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: Ynet News
3-4-12
Latvian President Andris Berzins on Tuesday defended a controversial annual parade that honors troops from the Baltic state who fought the Soviet Union under the banner of Nazi Germany.Speaking on the LNT television channel, Berzins said veterans of the World War II Latvian Legion, a 140,000-strong unit of Germany's Waffen SS, deserved respect not condemnation."They were conscripted into the fascist German Legion. They went with the ideal of defending Latvia. Latvians in the Legion were not war criminals," Berzins insisted.He also said foreign criticism of the March 16 rally was unfair....
Source: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
3-6-12
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week cited the Roosevelt administration's failure to bomb Auschwitz as part of his explanation of Israeli policy regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program.In his remarks to the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. on March 5, 2012, Prime Minister Netanyahu noted that some critics of Israel have claimed military action against Iran "might provoke an even more vindictive response." The prime minister recalled that similar claims were advanced by Roosevelt administration officials in 1944, in rejecting requests to bomb Auschwitz. He then held up copies of correspondence between the World Jewish Congress and the War Department in 1944, and read excerpts from them. [SEE ATTACHED LETTERS]The World Jewish Congress asked the Roosevelt administration to undertake the "destruction of gas chambers and crematoria in Oswiecim [Auschwitz] by bombing" and "bombing of railway [lines leading to Auschwitz]." In response, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy gave several excuses as to why bombing should not be carried out, including the claim that attacking Auschwitz "might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans." Prime Minister Netanyahu then commented: "What could possibly have been more vindictive than Auschwitz?"
Source: Yahoo News
3-5-12
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Back in 1926, nobody balked when President Calvin Coolidge dedicated Kansas City's towering Liberty Memorial as the national memorial to the First World War.But as the 100th anniversary of the beginning of "the Great War" approaches in 2014, a tussle has broken out between Kansas City and Washington, D.C. over which city should be the site of the nation's "official" World War One memorial.In 2004, Congress voted to designate the Kansas City memorial as the official museum, but late last year support emerged for having the memorial on the National Mall in the nation's capital.A bill designating both locations as national memorials has also stalled, delaying fundraising for the U.S. observation of the approaching centennial....
Source: AP
3-6-12
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — President Cristina Fernandez says a new museum dedicated to the Falklands Islands will honor Argentine marines killed trying to reclaim them from Britain 30 years ago....
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
3-6-12
Visitors to one of Northern Ireland's most popular beaches have been warned to be careful after an unexploded World War II bomb was washed up.Benone beach has reopened after the Army carried out a controlled explosion on a bomb discovered by a member of the public on Sunday.It was discovered lying near the water on the beach, which was evacuated along with part of the nearby Seacoast Road. The train line was also closed for a time as a precaution.This was the second time in recent months that an unexploded bomb had washed up in the area....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
3-6-12
Although a collision with a vast tower of ice ultimately brought the passenger liner to its sticky end, it was a freak lunar event three months earlier that put the obstacle in its path, a new study claims.An incredibly rare combination of astronomical factors including the closest approach of the moon to Earth in 1,400 years caused an unusually high tide in January 1912, researchers found.This once-in-a-lifetime swell would have swept a vast field of icebergs from their normal resting place off the coast of Canada and caused them to drift further south.It would have taken them almost exactly three months to reach the shipping lanes where the Titanic sank on April 14 at a cost of 1,500 lives, the scientists reported in Sky & Telescope magazine....
Source: CS Monitor
3-6-12
Fifty-five years ago today, Ghana became the first black African nation to gain independence from a colonial power. As the Ghana Broadcasting Corp. reported today, apparently without great enthusiasm, “The day will as usual be marked all over the country with parades of security agencies, school children, workers, and other groups.”When independence day becomes a ho-hum affair, it's a good sign. It means freedom is the accepted norm. The path of independence has not been easy. Kwame Nkrumah – the pan-Africanist leader who galvanized various different tribes into a single nation, and then was overthrown in a 1966 coup for overstaying his welcome – told his countrymen that their success depended on common effort for the greater good....
Source: WaPo
3-6-12
Perhaps they were friends — the older sailor who walked with a limp and always had a pipe clenched in his teeth, and the younger salt with the busted nose and the beat-up, mismatched shoes.If not comrades in life, they became so in death, drowning together in the iron tomb of the USS Monitor as it capsized off Cape Hatteras in 1862 and sank upside down in 40 fathoms of water.Over a century later, their skeletons would be found, one atop the other — the younger man still with his shoes on — amid the guns, equipment and debris inside the famous ship’s turret.And Tuesday, a few months shy of 150 years since their faces were last seen in the midst of the Civil War, likenesses of the noble Yankee seamen were unveiled at the Navy Memorial in downtown Washington....
Source: NYT
3-5-12
At 82, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric R. Kandel is still constantly coming up with new ideas for research.This winter, he has been working on a project that he hopes will lead to a new class of drugs for treating schizophrenia. Last year he collaborated, for the first time, with Denise B. Kandel — his fellow Columbia University research scientist and wife of 55 years — investigating the biological links between cigarette and cocaine addiction. And this month his newest book, “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present,” is to be released by Random House.A condensed and edited version of our two interviews follows. As in his new book, the conversation begins with memories of Vienna, his birthplace.How old were you when the Nazis marched into Vienna?
Source: NYT
3-5-12
Since it was discovered in 1991, preserved in 5,300 years’ worth of ice and snow in the Italian Alps, the body of the so-called Tyrolean Iceman has yielded a great deal of information. Scientists have learned his age (about 46), that he had knee problems, and how he died (by the shot of an arrow).Now, researchers have sequenced the complete genome of the iceman, nicknamed Ötzi, and discovered even more intriguing details. They report in the journal Nature Communications that he had brown eyes and brown hair, was lactose intolerant and had Type O blood.The lactose intolerance makes sense, said Albert Zink, an anthropologist at the European Academy of Research in Bolzano, Italy, who was one of the study’s authors.
Source: NYT
3-6-12
FUSHUN, China — Some national heroes are born in the crucible of war. Others have far less dramatic origins.So it was in the summer of 1962, when a soldier at this army base in northeast China reversed his truck into a telephone pole, sending it crashing onto the head of a 22-year-old comrade. The young man died, but his short life provided Communist Party propagandists with a perfect icon: Lei Feng, industrious, generous and irresistibly impish, China’s most endearing soldier, the sort of fellow who would darn his comrades’ socks and skip a meal so others might eat.In urging people to “Learn from Lei Feng” a year after his death, Mao Zedong sought to imbue China’s youth with a passion for self-sacrifice and patriotism — and perhaps distract them from the hunger pangs of famine that followed his disastrous effort to rapidly industrialize in the Great Leap Forward.But the party’s efforts to resuscitate the spirit of Lei Feng on the 50th anniversary of his death have exposed the limits of old school propaganda in the age of the Internet. The campaign, which culminated Monday with the annual “Learn From Lei Feng Day,” has provoked a fresh round of public cynicism about a ruling party that is struggling to cultivate a sense of legitimacy....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
3-5-12
A 'secret' book recording the precise details about the D-Day landings has been discovered locked in a safe.General Sir Miles Dempsey GBE, KCB, DSO, MC commanded the 2nd Army and ordered the account to be written shortly after the events that would change the course of the war.Only 48 copies of the three-volume book, An Account Of The Operations Of Second Army In Europe 1944-45, were ever published, soon after the war - and are all held in museums or military institutions.Much of the material provided the world with information about the army's actions from before D-Day to Berlin....
Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
3-4-12
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A heart-wrenching letter penned 150 years ago by Mary Todd Lincoln to a Cleveland man named Charles Reeves is being auctioned online this month.RR Auction of New Hampshire is estimating the sad narrative about the death of the first family's 11-year-old son, Willie, will sell for between $20,000 and $40,000."There are days when I feel I cannot struggle on much longer," Lincoln wrote in the letter dated May 5, 1862. "Please excuse this letter, written in much haste, and almost blotted by my tears.""She's quite rare," said RR Auction Vice President Bobby Livingston, noting that a letter by the first lady to the War Department sold at a 2010 auction for $11,000....
Source: AP
3-4-12
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The way Ernie Gross and Don Greenbaum laugh and tell jokes with the ease of old friends, it's easy to assume the dapper octogenarians have known each other forever.In reality, they only met a few months ago. Their familiarity doesn't come from shared memories of a childhood playground or a high school dance but a far darker place: Both men were at the Dachau concentration camp on the day its 30,000 prisoners were liberated by American soldiers in 1945.Greenbaum, 87, and Gross, 83, don't think they met that day in Dachau but nevertheless share a bond. They met after Gross, who lives in Philadelphia, saw a mention in a local newspaper last November about Greenbaum, a Philadelphia native now living in suburban Bala Cynwyd....
Source: Pittsburgh Review-Tribune
3-5-12
Preservationists are drawing lines of defense around more of America's hallowed ground.U.S. senators hoping to control development near Civil War sites have introduced legislation to protect two parcels at Gettysburg and preserve thousands of acres of battlefields at Vicksburg, Miss., and Petersburg, Va."That kind of historic land can never be replaced," said Michael Kraus, curator of Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Oakland and a member of the National Civil War Museum Advisory Council. "These are places where people fought and gave their lives."Preservation groups recently fought off a developer's proposal to build a casino a half-mile from Gettysburg National Military Park, drawing attention to the preservation issue.A planned Gettysburg expansion would add 46 acres, including two parcels known as Plum Run and the Gettysburg Train Station. Supporters hope that will happen before next summer's 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg....
Source: Billings Gazette
2-25-12
While the National Park Service in Montana struggles to find a way to build a new museum and visitor center at Little Bighorn Battlefield, an ambitious group in Monroe, Mich., is working toward establishing Lt. Col. George Custer's hometown as the center for all things Custer.William H. Braunlich, president of the Monroe County Historical Society, said in a telephone interview that the project involves establishing a unit of the National Park Service in downtown Monroe called Custer National Monument and Museum.It wouldn't involve large capital expenditure by the cash-strapped federal agency, he said. Instead it would transfer ownership of existing resources from the city of Monroe and Monroe County to the Park Service. Those resources would include a county museum, a world-renowned Custer collection and an annual payment of $200,000 for the first 10 years of operation.One of the Park Service's newest units, the War of 1812 River Raisin National Battlefield Park and River Raisin Heritage Trail, was established in Monroe two years ago. The Historical Society envisions the Custer monument as a second unit of River Raisin....
Source: The Hill
3-1-12
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hammered Republicans on Thursday for kicking off March — Women’s History Month — with a vote on legislation she claims would curtail women’s access to contraception.As part of a sweeping transportation bill, Senate Republicans forced a vote Thursday on an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), to repeal President Obama’s new birth-control mandate for employers.Pelosi and the Democrats are highlighting the legislation in hopes of portraying Republicans as out-of-touch with women’s healthcare needs — a message Pelosi pressed Thursday.“Instead of talking about jobs … we’ve moved on to the Blunt amendment — a blunt, sweeping overreach into women’s health,” Pelosi said during her weekly press briefing in the Capitol....
Source: WaPo
3-1-12
The United States and North Korea have announced a nuclear-disarmament-for-aid deal after their first nuclear talks since the death of Kim Jong Il. Here’s a timeline of some key developments of North-South tensions in Korean history:— Sept. 9, 1948: Kim Il Sung establishes the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the northern half of the Korean peninsula.— June 25, 1950: North Korea invades the South, beginning the Korean War. United States backs South Korea, while China and the Soviet Union provide support to the North.— July 27, 1953: Korean War ends in armistice, not a peace treaty. Demilitarized Zone established along the border; U.S. military presence in South Korea remains....
Source: AP
2-27-12
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Mike Ritz is trying to help save Central Falls — one chocolate bar at a time.While Central Falls is often called a “failed city” that was taken over by the state and later filed for bankruptcy, a new project is highlighting a very different story: its history as a chocolate manufacturer during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.Ritz says the “Save Chocolateville” bar — honoring Central Falls’ nickname — recalls the tale of an American city that once thrived as a manufacturer, sank into decline and is trying to turn itself around. Proceeds will go to a yet-undecided program benefiting city children.“Chocolateville to me represents the spirit of ingenuity, entrepreneurship, productivity, and — when that first mill building was created there — it was the heart of the community,” said Ritz, who heads the organization Leadership Rhode Island. The old Wheat chocolate factory that operated along the Blackstone River is pictured on the chocolate bar’s label....
Source: Vancouver Sun
3-5-12
During the 1968 federal election, a campaign team working for an underdog Conservative candidate in New Brunswick decided to deface a bunch of their candidate's lawn signs.The reasoning was that Char-lie Thomas might get some sympathy votes if people saw "Vote Liberal" scrawled across his signs, indicating he likely was the victim of dirty tricks by his opponents.Their scheme - as told in Leaders and Lesser Mortals, a 1992 book about backroom politics - ultimately was found out by the police. No charges were laid because it was their own property the campaign workers had damaged. Thomas ended up winning his seat, despite the Tories losing that general election to the Liberals under Pierre Elliott Trudeau.The past 10 days have seen a public outcry over revelations that misleading phone calls were made to voters during last year's federal election campaign in an alleged attempt to suppress the vote in some ridings....
