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: BBC
January 14, 2008
A German U-boat sunk off Scotland's coast more than 90 years ago has been discovered by two divers.
Jim MacLeod, of Bo'ness, and Martin Sinclair, from Falkirk, found the wreckage of the U12 about 25 miles from Eyemouth at the weekend.
They had been looking for the 60-metre U-boat for the past five years.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
January 20, 2008
FOR more than 60 years RAAF veterans Geoff Burn and Arthur Lewis kept silent about the terrible secret hidden in a disused railway tunnel at the foot of the Blue Mountains.
Thousands of barrels filled with chemical weapons, including mustard gas, were stored in the tunnel at Glenbrook and other sites around Australia during the Second World War.
The men were part of a secret unit formed to look after the deadly stockpile, kept for use against Japanese troops - a fact th
Source: Independent (UK)
January 21, 2008
They were the blue-eyed blonds born into a sinister SS scheme to further the Aryan race. But the defeat of the Nazis left Norway's 'Lebensborn' facing the vengeance of an entire nation. Here, five former war children talk for the first time about their ordeal – and their fight for compensation.
Source: Scotsman
January 21, 2008
SCOTTISH history is to be restored to its position at the heart of the school curriculum to combat young people's "ignorance" of their nation's past, the education secretary promises today.
Fiona Hyslop maintains that making history relevant to the lives of children will "create a better understanding of how Scotland came to be, where it is now and the part the nation could play in shaping the future".
In a move likely to be greeted with suspicion by
Source: National Security Archive
January 21, 2008
Documents published today by the
National Security Archive reveal that Mexico’s secret service captured a
squad of Argentine military intelligence operatives and expelled them for
spying on [exiled rebel] Montoneros living in Mexico" in January 1978. At
the time, the Mexican press denounced the presence of foreigners attempting
to target and assassinate the leadership of the Argentine Montonero
insurgents. Today, the documents of the now dismantled Mexican Federal
Security Directorate co
Source: columbiatribune.com
January 20, 2008
One of the most vivid memories George Esper has from his years as an Associated Press correspondent during the Vietnam War was of a flight he took on a U.S. military transport plane loaded with the bodies of dead American soldiers.
Esper had been in the demilitarized zone covering a battle. Afterward he asked the pilot of the plane if he could hitch a ride back to Saigon. The pilot agreed, and Esper was directed to the aircraft’s freight section.
There, Esper found he a
Source: AP
January 21, 2008
Nearly 40 years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., some say his legacy is being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message.
“Everyone knows - even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King - can say his most famous moment was that ‘I have a dream’ speech,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo. “No one can go further than one sentence. All we know i
Source: AP
January 19, 2008
A young veteran back from war whose struggle to rejoin society has failed, at least for the moment, fighting demons and left homeless.
But it is happening to a new generation. As the war in Afghanistan plods on in its seventh year, and the war in Iraq in its fifth, a new cadre of homeless veterans is taking shape.
And with it come the questions: How is it that a nation that became so familiar with the archetypal homeless, combat-addled Vietnam veteran is now watching as
Source: AP
January 19, 2008
Evelyn Johnson's father has never liked talking about his time in the Army during World War II. He was angry that black servicemen like him fought for freedom overseas only to come home to face discrimination, she says.
Johnson, however, now has a window into her father's experiences, having recently inherited about 30 letters he wrote his mother while stationed in North Africa and Italy.
On Saturday, Johnson learned how to best preserve the box full of letters — writte
Source: AP
January 19, 2008
MILWAUKEE - Booker Townsell rarely spoke about his time in the Army or his wrongful conviction in one of the largest courts-martial of World War II.
But his past took center stage on Saturday, when the late Townsell received military honors at his grave site and a salute. His family also accepted the U.S. flag that was denied at his burial almost 25 years ago.
The ceremony and reception that followed attracted hundreds of people, including local and state dignitaries, a
Source: Courier-Journal
January 17, 2008
KNOB CREEK, Ky. -- In a small valley bordered by forested hills and a low creek, Abraham Lincoln's first memories took root: of planting pumpkins, walking to school, nearly drowning in a swollen stream and seeing shackled slaves shuffle along a dusty turnpike.
This week, National Park Service archaeologists are using shovels, sifters and magnetometers to search for artifacts of Lincoln's Kentucky boyhood, and, if they're lucky, the farm's Holy Grail: The missing footprint of the tin
Source: AP
January 18, 2008
Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former inhabitants and their descendants, its crumbling homes still perched on stilts, clinging to the steep, rocky terrain.
Until recently, little else remained of the island, an Inupiat Eskimo village, except for traditions, memories and artifacts scattered at museums around the nation.
Then came word from a stranger nearly 2,000 miles away who said she possessed an ancient mask a rela
Source: HNN Staff
November 13, 2007
In a single week three New York Times columnists have addressed the question of Ronald Reagan's intentions in 1980 in starting his campaign for the presidency near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the notorious murders of civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. First was David Brooks, the Times's sole in-house conservative columnist, in a piece titled,
Source: WaPo
January 21, 2008
ATLANTA, Jan. 20 -- Sen. Barack Obama took the pulpit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church here Sunday and drew a clear link between King's vision of an America free of segregation and racism and the central tenet of his own presidential campaign, a call for unity after years of partisan rancor and division.
"If Dr. King could love his jailer, if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we
Source: CBS News
January 20, 2008
On Monday, the country will officially mark the holiday celebrating the life of Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. This year will mark the 40th year after his assassination. His dream of economic and racial equality still lives on. Or does it?
For many living on Chicago's Martin Luther King Drive, the hopes of the slain civil right's leader are more like a dream, deferred, reports CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller.
Source: NYT Week in Review
January 20, 2008
IT is now a part of the Republican catechism to regularly invoke the name of Ronald Reagan and to ritually wrap oneself in his cloak. This year’s Republican candidates (and even one Democrat, Barack Obama), have all called down the spirit of St. Ronald of Dixon, Ill., to bless their candidacies.
But they will have a hard time topping the greatest Reagan pander of all time, delivered in the summer of 1995 by Senator Bob Dole, embarking on his quest for the 1996 Republican presidentia
Source: NYT
January 20, 2008
[R]ecent history shows that it’s often the anticipation of a recession that depresses stock prices, not the actual experience of a recession. So if we’re out of the anticipatory stage, stocks could soon start to stabilize.
Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S.& P., studied the performance of the stock market during the last 11 recessions, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, going back to 1945. He found that the S.& P. 500 fell 26 percent, on aver
Source: NYT
January 18, 2008
Gilang was one of the last victims of former President Suharto’s harsh 32-year rule, a young activist who disappeared here on the day the former president was forced from power 10 years ago and whose body was found six days later, shot, stabbed and disemboweled.
As with many of Mr. Suharto’s victims, his killers have never been identified or brought to justice, escaping prosecution much as Mr. Suharto himself has done over the past decade.
Now, on what appears to be his
Source: NYT
January 19, 2008
ROME — As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero’s welcome here on Friday.
When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon
Source: NYT
January 14, 2008
Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have repeatedly invoked the name of Senator Chuck Hagel, a longtime critic of the Iraq war, as they defend Mrs. Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the war.
In interviews and at a recent campaign event, they have said that Mr. Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, helped draft the resolution, which they said was proof that the measure was more about urging Saddam Hussein to comply with weapons inspections, instead of authorizing combat.
Mrs. Clinto
