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: NYT
Jan 27, 2011
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s first officially sanctioned commemoration of the Holocaust was held in a synagogue here on Thursday, reflecting government efforts to assuage the Jewish minority in the face of increasingly strained ties with Israel. But the event was overshadowed by the scheduled premiere on Friday of the latest installment in a series of popular Turkish-made adventure films that depict Israelis as evil.
“Gathering in love, brotherhood and humanity should be our common language
Source: NYT
Jan 27, 2011
SANTIAGO, Chile — A Chilean judge has opened the first official investigation into the death of former President Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist who died during the 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Mr. Allende, 65, was found dead by the military forces that stormed the presidential palace after hours of a gun battle and bombings. At the time, an autopsy suggested that Mr. Allende had killed himself. But many of his supporters have contended for
Source: CNN
Jan 27, 2011
The Manhattan district attorney announced Thursday new indictments against Rodney Alcala, the so-called "Dating Game Killer," in connection with the deaths of two women in New York during the 1970s.
Alcala, 67, is currently on death row in California for killing four women and a 12-year-old girl there. He was convicted of those crimes in February 2010 and sentenced the following month.
The California murders took place between November 1977 and June 1979 and c
Source: CNN
Jan 27, 2011
A Pennsylvania high school says some students are separated by race, gender and language for a few minutes each day in an effort to boost academic scores, raising controversy over the historically contentious issue of segregation in schools.
The initiative is a pilot program intended to capitalize on "enriching students' experiences through mentoring" and is derived from school research "that shows grouping black students by gender with a strong role model can help bo
Source: AP
Jan 27, 2011
...The ancient gods and fantastical creatures going on show in Berlin this week have made an unlikely comeback from near-destruction.
Unearthed in present-day Syria a century ago, the 3,000-year-old basalt statues and stone reliefs in the exhibition, "The Tell Halaf Adventure," shattered into thousands of pieces when their Berlin home was destroyed by bombing in 1943.
The rubble was rescued, then slumbered in the vaults of the capital's Pergamon Museum, then i
Source: The Boston Globe
Jan 27, 2011
For years it has been buried, swallowed up by layers of earth, muck, and water, a once-prominent landmark concealed by time.
And the late-1700s wharf might have remained that way — embedded for the ages — had it not been for a recent accidental find.
Last June, as workers excavated portions of Newburyport’s Water Street for the city’s new waste-water operations building, they unearthed large, centuries-old slabs of granite. Based on maps and archaeological research, the
Source: BBC
Jan 27, 2011
JD Salinger was a fan of tennis player Tim Henman and enjoyed eating burgers, previously unseen letters written by the Catcher in the Rye author show.
Despite his reputation as a literary recluse, the collection - on display at University of East Anglia - shows he also enjoyed trips to Niagara Falls.
It consists of 50 letters and four postcards written to the late Donald Hartog, from London, from 1986 to 2002.
They are being displayed to mark the first anni
Source: BBC
Jan 27, 2011
Modern humans may have emerged from Africa up to 50,000 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.
Researchers have uncovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula that they say were made by modern humans about 125,000 years ago.
The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science.
The results are controversial: genetic data strongly points to an exodus from Africa 60,000-70,000
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
Europe's Roma will be represented for the first time at Germany's official Holocaust memorial ceremony, almost seven decades after up to half a million members of the community were exterminated in Nazi death camps.
Dutch born Zoni Weisz, a Roma Holocaust survivor, will address Germany's Bundestag on Thursday, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. Germany marks the day with official memorial ceremonies for Holoca
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
Google has partnered with Israel’s Yad Vashem museum, to help digitise the largest collection of Holocaust photos and documents in the world, to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The search giant is working with the Jerusalem-based archive to properly index and store in Google’s cloud 130,000 photographs, some of which are currently available on Yad Vashem’s website, but until now have been difficult to locate and discover online.
Google is also applying t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
Former South African President Nelson Mandela was hospitalised overnight for routine medical tests, reigniting fears over the health of the frail 92-year-old anti-apartheid campaigner.
Mandela was admitted to a Johannesburg hospital on Wednesday for what his foundation described as routine tests but Talk Radio 702 reported that Mandela had been seen by a specialist pulmonologist, who treats respiratory systems.
Several of Mandela's family members, including his wife G
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
British troops in Iraq were denied resources because Tony Blair’s cabinet could not accept that the country was at war, the former head of the Armed Forces has said.
Admiral Lord Boyce suggested that ministers were unhappy about the decision to topple Saddam Hussein and as a result were unable to take on the responsibility for funding the conflict properly.
Giving evidence before the Iraq Inquiry, Lord Boyce singled out Gordon Brown, the then-chancellor, for criticism
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
Apple has removed a Nazi Party anthem from the German version of its iTunes online music store, a spokesman for the US firm has said.
The marching song "Horst Wessel Lied," named after a young party activist killed in 1930, was the unofficial anthem of the Nazis.
The availability of Nazi anthems on iTunes and internet retalier Amazon was first reported by the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung daily on Wednesday.
Apple's iTunes store also sold son
Source: Fox News
Jan 27, 2011
Holocaust survivors often refer to the "banality of evil" when describing how remarkably ordinary even the highest-ranking Nazis seemed after their capture for aiding the mass murder of more than 6 million Jews during World War II.
At a gathering for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, Rafi Eitan looks like any other aging great-uncle: hearing aids, thick glasses, and a gray sweater under his blazer. Hi
Source: Fox News
Jan 27, 2011
Usually famous Hollywood stars and athletes get piles upon piles of fan mail, but a former Hitler bodyguard?
Rochus Misch, the 93-year-old former bodyguard of Adolf Hitler, says he can no longer respond to the deluge of fan mail he receives from around the world, according to Reuters.
Misch previously would send fans autographed copies of wartime photos of him in his SS uniform....
Source: National Parks Traveler
Jan 27, 2011
Artifacts associated with famous people and events are important visual connections to the past, and one of them—the coat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford's Theatre on the night of his assassination—is returning to the Theatre for public display. Where has it been?
The answer is found in one of the dilemmas facing curators and managers responsible for historical objects: What's more important, maximum protection for artifacts or public access?
In the case of the Lincoln ove
Source: CNN
Jan 27, 2011
Hidden in a basement in central Tel Aviv, amidst the smell of sawdust and varnish, is a musical workshop whose owner and son have spent the last 15 years tracking down violins played by Jewish Holocaust victims and bringing the instruments back to life.
"The Germans confiscated from the Jewish people every violin, viola, cello they could and we are talking about thousands, gone with the wind," said Amnon Weinstein, working amongst the dozens of violins and bows hanging fro
Source: BBC News
Jan 27, 2011
The first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust remembrance day ceremony has said his people face new threats.
Zoni Weisz told German MPs that Roma in western Europe again faced discrimination and were living "in inhumane conditions in ghettos".
The Dutch-born speaker is the sole survivor of a family killed in 1944.
He was speaking on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops in 1945.
Source: BBC News
Jan 27, 2011
It was an audacious double-cross that fooled the Nazis and shortened World War II. Now a document, here published for the first time, reveals the crucial role played by Britain's code-breaking experts in the 1944 invasion of France.
All the ingredients of a gripping spy thriller are there - intrigue, espionage, lies and black propaganda.
An elaborate British wartime plot succeeded in convincing Hitler that the Allies were about to stage the bulk of the D-Day landings in
Source: NYT
Jan 27, 2011
CARPINTERIA, Calif. — The last time Barnaby Conrad saw Sinclair Lewis, three years after he served as Lewis’s personal secretary, they were at a bar in Paris and, by Mr. Conrad’s account, Lewis was thoroughly drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t chastise his former secretary for failing to execute a book idea that Lewis had handed him one morning at breakfast: a novel based on the conceit that John Wilkes Booth had escaped capture after assassinating Lincoln and had embarked on a secret life
