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: Spiegel Online
Sep 27, 2010
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West Germans were desperate to prevent the Stasi's top codebreakers from falling into the wrong hands and set up a company to hire the East German cryptographers. Now the former Stasi scientists develop technology used by Angela Merkel and NATO.
Every morning, while going to his office in Berlin's Adlershof district, Ralph W. passes a reminder of his own past, a small museum that occupies a room on the ground floor of the building. The museum c
Source: Mediaite
Sep 27, 2010
After controversially declaring last April as Confederate History Month Virginia’s Republican governor Bob McDonnell has decided to cancel the event for next April.
McDonnell made his announcement at a conference titled “Race, Slavery, and the Civil War,” which was being held at Norfolk State University.
“Slavery was an evil and inhumane practice that reduced people to property,” the first-term governor informed his audience at the historically black college. “It left a
Source: Fox News
Sep 27, 2010
The USS Emmons served the United States proudly through World War II, right up until April 6, 1945, when it was attacked by five kamikaze pilots off the coast of Okinawa. One day later, the U.S. Navy sank the destroyer to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Japanese.
The bodies of 60 American sailors went down with the ship.
For 65 years, the Emmons lay peacefully on the ocean floor, guns raised skyward — until recently, when divers discovered that the ship h
Source: LA Times
Sep 27, 2010
Morris Sutton, a Tennessee factory-manager-turned-archaeologist, feels the wonder of hunting for fossils and Stone Age tools and uncovering a time when mankind was in its adolescence.
When Morris Sutton picks a chipped, ordinary-looking rock from the soil, he's the first to touch the stone tool since an ancestor of man used it nearly 2 million years ago.
In his dim, cool cavern at the bottom of a 30-foot ladder, he feels the wonder of it, breathing in the loamy smell, p
Source: LA Times
Sep 27, 2010
Morris Sutton, a Tennessee factory-manager-turned-archaeologist, feels the wonder of hunting for fossils and Stone Age tools and uncovering a time when mankind was in its adolescence.
Sutton, 47, an archaeologist, was a Memphis, Tenn., factory manager who grew tired of the flat horizon of commerce and manufacturing and of laying off fellow employees.
So he quit to pursue his hobby: hunting for fossils and Stone Age tools. He went back to college to study archaeology and
Source: Discovery News
Sep 27, 2010
Neanderthals may have gone out with a bang.
Neandertals didn't get dumped on prehistory's ash heap -- it got dumped on them. At least three volcanic eruptions about 40,000 years ago devastated Neandertals' western Asian and European homelands, spurring a rapid demise of these humanlike hominids, says a team led by archaeologist Liubov Golovanova of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Modern humans survived because they lived in Africa and on the
Source: BBC
Sep 27, 2010
A 250 year old pistol, which was taken from an Italian museum during World War II and kept on a wall in Flintshire for more than 60 years, has been returned to Florence.
The family of Stanley Parry, from Holywell, said it was one of his dying wishes to have the gun sent back.
He was given the silver pistol by another soldier, who was about to throw it into the sea....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 27, 2010
The former security chief of Radovan Karadzic, the alleged Bosnian war criminal, masqueraded as a psychiatrist at hospitals in Australia and Britain for several years and lied to the International War Crimes Tribunal about his qualifications.
Vitomir Zepinic, who was born in Sarajevo, trained in psychology in Serbia and went on to work for Karadzic during the Balkan conflict.
In 1992 he resigned and emigrated to Australia, where he claimed that his medical documents h
Source: AP
Sep 27, 2010
If portraits could talk, Jan Six might have much to say about his family.
The merchant, poet and civic leader, painted by Rembrandt in 1654, has watched his descendants make money, marry into Holland's best families, engage in infidelities and sometimes quarrel over their fabulous inheritance.
Now one of Rembrandt's most celebrated paintings is on public display until Nov. 29 at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum while the 58-room Six mansion undergoes renovations....
Source: AP
Sep 27, 2010
Britain's surprise new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband on Monday pledged to bury the era of Tony Blair, promising to guide to power a generation of lawmakers untainted by divisive decisions over the Iraq war and the global financial crisis.
The 40-year-old Ed Miliband, his party's youngest postwar leader, has vowed to radically overhaul Blair's pro-business and Washington-friendly platform, but dismissed critics who call him "Red Ed," and have warned he will shift the cent
Source: CNN
Sep 27, 2010
Many Democrats have been using former President George W. Bush as a foil in the midterm elections. But one Democratic congressman in a tough re-election bid is using Bush in a new TV ad in a positive way.
Rep. Earl Pomeroy is facing a difficult race as the only congressman in red state North Dakota.
His new commercial starts with a shot of Bush signing a bill, with the announcer saying, "When George Bush proposed a Medicare prescription drug plan, Earl Pomeroy vote
Source: CNN
Sep 27, 2010
Former Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic appeared in court Monday to defend himself on charges of war crimes and genocide, resuming a trial which he has fought for years to delay.
He spoke firmly and fluently as he defended himself, occasionally looking irritated or dismissive, but not appearing to obstruct the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The trial was most recently suspended earlier this month to give the defense time to review documents...
Source: New Yorker
Sep 27, 2010
For most people, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be Barack Obama as his Administration’s high hopes are dashed by daily waves of bad news. But for Walter Mondale, who spent four years as Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President, the experience is all too familiar. When the public sours on you, he said last week, the Presidency seems “like a unique four-year marriage contract, in which divorce is not an option.”
Mondale, now in his eighties, was speaking on the phone from his home state
Source: CNN
Sep 26, 2010
Former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday.
Stevens, a decorated World War II pilot, will be buried with honors, family spokesman Elliott Bundy told CNN last month.
The ceremony will be open to the Stevens' family and friends....
Source: AP
Sep 26, 2010
One of the world's most important caches of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the Web in recent years.
The British Library said Monday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.
Although the manuscripts — hig
Source: Newsweek
Sep 26, 2010
During a few tumultuous months in 1989, Soviet tanks pulled out of Eastern Europe, communist governments there collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell—and the Cold War ended without a shot fired. Figuring out why it happened so fast and so peacefully will occupy historians forever, and a new 700-page collection of documents will be essential to their understanding. Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989 is a treasure trove of the most secret discussions by leaders of t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 26, 2010
A 250-year-old antique pistol taken from an Italian museum as a souvenir from the Second World War by a British solider has finally been returned, fulfilling the last request he made on his deathbed.
Stanley Parry, who died last year, had served with the Eighth Army and had been involved in the Allied push up through Italy having also seen combat in North Africa.
At the end of the Second World War while on his way back to Britain across the English Channel he noticed
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 26, 2010
Russia is mining the remains of its long extinct woolly mammoths to meet a growing demand for ethical ivory.
Taking advantage of a global ban on the trade in elephant ivory, Russia is gambling that ivory lovers around the world will pay a premium for ethically friendly mammoth ivory instead.
Michelle Obama, the US First Lady, has been spotted wearing jewellery crafted from the mammoth ivory.
It is exporting 60 tons of mammoth ivory to China, the world's
Source: AP
Sep 26, 2010
One of the world's most important caches of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the Web in recent years.
The British Library said Monday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.
Although the manuscripts — hig
Source: AP
Sep 26, 2010
White descendants of the nation's first professionally trained African-American doctor gathered in a cemetery on Sunday to dedicate a tombstone at the unmarked grave where he was buried in 1865.
Smith, born in New York City in 1813, wanted to be a doctor but was denied entry to medical schools in the United States. He earned a degree from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, then returned to New York to practice. Besides being a doctor, he was celebrated in his lifetime as a write
