"The closures started during the last few months of the Republican-controlled Congress when budgetary oversight was not high on the agenda. Aside from its claim of fiscal austerity, EPA said the closures were part of an effort to “modernize” its information systems by digitizing thousands of documents, page-by-page. In the meantime, whole collections are now inaccessible to both agency and outside researchers."
"When France's second-last surviving veteran from World War I, Louis de Cazenave, died Jan. 20, the news made international headlines.
But in Germany — which lost both world wars and has had to cope with the shame of the Nazi genocide for more than six decades — there is not even an organization keeping track of the remaining veterans.
"That is the way history has developed," Kaestner's son, Peter Kaestner, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "In Germany, in this respect, these things are kept quiet — they're not a big deal."
The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week, and the stories were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner's death itself.
"The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self-denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting," the daily Die Welt wrote Friday in its obituary for Kaestner.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that "the German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era" until someone who had read Kaestner's death notice in a newspaper figured out who he was and updated a Wikipedia entry on the Internet."
Story Link:
http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/Last_German_World_War_I_veteran_die_01252008.html
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A mailer from a congressional candidate's campaign contains a photo of his head attached to an image of a different body that makes him look thinner.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.
The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work, in response to a "mandatory declassification" request, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Monday.
Article begins:
"I used to think of skepticism as a primary intellectual virtue, whose goal was truth. I have changed my mind. I now see it as a weapon.
Creationists opened my eyes. They use the techniques of critical thinking to expose weaknesses in the evidence for natural selection, gaps in the fossil record and problems with evolutionary theory. Is this because they are seeking truth? No. They believe they already know the truth. Skepticism is a weapon to defend their beliefs by attacking their opponents."
By RUPERT SHELDRAKE
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