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)
September 4, 2007
George Orwell, the author who coined the phrase "Big Brother is watching you", was himself the subject of intense surveillance by the secret services, documents released on Tuesday disclose.
The creator of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisages a day when every person's movements are scrutinised by a totalitarian state, was closely monitored amid concerns that he was a prominent member of the communist movement....
Files released by the National Archives disclo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 4, 2007
She is one of the nation’s most revered heroines, the determined Lady with the Lamp who saved the lives of wounded British soldiers in the Crimea and pioneered modern nursing. But not everybody in Victorian Britain loved Florence Nightingale.
She was, according to a prominent figure whose nose she badly put out of joint in the Crimea, a meddlesome and arrogant publicity-seeker who found it easier to make enemies than friends.
Unpublished letters written by Sir John Hall
Source: http://www.lancashireeveningtelegraph.co.uk
August 27, 2007
A RARE diary, giving an unique insight into life in World War One's trenches, has been transcribed by a history student for public use.
An unknown soldier is responsible for the log, which gives an unflinching account of life on the Western Front from 1917 and 1918 and is held at Blackburn's Central Library.
The 40-page diary was kept by a soldier from the Royal Field Artillery's 330 Brigade A Battery - for which four Blackburn soldiers gave their lives on the field of
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 31, 2007
The killing of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th century, and has been called the first modern genocide.
In all, 25 concentration camps were set up in a systematic slaughter aimed at eradicating the Armenian people - classed as "vermin" by the Turks.
Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted: "This crim
Source: NYT
September 4, 2007
A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.
Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happ
Source: http://www.news.com.au
September 4, 2007
A Beefeater at the Tower of London made history yesterday - she became the first woman in the post.
Moira Cameron, from Argyll in Scotland, beat five men to secure the coveted position as a Yeoman Warder, the first female in the role in the guards' 522-year history.
She donned the traditional blue and scarlet livery for her duties, which began with opening the Beauchamp Tower and the Chapel Royal of St Peter and Vincula.
Source: WaPo
September 3, 2007
It was just two days after President Bush's reelection in 2004, and Condoleezza Rice was planning her move back home to California and to the tranquility of life at Stanford University.
But Bush had other plans. In a private meeting at Camp David on the morning of Friday, Nov. 6, the president made his pitch: Colin Powell was out as secretary of state -- though Bush hadn't told him yet -- and the president wanted Rice to take the job.
Source: WaPo
September 3, 2007
Karl Rove told George W. Bush before the 2000 election that it was a bad idea to name Richard B. Cheney as his running mate, and Rove later raised objections to the nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court, according to a new book on the Bush presidency.
In "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush," journalist Robert Draper writes that Rove told Bush he should not tap Cheney for the Republican ticket: "Selecting Daddy's top foreign-policy guru ran count
Source: NBC video (scroll)
September 3, 2007
In Stonewall, Miss., a former 'whites-only' swimming pool officially reopens after three decades of being buried. As NBC's Ron Mott reports, its painful past has found a new life.
Source: Earth Times
August 23, 2007
New Zealand's Hell pizza chain, which is known for its wacky advertising campaigns, has scrapped billboards showing Hitler saluting with a slice of pizza after complaints from the Jewish community, a newspaper reported on Friday. The Nazi leader was shown giving a Heil Hitler salute with pizza in his hand and the quote: "It is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell."
Kirk MacGibbon, of the Cinderella advertising agency that devised the billboard, told The Press new
Source: Earth Times
August 31, 2007
German television has uncovered a Nazi shrine in a bunker in Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg mountain lair near Berchtesgaden in the state of Bavaria. Prosecutors said Friday they were laying charges against the owner of the World War II bunker for allowing Nazi slogans and swastikas to be scrawled on its walls.
According to a television report by national public broadcaster ARD, the bunker is advertised in the hotel located above and visitors pay an entry charge.
Source: The Hindu
September 1, 2007
British military scientists sent hundreds of Indian soldiers into gas chambers and exposed them to mustard gas, documents uncovered by this reporter have revealed.
The Indian troops were serving under the command of the British military at a time when India was under colonial rule.
The British military did not check up on the Indian soldiers after the experiments to see if they developed any illnesses. It is now recognised that mustard gas can cause cancer and other dis
Source: Vancouver Sun (BC)
September 3, 2007
France is a pretty country full of pretty little villages, but Oradour sur Glane is not pretty.
On June 10, 1944, possibly as a reprisal for the death of a German officer, Nazi troops encircled the village, then, quickly working toward the centre, rounded up every person they found and killed them. Next they burned the village. They also burned the bodies.
Not long after, France was liberated and the new French leader, General Charles De Gaulle, visited the site. He dec
Source: BBC
September 2, 2007
Intimate, revealing and previously unpublished, the Mitford letters present a vivid portrait of the six sisters and the age they lived in. Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the sole surviving Mitford, talks to John Preston about some of their more surprising revelations.
In June 1937, Deborah Mitford visited Munich where she took tea with Adolf Hitler. 'I went with my sister Unity and our mother to his flat,' she recalls. 'The atmosphere was rather awkward because ne
Source: BBC
September 3, 2007
An archaeological dig has started in Dumfries and Galloway in an attempt to find out more about the Scot viewed as the founder of the United States Navy.
A US team is carrying out the investigation at the cottage where John Paul Jones was born in 1747.
They hope even traces of "trash" will shed more light on his early years.
Source: BBC
September 3, 2007
Britain's historic buildings - some of the jewels in our architectural crown - are crumbling, not because of a lack of money, but because of a shortage of traditional skills.
Watch stonemasons at work and as you feel the tang of dust in your throat, hear the clash of metal and material and see objects painstakingly appear, it's hard not feel a certain frisson of magic.
Never mind shopkeepers, ours used to be a nation of trades people and craftsmen, but now it is easy to think
Source: Peter Steinfels in the NYT
September 1, 2007
One hundred years ago next Saturday Pope Pius X issued a papal encyclical, “Pascendi Dominici Gregis,” that would have a huge impact on the Roman Catholic Church and consequently on its role in the blood-drenched history of the first half of the 20th century.
Today, not many Roman Catholics, let alone others, could identify or describe “Pascendi.” Yet compared with the widely known encyclicals addressing social and moral problems, it has probably had a deeper impact on their religio
Source: NYT
September 2, 2007
Again it comes, for the sixth time now — 2,191 days after that awful morning — falling for the first time on a Tuesday, the same day of the week.
Again there will be the public tributes, the tightly scripted memorial events, the reflex news coverage, the souvenir peddlers.
Is all of it necessary, at the same decibel level — still?
Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It be
Source: NYT
September 2, 2007
When President Bush is asked what he plans to do when he leaves office, he often replies curtly: “I don’t have that much time to think beyond my presidency” or “I’m going to sprint to the finish.”
But in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estima
Source: NYT
September 1, 2007
On May 25, Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, devoted the bulk of its front page to the university’s former provost, who is on leave while she serves out her term as secretary of state. “Condi Eyes Return,” read the headline, “but in What Role?”
Within hours, the letters to the editor started coming in. “Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty. Stanford should not welc
