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: Telegraph (UK)
October 30, 2007
The buccaneering, but largely forgotten, exploits of an 18th century Scottish soldier, who once controlled vast tracts of Europe, are to be commemorated by the German village where he died in battle.
James Keith, a charismatic military mastermind, governed Finland, Ukraine, and Berlin. He was feted as a soldier in Spain, in Russia and in Prussia, and sought as a lover by the Tsarina Elizabeth I.
But despite contemporary acclaim, Keith's career is today more shrouded in
Source: AFP
October 31, 2007
More than 60 years had passed, but Akira Makino still suffered nightmares about Filipino hostages and the injections that rendered them unconscious. Then there was the one about the surgical knife gouging a human liver.
Every time he woke up to the flashbacks of horrific killing scenes, he shut his eyes tight and tried to turn his mind away from something he no longer wanted to think about.
But Makino, 84, also felt he had to speak out about his wartime experiences to a
Source: Christian Today
October 30, 2007
The village church and its steeple have dominated the skyline of rural France for centuries, surviving feuding warlords, foreign invasion and the upheavals of the French Revolution.
But as local mayors look to the future, some are thinking the unthinkable and threatening to demolish the crumbling churches they have to fund, prompting cries of sacrilege from a heritage lobby that says the French way of life is under attack.
Hundreds of 19th-century edifices face the wrec
Source: NYT
October 30, 2007
The names of thousands of people who were executed during the bloodiest period of Stalin’s purges were read aloud in a daylong ceremony here on Monday at a square in front of the former Soviet secret police headquarters, where many of the victims died or began their journey to execution.
Memorial, a human rights organization that assists survivors of Soviet repression and commemorates its victims, organized the event, one of a series this year marking the 70th anniversary of a perio
Source: AFP
October 29, 2007
Fifty years ago Saturday, a perky-eared mutt named Laika, scooped up from the streets of Moscow, became the first earthling to breach our planet's atmosphere and enter space.
It was a short and painful voyage for the docile little stray, which died within hours after launch, but a crowning coup for the Soviet Union.
Only a month earlier, Moscow had humiliated the United States by lobbing Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit.
Sputnik 2 added anot
Source: AP
October 29, 2007
The FBI used mob muscle to solve the 1964 disappearance of three civil rights volunteers in Mississippi, a gangster's ex-girlfriend testified Monday, becoming the first witness to repeat in open court a story that has been underworld lore for years.
Linda Schiro said that her boyfriend, Mafia tough guy Gregory Scarpa Sr., was recruited by the FBI to help find the volunteers' bodies. She said Scarpa later told her he put a gun in a Ku Klux Klansman's mouth and forced him to reveal th
Source: LiveScience
October 30, 2007
More than fifty headless skeletons have been unearthed in one of the oldest Pacific Islander cemeteries in the world.
The individuals were members of a socially complex society, traveling between islands hundreds of miles away, a new study suggests.
The finding could solve a long-held debate over whether the Lapita people, thought to be ancestors of the Polynesians, were isolated on individual islands or interacted with other distant Lapita tribes to find marriage partn
Source: AP
October 29, 2007
When it comes to presidential politics, the news media loves front-runners. And seems to hate them, too.
Within the first five months of the presidential contest, the media effectively had reduced the field to five candidates, even though there were 17 mainstream Democrats and Republicans, a study of political coverage found.
But the tone of the coverage for the top two front-runners — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani — hardly was friendly. N
Source: Reuters
October 26, 2007
An Austrian farmer beheaded by the Nazis for refusing to serve in Hitler's army was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church on Friday in a ceremony attended by his 94-year-old widow.
Around 5,000 people joined 27 bishops and cardinals to honour Franz Jaegerstaetter, a devout Catholic who died in 1943, aged 37.
"He gave his life in mighty-hearted self-denial and with an upright conscience, in loyalty to the gospel and for the dignity of mankind," Pope Benedict w
Source: AP
October 27, 2007
Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.
The lawmakers said that Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."
Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary, was responding to arguments that the United States should
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
October 30, 2007
As required by law, the Director of National Intelligence today
disclosed that the budget for the National Intelligence Program in
Fiscal Year 2007 was $43.5 billion.
The disclosure was strongly resisted by the intelligence bureaucracy,
and for that very reason it may have significant repercussions for
national security classification policy.
Although the aggregate intelligence budget figures for 1997 and 1998
($26.6 and $26.7 billion respectively) had previously been disclosed
Source: Waco Tribune
October 30, 2007
For Byron Johnson, director of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, a nearly 70-foot-tall statue of a 19th-century Ranger represents the idyllic image most Americans have of the legendary Texas lawmen.
But for Ernesto Calderon, a Mexican-American and Waco native with roots in the Chicano movement, the statue carries the symbolism a 70-foot-tall noose could hold for an African-American.The proposal to erect a towering Texas Ranger statue outside Waco’s off
Source: AFP
October 30, 2007
For many Franco's mausoleum, with its giant granite cross that is visible for kilometers around, is a painful reminder of the suffering endured under Franco's repressive dictatorship, which only ended after his death in 1975. But a controversial law to be voted on by parliament Wednesday which aims to honor the the victims of the 1936-39 civil war and the dictatorship that followed it, includes measures to depoliticize the grounds.The "law of historical memory" wou
Source: Reuters
October 30, 2007
Russian President Vladimir Putin paid his respects on Tuesday to millions of people killed under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and called for the country to unite to prevent a repeat of its tragic past.Putin, a former KGB spy, marked Russia's annual day of remembrance for the victims of Stalin's purges with a visit to Butovo, a military training ground near Moscow where tens of thousands of people were executed by firing squads.
Millions of people were executed
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 28, 2007
In the early stages of its planning, the European Digital Library held the promise of a counterstrike to Google domination of digital archives through the search engine's vast book search project and powerful alliances with American universities.
But as the European project prepares for its debut early next year, the 80 museums, film institutes and national libraries involved are facing the reality of limited government funding for the enormous task of digitizing material, and they
Source: http://dsc.discovery.com
October 15, 2007
People turned to farming to grow fiber for clothing, and not to provide food, says one researcher who challenges conventional ideas about the origins of agriculture.
Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, says his theory also explains why Aboriginal Australians were not generally farmers.
Gilligan says they did not need fiber for clothing, so had no reason to grow crops like cotton.
He argues his case in the current issu
Source: Herald Sun (Australia)
October 26, 2007
THE Memorial rights group has compiled a database on over 2.6 million victims of Joseph Stalin's purges, to be distributed in schools and public organisations, the group's chief said.
"Our database this far is only 20-25 percent of the total number. This is a result of the work conducted by hundreds of people in many regions throughout nearly 20 years," Arseny Roginsky said as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.
The group issued 5000 copies of the database,
Source: BBC
October 27, 2007
Ukrainian authorities have reburied near the capital, Kiev, the bodies of some 2,000 people killed by the Soviet secret police more than 60 years ago.
Relatives of the victims watched as red coffins were lowered into graves and blessed by a priest at the ceremony.
The bodies, including 474 Poles, were dug up this year in Bykovnya, where tens of thousands are thought to have been dumped during the 1930s and 1940s.
Source: http://www.citizen-times.com/
October 25, 2007
Disagreement over whether a Civil War ancestor should lie beneath a Union or a Confederate headstone has led to the arrest of a Gaston County jailer, charged with desecrating the grave of the veteran.
A warrant was served Oct. 15 on Richard Hill, a detention officer with the Gaston County Sheriff's Department, Gaston County Chief Deputy Tim Farris said Monday.
The warrant was issued in Madison County, where the grave lies. It was taken out by Sheila Grindstaff of Mars H
Source: http://www.independentmail.com
October 25, 2007
It’s a sight that elicits a second glance, maybe a third. A black man marching along the S.C. 28 toward Walhalla dressed in Confederate butternut, carrying a Confederate battle flag.
To H.K. Edgerton, however, it’s a march for truth in history as critical as any march for civil rights. Mr. Edgerton’s march Thursday carried him to Oconee County.
When it comes to the role of blacks in the Confederacy, Mr. Edgerton is less than happy about the story.
“This fl
