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
November 26, 2007
A new BBC documentary has re-examined the legacy of a controversial Scottish soldier who was dubbed "Mad Mitch" for his tough methods.
Lt Col Colin Mitchell became a national hero when he led his Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders back into the Crater area of Aden in July 1967.
The British army had earlier pulled out of the district after 24 soldiers were killed by insurgents.
But Mitchell's reputation has been tarnished by allegations of brutality
Source: http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk
November 24, 2007
ONE was a notorious Nazi war criminal, the other a young Tyneside soldier.
They came from different countries and from different backgrounds, but they forged a friendship of sorts and ended up playing chess together.
This is the remarkable real life story of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and Maurice Williams of the Durham Light Infantry.
Charged with guarding Hess in Berlin’s Spandau Prison, Maurice the pair ended up playing a game of chess.
“It
Source: Chicago Tribune
November 26, 2007
Munich is an easy city to like: clean, bright and livable. It has world-class art museums, stylish shops, wide boulevards, parks and squares. Conviviality overflows in its fabled beer gardens, and its people have an open, animated air.
Joachim von Halasz, a London-based financial analyst who often travels to Munich, knows well the attractions of this southern German city, including its towered and turreted Gothic revival Neues Rathaus, which the U.S. 7th Army used as headquarters ne
Source: Boston Globe
November 24, 2007
A clue, a clue, my kingdom for a clue.
With apologies to William Shakespeare, that line sums up the plea of scholars who for years have tried to untangle one of literary history's most nettlesome knots: To which church did the Bard belong?
Was he Roman Catholic, the religion of his mother's family, many of his schoolteachers, and perhaps the closet faith of his father? Was he Protestant, a version of which was the official religion of Elizabethan England, where he craft
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 26, 2007
Newly-elected Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has promised to apologise to Aborigines for historic injustices, as the conservative party he defeated faced a bruising leadership battle.
Mr Rudd's pledge to say sorry to Aborigines was a radical departure from his predecessor John Howard, who during 11 years in power argued that contemporary Australians bore no responsibility for past wrongs.
It would be the first time that an Australian federal government had apologi
Source: Times (London)
November 26, 2007
Oxford University was preparing for lockdown tonight ahead of threatened protests against the decision to invite two controversial far right figures to a debate.
Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, and the historian David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for Holocaust denial, are due to speak at the Oxford Union debating society on the subject of free speech.Oxford colleges e-mailed their students warning them to stay in their rooms, and many colle
Source: Times (UK)
November 17, 2007
Tony Blair has admitted for the first time that he ignored the pleas of his aides and ministers to deter President Bush from waging war on Iraq because he believed that America was doing the right thing. And he has acknowledged that he turned down a last-ditch offer from Mr Bush to pull Britain out of the conflict.
He has also revealed that he wishes he had published the full reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) instead of the infamous September dossier about Saddam H
Source: NYT
November 25, 2007
YEKATERINBURG, Russia — On the outskirts of this burly industrial center, off a road like any other, on a nowhere scrap of land — here unfolded the final act of one of the last century’s most momentous events.
A short way through a clearing, toward a cluster of birch trees, the killers deposited their victims’ bodies, which had been mutilated, burned and doused with acid to mask their origins. It would be 73 more years, in 1991, before the remains would be reclaimed and the announce
Source: Reuters
November 23, 2007
A Springfield rifle owned by the famed Apache warrior Geronimo fetched $100,000 during an auction of Wild West guns and weapons that brought in more than $1 million.
Lawman Wyatt Earp's double-barreled shotgun garnered $65,500, while a saber attributed to U.S. Army cavalry commander George Custer sold for $20,315 at the Bonhams & Butterfields auction Tuesday.
Some of the guns were offered by a private collector who spent a lifetime accumulating firearms once carried
Source: Chicago Tribune
November 25, 2007
A mysterious box of letters, memos and legal documents pertaining to the White Sox team accused of throwing the 1919 World Series -- some of the papers thought to be lost since the middle of the last century -- is bound for the auction block this week after being uncovered by two Chicago-area collectors.
The identity of the sellers is not being disclosed and the story of how the papers came to emerge is incomplete. The auction house, Mastro Auctions in Burr Ridge, says the owners pr
Source: Times (UK)
November 25, 2007
NEARLY five years after it was ransacked by hordes of looters in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, the Iraq museum in Baghdad is about to open its doors again.
The museum, famous for priceless antiquities representing the world’s earliest civilisation, is scheduled to open next month, according to its acting director, Amira Emiran.
Visits will be confined to just two galleries on the ground floor containing Assyrian and Islamic treasures that are too large and hea
Source: NYT
November 25, 2007
FROM the 1880s to the 1960s, at least 4,700 men and women were lynched in this country. The noose remains a terrifying symbol, and continues to be used by racists to intimidate African-Americans (who made up more than 70 percent of lynching victims).
In the past decade or so, only about a dozen noose incidents a year came to the attention of civil rights groups. But since the huge Sept. 20 rally in Jena, La., where tens of thousands protested what they saw as racism in the prosecuti
Source: NYT
November 25, 2007
PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to “South Park,” from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department.
A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film
Source: NYT
November 25, 2007
IN 1960, Richard Nixon ran for president against John F. Kennedy on a slogan that had powerful resonance for cold war America: “Experience Counts.” Nixon had been vice president for eight years, a senator for two, and a House member for four. Kennedy had been a senator for eight years and a House member for six, and was also a war hero and the scion of a politically powerful family.
Nixon’s claim to experience, though, were those eight years in the White House — he was dispatched by
Source: National Security Archive
November 21, 2007
Washington D.C., November 22, 2007 - The first comprehensive U.S. nuclear war plan, produced in 1960, was controversial within the U.S. government because top commanders and White House scientists objected to its massive destructiveness--the "high level of damage and population casualties"--according to newly declassified histories published today by the National Security Archive. The war plan also appalled Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who wanted to find ways to curb its overk
Source: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn
November 23, 2007
A Chinese former "comfort woman" flew to Canada Thursday to place pressure on the Canadian parliament to pass a bill urging Japan to formally apologize to women forced into sexual slavery during World War II. The Dutch parliament endorsed a similar resolution this week.
Liu Mianhuan, 80, from Shanxi Province, was joined by three other comfort women from South Korea, the Netherlands and the Philippines, and is scheduled to take part in a series of events in Toronto and Otta
Source: Daily Mail
November 21, 2007
Italy's ex-royals are demanding £260 million in damages - and the return of confiscated property, including the presidential palace - for being sent into exile after World War II.
The Savoy dynasty, with a lineage dating back to the 10th century, unified Italy in the 1800s and ruled the country as a kingdom until Italians voted in a 1946 referendum to become a republic.
Two years later, Italy's new Constitution barred the last king, Umberto II, and his male descendants
Source: HNN Staff
November 23, 2007
M. Stanton Evans, a stalwart of the conservative movement for half a century, has written a new book about Joe McCarthy, the long-reviled senator from Wisconsin whose name became a term of opprobrium.
In a review in the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, Robert Novak asserts that Evans make a convincing case that McCarthy was innocent of the three main charges leveled against him:
The demonization of McCarthy was essentially a three-part
Source: C-SPAN
November 23, 2007
Featuring film, sound and video clips that have not been aired yet during our programs - Eleanor Roosevelt speaking with troops in the Pacific, Kennedy family home movies, Gerald Ford Election eve program from Air Force One, and others. Also an interview with Sharon Fawcett, Asst. U.S. Archivist for Pres. Libraries.
Source: Haaretz
November 16, 2007
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg Thursday acquitted an Austrian journalist of "causing the suicide" of a German professor who claimed that the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933. The ruling was handed down in a complicated case involving freedom of speech, libel and anti-Semitism.
The court found in favor of veteran journalist Karl Pfeifer, ruling that Austrian courts failed to protect Pfeifer's good name. The court ordered the Austrian government to pay
