, the state is in danger.” He predicted that if a war breaks out again, Jews will be capable of the same kind of self-sacrifice as in 1948....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jun 13, 2013
An administration under fire over covert wiretapping, whistleblowers hailed as heroes and lambasted as traitors, a president's reputation on the line … You could be excused for detecting a whiff of Nixon-era sulphur in the US political atmosphere these days. With the trial of Bradley Manning, the Department of Justice's pursuit of journalists who use national-security sources and, of course, Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA data harvesting filling the headlines, state-sanctioned subterfuge and divisive whistleblowing dominate US politics more than at any time since the days of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.
Source: Irish Times
Jun 13, 2013
Did you know Ireland has the highest concentration of men with the R1b DNA marker? No fewer than 84 per cent of all Irish men carry this on their Y chromosome....“The high prevalence rates have always perplexed Irish geneticists and historians,” says Alastair Moffat of IrelandsDNA. The firm’s research proposes a new hypothesis. There is already established evidence suggesting that the first farmers, (carrying the Y chromosome lineage of ‘G’, which can be found across Europe) arrived in Kerry about 4,350BC.According to IrelandsDNA, the so called ‘G-Men’ may have established farming in Ireland “but their successful culture was almost obliterated by what amounted to an invasion, even a genocide, some time around 2,500BC” (the frequency of G in Ireland is now only 1.5 per cent). “There’s a cemetery in Treille [France], where ancient DNA testing has been carried out and almost all men carry the ‘G’ marker but the women don’t,” says Moffat. They carry native/indigenous markers. This strongly suggests incoming groups of men. Because the R1b marker is still so prevalent in Ireland and is also frequently found in places like France and northern Spain we believed that around 2,500 BC, the R1b marker arrived in Ireland from the south.”...
Source: WaPo
Jun 13, 2013
OSWIECIM, Poland —For decades, the Communist-era memorial to Jewish victims at the barracks known as Block 27 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex of death camps stood dilapidated and mostly ignored.“No one visited. They opened the doors, that was it,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s vast and authoritative Holocaust memorial museum and research center.Key artifacts had gone missing. The history presented in the signage was inaccurate, at best, and dominated by Soviet propaganda....
Source: Irish Times
Jun 13, 2013
What would Kaiser Bill say? Nearly a century after marching into a world war that ended in defeat and Wilhelm II’s abdication, Germany has begun rebuilding the Prussian palace in Berlin vacated in 1918 and demolished in 1950.German president Joachim Gauck yesterday laid the foundation stone for the palace 2.0, dubbed the Humboldt Forum and planned as a museum for non-European art. Berlin’s original palace expanded over the centuries, reflecting the rise of the ruling Hohenzollern family and Prussia. Like Prussia, however, the ruined palace vanished after the war – dynamited by East Berlin as an unwelcome symbol of German imperialism. They used the site as a parade ground and later for its own parliament complex, the Palace of the Republic.Following German unification a decade of debate over the site ended with a 2002 Bundestag vote to demolish the East German structure and rebuild the Prussian palace....
Source: Science News
Jun 12, 2013
Contrary to their hunting reputation, Stone Age Siberians killed mammoths only every few years when they needed tusks for toolmaking, a new study finds.People living between roughly 33,500 and 31,500 years ago hunted the animals mainly for ivory, say paleontologist Pavel Nikolskiy and archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hunting could not have driven mammoths to extinction, the researchers report June 5 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.On frigid tundra with few trees, mammoth tusks substituted for wood as a raw material for tools, they propose. Siberian people ate mammoth meat after hunts, but food was not their primary goal....
Source: Fox News
Jun 12, 2013
In most countries, construction workers uncover faulty pipes, old mason work and heaps of garbage when excavating a plot of land for a new building.In El Salvador, they find Mayan relics.Working on a housing project in Colón – about 15 miles from the capital of San Salvador – construction workers unearthed Mayan pots, ceramic fragments and other artifacts.Pieces of obsidian and part of a human skeleton, which may also be from the Mayan period, were found on the site after specialists arrived to survey the site. The area around Colón is believed to be one of the riches archeological areas of the Central American country, Julio Alvarado, a technician for El Salvador’s Culture Ministry told Agence France Presse....
Source: UPI
Jun 12, 2013
The group conducting a search for Amelia Earhart's plane strongly denied charges they had found the aircraft in 2010 and hid it from donors.Timothy Mellon, the son of philanthropist Paul Mellon and a major contributor to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery sued the group on June 3, alleging TIGHAR found the famed airplane in a 2010 expedition, then hid the news so it could keep fundraising.Mellon donated $1 million that helped fund the 2012 expedition that may have indeed turned up the long-awaited evidence of Earhart's plane.Ric Gillespie, the executive director of TIGHAR, called the lawsuit frivolous....
Source: Irish Times
Jun 12, 2013
UCD history professor Diarmaid Ferriter said plans to remove history as a compulsory subject under the new junior cycle programme were “very worrying for the future”.Would the student “be equipped to analyse effectively the present?”, he said as part of a History Teachers’ Association of Ireland delegation speaking to the Oireachtas education committee today.The Association expressed “grave concern” at the removal of their subject as compulsory under the new junior cycle programme. History “may not be offered” at junior level and “does not have to be offered under the statements of learning,” Association president Gerard Hanlon said referring to the criteria to be met under the planned junior cycle programme which is to change history from 2017.
