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: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 8, 2010
A 91-year-old Dutch Jew who fought the Nazis in World War II has marked his bar mitzvah – the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony – almost 80 years late.
Hans De Leeuw says he was "shaking" during the service – usually meant for 13-year-olds – at Jerusalem's Western Wall on Sunday....
Source: NY Daily News
Nov 7, 2010
Brooklyn sisters Ruth and Toni Usherenko were young children when Nazi storm troopers burst into their Berlin home 72 years ago, stting fire to their belongings and beating them brutally.
Ruth was struck on her back with billy-clubs and Toni still has the scar on her forehead from being pushed down the stairs by Nazi agents on Nov. 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, "the night of broken glass."
"I cannot forget, never," said Ruth, 80, who lives in Brig
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 7, 2010
A Spitfire soaring majestically into the sky has been selected as the winning design for a national memorial to the wartime aircraft.
The design by Nick Hancock, an architect, was chosen from hundreds of entries in a public contest, backed by The Sunday Telegraph, to create a permanent tribute to the Spitfire in Southampton, the city where it was designed and first built.
Mr Hancock, 36, who has a studio in north London, said he was "over the moon" after lear
Source: WTOP
Nov 7, 2010
A war is being waged on two fronts to save two pieces of the Wilderness Battlefield from being lost forever.
This Civil War battlefield straddles Spotsylvania and Orange counties in Virginia. It's where Civil War giants Grant and Lee clashed for the first time. Now there's a modern day clash - Walmart versus concerned citizens.
The battle will play out in court in January. A lawsuit was filed to stop Walmart from building a superstore on land that an expert says was par
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2010
FRANKFURT — German soldiers, including one wearing a skullcap with his uniform, filed silently through a leaf-covered cemetery in Frankfurt on Sunday to lay wreaths at a memorial for 467 Jewish soldiers killed fighting for the kaiser during World War I.
The memorial, the first public service at the site for as long as anyone can remember, was organized by the Association of Jewish Soldiers, a small but growing group in the German military whose existence testifies to the feeling by
Source: BBC
Nov 7, 2010
A former squadron leader who flew agents of the Special Operations Executive into Nazi-held Europe is to be guest of honour at the opening of a new museum to the Resistance in France.
Wing Commander Leonard Ratcliffe, 91, is the last surviving squadron leader who led secret wartime missions to drop SOE agents into occupied Europe.
Operating from RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire and under cover of darkness, he took part in more than 70 operations behind enemy lines.
Source: BBC
Nov 7, 2010
A gigantic statue of Jesus - claimed to be the world's tallest - has been erected in a western Polish town.
Christ the King in Swiebodzin rises 33m (108ft) - one metre for every year that Jesus lived, said Sylwester Zawadzki, the priest who created the statue.
But other local officials said the statue was 51m-high (167ft), if one included a mound it sat on and the golden crown on the head.
They said it was higher than famous Christ figures in Bolivia and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 7, 2010
George W Bush will on Monday begin a media blitz that will thrust him back into the lives of Americans after two years of near silent retirement.
The former US president campaign to rehabilitate his reputation in multiple interviews and television appearances to publicise the memoir, which is published this week both in the US and UK.
He will be on screens and the airwaves every day for a week, conducting interviews with giants of American broadcasting such as Oprah W
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2010
...Republicans now hold at least 93 of the 131 House seats from the states of the old Confederacy. Less than 20 years ago they did not even hold half. With the defeat of long-serving fiscally conservative Blue Dogs like Representatives Gene Taylor of Mississippi and John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, Southern white Democrats in Congress have become as rare as a Dixie blizzard....
Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University and a co-author of “The Rise of Southe
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2010
NEW DELHI — Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the great Indian apostle of peace, democracy and nonviolent protest, Mohandas K. Gandhi....
Yet if paying homage to Gandhi is expected of visiting dignitaries, Mr. Obama’s more personal identification with the Gandhi
Source: Reuters
Nov 7, 2010
ROME (Reuters) - Archaeologists, commentators and opposition politicians accused Italy's government of neglect and mismanagement on Sunday over the collapse the 2,000-year-old "House of the Gladiators" in the ruins of ancient Pompeii.
Some commentators said the UNESCO World Heritage site should be privatized and removed from state control because the government had shown it was incapable of protecting it.
"Pompeii -- the collapse of shame," La Stampa
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2010
When the hip-hop star Kanye West says he can “connect with” George W. Bush, perhaps it is time to think about whether America has begun to reconsider its 43rd president.
It was Mr. West, after all, who delivered one of the harshest attacks on Mr. Bush during his eight years in office. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Mr. West memorably charged that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
After learning last week that Mr. Bush considered that the l
Source: Scotsman
Nov 6, 2010
No-one will ever know who the man who fell at the Seelow Heights outside of Berlin was. Denied an honourable burial as five million men of the Red Army marched on the Nazi capital in 1945, he was disinterred last month to be plundered of his papers and army insignia.
He fell victim the first time to a Soviet shell blast; the second to vultures who are at work plundering the graves of fallen warriors like him for money.
Thousands of German and Russian corpses recovered f
Source: The Sun (UK)
Nov 5, 2010
AT first glance it looks like any tatty old lampshade - the sort that are gathering dust in houses all over the world.
Then you notice the weird, parchment-like fabric stretched over eight panels, so thin it is almost translucent.
On closer inspection the yellowy material is marked with strange pores, filaments and patterns which look disturbingly like one thing only - HUMAN SKIN....
The lamp's owner Mark Jacobson said: "It weighs about a pound. But th
Source: AP
Nov 5, 2010
Below Slovenia's cornfields, ski slopes and school yards lie skulls, bones and teeth — the remains of thousands of people whose fates have been lost for decades.
In 1945, enraged anti-Nazi fighters slaughtered suspected collaborators, fascists and panicked civilians who tried to flee through the region to the West, leaving graves scattered from a spree of vengeance that turned the tiny country into what historians call the biggest post-WWII killing site in Europe.
Slove
Source: The Canadian Press
Nov 5, 2010
WASHINGTON — The National Park Service is marking the election of president Abraham Lincoln's election 150 years ago at the start of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
Groups in Kentucky and at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, Ill., will recreate the election on the exact anniversary Saturday....
Source: MSNBC
Nov 5, 2010
Britain's enigmatic "headless Romans" lost their heads far away from home, according to a multi-isotopic analysis of the 1,800-year-old skeletal remains.
Unearthed between 2004 and 2005 in a cemetery in York, England, the remains belong to 80 individuals, almost all males, who died violently at ages ranging between 19 and 45.
At least 46 of them had been carefully decapitated, with their heads placed by or between their legs or pelvis.
Believed b
Source: b92.net
Nov 5, 2010
Croatian President Ivo Josipović has stated that he did apologize for the Serb victims in Paulin Dvor near Osijek and that some media were "twisting the facts".
Commenting on reports that he, unlike Serbian President Boris Tadić, did not apologize for the victims, Josipović said he was glad that such media were few.
“I think they weren’t listening carefully, watch the recording again,” he added.
The Croatian president
Source: Canada.com
Nov 5, 2010
A 400-year-old book described as "the first written history of Canada" — and adorned with one of the earliest and most treasured maps of the country — is to be sold this month at a British auction of rare volumes and historic manuscripts.
The 1612 edition of French adventurer Marc Lescarbot's Histoire de la Nouvelle France — the appearance of which outraged fellow Frenchman Samuel de Champlain, the famed explorer who had planned to be first to publish a history of the New
Source: Newsweek
Nov 5, 2010
Celebrity worship reflects a primal need that’s been present since the Babylonians: to elevate people to the status of mythic heroes, only to destroy them. “It suits us when … fame comes at a price,” Payne writes. Or as the Greeks put it, the only place to go from the top of Fortune’s Wheel is down. Achilles, hero of the Trojan War, had to choose between a long, anonymous life or a short, glorious one. There’s no middle ground: a hero must either “go out in a blaze of glory or else disappoint us
