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
7-30-13
FRANKFURT — The Waffen-SS is widely seen as one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust, but not in the pages of Der Landser, a weekly German pulp magazine.In one recent issue, members of the feared World War II military unit were portrayed as just a bunch of good-natured soldiers doing their jobs and, between battles, sharing rounds of local plonk with Greek villagers grateful to have been invaded. “We conquered them, and they’re still a friendly folk,” remarked one member of the squad, which belonged to Hitler’s personal bodyguard.
Source: BBC News
7-28-13
When USS Indianapolis was hit by Japanese torpedoes in the final weeks of WWII, hundreds of crewmen jumped into the water to escape the burning ship. Surrounded by sharks, they waited for a response to their SOS. But no one had been sent to look for them.In late July 1945, USS Indianapolis had been on a special secret mission, delivering parts of the first atomic bomb to the Pacific Island of Tinian where American B-29 bombers were based. Its job done, the warship, with 1,197 men on board, was sailing west towards Leyte in the Philippines when it was attacked.The first torpedo struck, without warning, just after midnight on 30 July 1945. A 19-year-old seaman, Loel Dean Cox, was on duty on the bridge. Now 87, he recalls the moment when the torpedo hit."Whoom. Up in the air I went. There was water, debris, fire, everything just coming up and we were 81ft (25m) from the water line. It was a tremendous explosion. Then, about the time I got to my knees, another one hit. Whoom."...
Source: BBC News
7-26-13
Stooped and frail within the ranks of veterans, Lee Duk-bin watches the memorial parades marking 60 years since the end of the Korean war.He was 25 years old when the conflict began, an officer in the South Korean army, who believed passionately in the ideological fight against the communist North....The irony is that Lee Duk-bin is originally North Korean. He came to the South to fight with the UN forces against his own communist government.Sixty years after the fighting ended in a truce, he says it is still too soon for a permanent peace treaty."The very idea of a peace treaty is just North Korean trickery," he said....
Source: BBC News
7-29-13
There has been a renewed call in Italy for one of the oldest surviving Nazi war criminals to repent.It came on the eve of the 100th birthday of Erich Priebke, who has never expressed remorse for his part in a World War ll massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, on the outskirts of Rome.The former SS officer is actually still in the Italian capital.He lives under house arrest in what some in the city regard as conditions that are far too comfortable and lenient....
Source: BBC News
7-29-13
Our modern idea of tyranny was born 2,000 years ago. It is with the reign of the Caligula - the third Roman emperor, assassinated in 41 AD, before he had reached the age of 30 - that all the components of mad autocracy come together for the first time.In fact, the ancient Greek word "tyrannos" (from which our term comes) was originally a fairly neutral word for a sole ruler, good or bad.Of course, there had been some very nasty monarchs and despots before Caligula. But, so far as we know, none of his predecessors had ever ticked all the boxes of a fully fledged tyrant, in the modern sense.There was his (Imelda Marcos-style) passion for shoes, his megalomania, sadism and sexual perversion (including incest, it was said, with all three of his sisters), to a decidedly odd relationship with his pets. One of his bright ideas was supposed to have been to make his favourite horse a consul - the chief magistrate of Rome....
Source: Guardian (UK)
7-29-13
Another body has been recovered from the Leicester car park where the remains of Richard III were discovered last year – but while a king of England was bundled into a hastily dug hole slightly too short for his corpse, the mystery man was buried in splendour, his body sealed in a lead coffin placed in a handsome limestone sarcophagus.The stone lid was lifted carefully by hand last week. Archaeologists from Leicester University expected to find a fragmentary skeleton, since the weight of the lid and centuries of soil on top of it had long since crushed the sides of the box. Instead, to their surprise, they discovered an inner lead coffin, carefully soldered on all sides, its lid decorated with a cross."It's in remarkably good nick except for one end where we think water trickling down has degraded the lead, so we could just see the feet. They look to be in very good condition, so we hope to learn a lot more from the bones," said the site director, Matthew Morris....
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
7-29-13
SKEAN dhus, a blade traditionally worn with Highland dress, have been banned by organisers of the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.The celebration takes place next year and will be overseen by the National Trust for Scotland, who have told attendees that they will not be permitted to bring the blades to the event.Skean dhus are exempt from laws surrounding the carrying of weapons in Scotland, but organisers claim carrying the traditional dagger in a public place constitutes an offence.The festival, taking place in June next year, is expected to attract around 45,000 visitors. It will mark Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English in 1314....
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
7-29-13
IT WAS born out of the indignation at the attitude of newspapers to Edinburgh’s under-fire establishment. Now the origins of The Scotsman, dubbed the “Tenpenny Thunderclap” for its radical content, have been immortalised in tapestry.The newspaper is to star in what will be billed as the world’s longest tapestry.William Ritchie and Charles MacLaren, who founded The Scotsman, famously deployed a thistle emblem to prick the pomposity of the middle classes in the early 19th-century capital.The two men, the date of the newspaper’s launch in 1817, its early nickname and its original address, 347 High Street, Edinburgh, all feature in The Great Tapestry of Scotland, which will be unveiled at the Scottish Parliament later this year. The panel features a quote from philosopher David Hume, written in shorthand by The Scotsman’s editor, Ian Stewart, which states: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”...
Source: NYT
7-23-13
A chance request in 2004 for a 19th-century German book about the Mississippi River was what alerted the National Library of Sweden that dozens of rare books from its collection had been stolen. Now that volume and another valuable antique book that contains early maps of America have been recovered and are being returned to library officials at a ceremony on Wednesday at the office of the United States Attorney in Manhattan. These books were part of sensational heist engineered by Anders Burius, a senior librarian dubbed the “Royal Library Man,” who committed suicide shortly after his arrest nine years ago. A crack in the case first came last year after a rare atlas from 1597 was recovered. Mr. Burius sold or consigned at least 13 of the books to Ketterer Kunst, a German auction house....
Source: NYT
7-28-13
These days, Dwight Chapin shoots movies on his iPad. But in the Richard M. Nixon White House, he and his colleagues John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman were Super 8-wielding auteurs, capturing intimate moments that eluded the press corps: Tricia Nixon before her wedding; the president in Beijing enjoying a ballet about a workers’ insurrection; Pope Paul VI shot sideways (because Haldeman had smuggled his camera into the Vatican).The images, surreptitious and otherwise, are included in “Our Nixon,” the impressionistic documentary directed by Penny Lane that has its premiere Thursday on CNN. The film makes use of hundreds of reels of home movies shot by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mr. Chapin, some of which had been confiscated by the F.B.I. during the Watergate investigation. The footage remained largely unseen for 40 years.“They weren’t being hidden,” Ms. Lane said. “They were being ignored.”
Source: News 9 (OK)
7-25-13
OKLAHOMA CITY - The fight to save an historic building downtown is beginning to gain some steam.The old Film Exchange building is set to be demolished, but a local historian is fighting to keep it. The plan is to make way for the new $130-million 70-acre central park planned downtown.There's a couple of things that the MAPS planning committee is going to want for this building to have a future. It has to work within the scope of the original plan, and somebody has to pay for it to be renovated.It's the beginning of what supporters believe could be a long fight to keep an historic piece of downtown Oklahoma City....
Source: Irish Times
7-27-13
There are voices and they talk about the death of Jean McConville. It may not matter. After two years of legal proceedings in the US, a set of audiotapes in a Boston College archive are supposed to answer questions about McConville’s 1972 murder by members of the IRA, who claim they suspected her of informing for the British army in Belfast.The voices on the tapes are said to belong to former militants from the organisation that took McConville from her home, shot her dead and then buried her on a beach in the South.But the prolonged court battle may produce evidence of questionable legal value, as Boston College now says it is unable to identify some of the interviewees....
Source: AP
7-28-13
EASTON, Md. (AP) — Archaeology students have been sifting through a little patch of ground on Maryland’s Eastern Shore this summer, seeking evidence that it was home to the nation’s first free African-American community.Historians say hundreds of free blacks once lived in the area, while plantations flourished with hundreds of black slaves not far away.The students from the University of Maryland, College Park, and Morgan State University have been digging behind what is now the Women’s Club of Talbot County. The building, part of which dates to at least 1793, was home to three free non-white residents, according to the 1800 Census....
Source: SF Gate
7-28-13
VIENNA (AP) — Like many others in Austria's countryside, a tower bell above the red-tiled rooftops of Wolfpassing village marks the passing of each hour with an unspectacular "bong." But this bell is unique: It is embossed with a swastika and praise to Adolf Hitler.And unlike more visible remnants of the Nazi era, the bell was apparently overlooked by official Austria up to now.Ensconced in the belfry of an ancient castle where it was mounted by fans of the Nazi dictator in 1939, the bell has tolled on for nearly 80 years. It survived the defeat of Hitler's Germany, a decade of post-war Soviet occupation that saw Red Army soldiers lodge in the castle and more recent efforts by Austria's government to acknowledge the country's complicity in crimes of that era and make amends....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-25-13
His death in front of a firing squad was the defining moment of one of the best known, and most bitter, episodes of the Boer War: British-Australian soldier Harry “Breaker” Morant was court martialled and sentenced to death in 1902 for shooting prisoners.But now, more than a century on, campaigners are to launch a legal bid at the High Court in London to force the Government to open an inquiry into the case with a view to securing a posthumous pardon for Morant, as well as fellow soldiers, Peter Handcock, shot for the same offence, and George Witton, who was jailed for life.The supporters believe the men were simply following British army orders when they executed their prisoners and that they were used as scapegoats by embarrassed senior officers, including Lord Kitchener, and to accelerate peace talks with the Boers.Jim Unkles, a military lawyer who has taken the case on, said: “I am applying to the High Court for a review of the British government decision not to help an independent inquiry. I am filing papers next month. The appeal will be on the basis that there were major errors at the court martial, that it was an abuse of protest and that these men were denied their rights. Kitchener conspired to get them executed.”...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-28-13
The fighting took place at two separate battles, fought around ten days apart, over August and September 1644, near Lostwithiel, Cornwall.The Royalists had tracked a heavily outnumbered Parliamentarian army to the town and gradually closed in on them. King Charles I himself was present during the campaign and is said to have slept in a hedge. Part of the fighting centred around the ruins of Restormel Castle.The Parliamentarians had hoped that their navy would be able to navigate into the Fowey estuary to evacuate their troops, but unfavourable weather conditions prevented this. In the end, 6,000 men surrendered and the Parliamentarian leader, the Earl of Essex, was able to escape only after being taken off in a fishing boat.The two locations are the first new battlefields to be added to English Heritage’s register since it was created in 1995. They take the number on there from 43 to 45....
Source: The Age (AU)
7-27-13
A biplane pivots out of control with smoke billowing from the fuselage. The World War I pilot, who has evidently bailed out, can be seen hurtling towards the ground.Another black and white photo of a dogfight shows British and German aircraft twisting to avoid an almost inevitable midair collision....The photos attracted enormous interest as there were very few images of aerial combat at the time.But it was not until 1984 that they were definitively debunked by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington when archivists realised Mrs Cockburn-Lange was actually Betty Archer, wife of Wesley David Archer, a model maker in the film industry. He had painstakingly made models of all the aircraft and superimposed them on aerial backgrounds....
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
7-27-13
It's been raining at Gunung Padang, and the grass on the mountain's precipitous eastern slope is slick with water and mud.But geologist Danny Hilman, is undeterred. While others slip and fall around him, he trudges expertly down this hill tucked away among the volcanoes 120 kilometres south of Jakarta to show off two big holes he's dug.Since Dutch colonists discovered it in 1914, Gunung Padang has been known (though not widely) as the largest of a number of ancient megalithic sites in Indonesia....
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
7-28-13
HE FAMOUSLY wanted his portrait “warts and all”, but Oliver Cromwell was not the hero of the English Civil War that history has painted him.According to a new book, victory for the Roundheads, as the Parliamentary forces were known, was secured by battle-hardened Scottish troops who were more comfortable slaughtering Englishmen than southern soldiers forced to fight their fellow countrymen.A key battle at Marston Moor in 1644, which turned the tide of the 17th-century conflict between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers – King Charles I’s royalist forces – over who controls Parliament, was won by Colonel Hugh Fraser, a Scots soldier from Inverness, rather than Cromwell, who was wounded and forced off the battlefield.The controversial new study of the bloody military campaign – in which 80,000 people died – also compares the Scottish Army of the Covenant, battalions supported by the Kirk who wished to protect Presbyterianism against the religious policies of Charles I, with the Taleban of modern day Afghanistan....
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
7-28-13
ARCHAEOLOGISTS are planning a major dig to uncover one of the lost Kingdoms of the ancient Picts, the tribe of legendary warriors whose empire stretched from Fife to the Moray Firth before they mysteriously vanished from history.Until recently historians had believed that Fortriu - one of the most powerful Kingdoms of the “painted people” - had been based in Perthshire.But recent research has now placed the Pictish stronghold much further north to the Moray Firth area.And it was revealed today that a team of archaeologists from Aberdeen University are to embark on a series of excavations on the Tarbat peninsula in Ross-shire where archaeologists have already uncovered evidence of the only Pictish monastic settlement found in Scotland to date....
