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: BBC
May 27, 2011
The National Museum of Computing has finished restoring a Tunny machine - a key part of Allied code-cracking during World War II.Tunny machines helped to unscramble Allied interceptions of the encrypted orders Hitler sent to his generals.The rebuild was completed even though almost no circuit diagrams or parts of the original machines survived.Intelligence gathered via code-cracking at Bletchley underpinned the success of Allied operations to end WWII. ....
Source: BBC
May 27, 2011
Before his assassination on a dark highway on 30 May 1961, the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ruled with an iron fist for almost 30 years. Tim Mansel meets one of the men who shot him.Rafael Trujillo's rule is considered one of the most brutal periods in the history of the Dominican Republic. Taking power in 1930, his hold over the country was absolute. He brooked no opposition.
Source: Fox News
May 27, 2011
NEW YORK – The first Civil War casualty to be buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was a 12-year-old drummer for a New York regiment.Clarence McKenzie, a local boy fatally wounded in an accidental shooting in Maryland, was buried June 14, 1861, two months after the Union garrison at Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate forces. He was followed to the grave 12 days later by Adolph Vincens, a 23-year-old London-born jeweler who was the first Civil War battle casualty buried at Green-Wood.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 27, 2011
Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime general, is fit to be extradited to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague and has until Monday to appeal, a judge at a special Serbian war crimes court has said."Mladic's lawyer was delivered the extradition papers and he has until Monday to appeal," judge Maja Kovacevic said.He said Mladic had been examined by a medical commission "which has determined he is fit for further proceedings".
Source: BBC News
May 27, 2011
The US Congress has voted to renew three expiring provisions of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act which increase surveillance powers.The four-year extension was approved in the Senate just hours before the deadline at midnight (0400 GMT).The bill was then sent to the House of Representatives, where it passed by a 250-153 vote.The Patriot Act was brought in under President George W Bush in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.US President Barack Obama is now due to ratify the bill, officials said.
Source: Forbes
May 26, 2011
Since the day of Alexander Hamilton, the United States has never defaulted on the federal debt.That’s what we budget-watchers always say. It’s a great talking point. One that helps bolster the argument that default should not be an option in Washington’s ongoing debt limit slowdown.There’s just one teensy problem: it isn’t true. As Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the United States defaulted on some Treasury bills in 1979. And it paid a steep price for stiffing bondholders.Terry Zivney and Richard Marcus describe the default in The Financial Review (sorry, I can’t find an ungated version):
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 26, 2011
Witness statements taken by a British policemen 67 years ago following a Nazi wartime atrocity have helped convict three former German soldiers of multiple murder.Sgt Charles Edmonson's papers relating to the war crime were sold by an auction house last year to a Chinese collector but Italian prosecutors managed to track them down and use them in their court case.The chilling account led to life sentences for three former Nazi soldiers - captain Ernst Pistor, 91, Marshall Fritz Jauss, 94, and Sergeant Johan Robert Riss, 88.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 26, 2011
The three ex-soldiers were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment after the military tribunal in Rome ruled that they bore responsibility for the murder of 184 civilians, including infants, children and old people, in the village of Padule di Fucecchio in Tuscany.They were convicted, in part, on the basis of evidence gathered by a British military policeman, Sgt Charles Edmonson, of Stoke-on-Trent, who was determined to bring the culprits to trial.
Source: WaPo
May 26, 2011
Rinderpest, a cattle disease that for centuries felled herds in Europe, Africa and Asia and caused periodic human famine, has been eradicated, veterinary epidemiologists announced this week.Eradication is the Holy Grail of disease prevention and has been successful only once before. Smallpox, an equally devastating human scourge, was eradicated in 1980, proving it is possible to stamp out a microbe across the entire planet. Attempts are underway to rid the world of polio and Guinea worm disease.
Source: National Security Archive
May 26, 2011
Washington, D.C., May 26, 2011 - The U.S. government secretly helped France develop its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, and much earlier than previously realized, according to declassified documents compiled and edited by National Security Archive senior analyst William Burr and published jointly with the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, an Archive partner.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 26, 2011
The Austrian town where incest monster Josef Fritzl lived has revoked the honorary citizenship of Adolf Hitler.The town council of Amstetten, 95 miles from Vienna, approved the motion in a bid to banish its ties to the Nazis ahead of its 900-year anniversary.It comes just three weeks after the council approved plans to tear down Fritzl's house of horrors.Mayor Herbert Katzengruber said the decision to declare the title 'null and void' was approved by a large majority in the chamber.
Source: Guardian (UK)
May 26, 2011
New research suggests number of Nazis and collaborators who used travel documents meant for genuine refugees was much higher than previously thought.The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to a new book that pulls together evidence from previously unpublished documents.
Source: NewsCore
May 26, 2011
A German hotel that was once a notorious Nazi jail organizes "prison parties" complete with striped T-shirts and ferocious guards, Der Spiegel reported Thursday.Hotel Stadt Hameln, a four-star hotel in the northern city of Hamelin made famous by the Pied Piper legend, charges guest $62 to attend the parties.Guests, who wear black and white prison uniforms, are even forced to stand to attention when they ask guards for permission to use the restroom, the report said....
Source: LiveScience
May 26, 2011
Bizarre shrimp-like monsters that were the world's largest predators for millions of years grew even larger and survived much longer than thought, scientists find.
Source: CNN
May 26, 2011
It is now remembered as the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.In a five-day orgy of slaughter at Srebrenica in July 1995, up to 8,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated in what was described at the U.N. war crimes tribunal as "the triumph of evil."Former Bosnian Serb commander-in-chief General Ratko Mladic, who is accused of direct involvement in the genocide at Srebrenica, was arrested on Thursday after more than 15 years on the run.In 1995, Srebrenica was designated a U.N. "safe area."
Source: BBC News
May 26, 2011
A homeless street preacher who kidnapped a 14-year-old girl in the US state of Utah in 2002 has been ordered to spend life in prison.Elizabeth Smart, who was held captive for nine months by Brian David Mitchell, looked on as he was sentenced in a federal court in Salt Lake City."I know that you know what you did is wrong," Ms Smart told Mitchell.Mitchell was found guilty in December of abduction and the transportation of a minor across state lines for sex.
Source: BBC News
May 26, 2011
Barack Obama has completed his three-day state visit to the UK. But how did it compare with the last state visit by a US president, when George Bush came to the country eight years ago in 2003?
Source: BBC News
May 26, 2011
In the recent row over injunctions and Twitter, the analogy of King Canute vainly holding back the tide has constantly been used. But is it correct?"Who does he think he is - King Canute?" blasted one newspaper. A prominent media lawyer, Mark Stephens, said that by "trying to stop the unstoppable tide of information as it flows through the internet, [Ryan Giggs] has become the King Canute of football".
Source: BBC News
May 26, 2011
International reaction after former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic was arrested 15 years after his indictment for war crimes:FRENCH PRESIDENT NICOLAS SARKOZY"It is very good news and it is a very courageous decision by the Serbian president. It is one more step towards Serbia's integration one day into the European Union."
Source: BBC News
May 26, 2011
Ratko Mladic, wanted for genocide during the Bosnian war in the 1990s, has been arrested in Serbia.Serbian President Boris Tadic said the process to extradite the former Bosnian Serb army chief to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was under way.Gen Mladic, 69, was found in a village in northern Serbia where had been living under an assumed name.He faces charges over the massacre of at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
