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: Jerusalem Post
August 23, 2007
The chief spokesman of the Russian Air Force, Col. Aleksandr V. Drobyshevsky, has confirmed in writing for the first time that it was Soviet pilots, in the USSR's most-advanced MiG-25 "Foxbat" aircraft, who flew highly-provocative sorties over Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona in May 1967, just prior to the Six Day War.
Gideon Remez and Isabello Ginor, who co-wrote the recent book Foxbats over Dimona, which asserts that the Soviet Union deliberately engineered the war to
Source: WaPo
August 19, 2007
The hat catches the eye. It lends an air of mystery to Frederick I. Douglas. Who wears a Panama hat these days?
When he strides through a District restaurant, he seems from another era, wearing the same kind of hat once worn by the 19th-century Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave turned abolitionist, publisher and statesman. Douglas is a Douglass reenactor, you see. In a life of performance art, he poses as the great man. Douglas, 60, makes appearances around the country in top ha
Source: Ascribe
August 21, 2007
The Middlebury College Julian W. Abernethy Collection of American Literature has acquired the Ernest Hemingway and Hemingway Family Collection. The archive includes family correspondence, journals, more than 1400 original letters and 151 scans of Hemingway's letters. The material dates from the mid-19th century to the author's death in 1961.
Items of special interest include several diaries dating from the 1850s; Civil War letters belonging to the author's grandfather, Anson
Source: Time
August 23, 2007
Israel has always tiptoed around the whole idea of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, in which 1.5 million Armenians perished cruelly at the hands of Ottoman Turks. You’d think that if anybody could understand, and sympathize, about genocide, it should be the Jews, since they suffered their own genocide during the Nazi holocaust, right?
Not exactly.
Israel needs to maintain good relations with Turkey –-for its stuffed grape leaves, beach resorts and to have at least on
Source: Time Magazine
August 23, 2007
Politically, President Bush has reached the point all gamblers fear: being so far down that higher stakes start to look worth the risk. Public support for his handling of the war in Iraq is already abysmal, with 70% against him and only 25% still in his camp. So perhaps he felt he had very little to lose when Wednesday, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Mo., he effectively doubled down, arguing not only that America needs to stay in Iraq until a stable democracy can tak
Source: NYT
August 23, 2007
The American withdrawal from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war — but one with few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.
Now, in urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, President Bush is challenging that historical memory.
In reminding Americans that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of bloody upheaval in Southeast Asia, Mr. Bush argued in a speech on Wednesday that Vietnam’s lessons provide a reason
Source: NYT
August 23, 2007
The authorities in Estonia on Wednesday said that they had charged a cousin of a former president with genocide in connection with his role as a Communist bureaucrat involved in the deportation of civilians to Siberia in 1949.
The man, Arnold Meri, fought the Nazis and became a prominent official in the Communist Party during the decades of Soviet occupation in the Baltics. He was charged last week, his lawyer and the authorities said. If convicted, Mr. Meri, 88, could be sentenced
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
August 22, 2007
A recent report on students’ research habits raises questions about all the hand-wringing in academe concerning students’ overreliance on Google and Wikipedia to complete assignments. The report, based on a study conducted this year at Saint Mary’s College of California, found that most students started their research by turning to course readings or the library Web site, not Web search engines or Wikipedia.
Source: AFP
August 23, 2007
Experts say that US President George W. Bush may be misrepresenting history when he drew a parallel between the bloody wars Americans fought in East Asia to the current US "war on terror" to back his case for maintaining US troops in Iraq."My understanding of the history of the Vietnam war and the lessons of that differs rather dramatically from Mr Bush's," Robert Hathaway, an Asian expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told A
Source: Seattle Times
August 23, 2007
The White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn't want any.
A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance employees extensive instructions in the art of "deterring potential protesters" from President Bush's public appearances.
Among other things, any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be s
Source: NYT
August 22, 2007
To a mostly empty gallery, the man known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing villages in northern Iraq under Saddam Hussein stood up and identified himself as “the fighter, Ali Hassan al-Majid” on Tuesday, the first day of trial for his role in brutally suppressing the 1991 Shiite uprising in the south of the country.
Source: NYT
August 22, 2007
With a tough battle with Congress over the future of the war expected to come in September, President Bush offered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy today, declaring that he envisions an American victory there and asserting that a hasty withdrawal by the United States would unleash a bloodbath reminiscent of the Vietnam War era.
Mr. Bush accused the Congress of planning to “pull the rug out from under” American troops. He said the American pullout from Vietnam more than 32 years
Source: Zvika Krieger in the New Republic
August 17, 2007
Earlier this week, I found myself standing in the courtyard of Beirut's newest museum in front of the warped propeller of a Yasur CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. The propeller, a placard helpfully explained, had been "destroyed by the resistance" during last summer's war, a fate that had also befallen the half-dozen charred Israeli military vehicles surrounding it. A group of hijab-clad women nudged me out of the way so they could snap some photos with the propeller.
The do
Source: Reuters
August 21, 2007
Germans are starting to rethink their negative views about Prussia, the state which ruled much of northern Germany for centuries and which has been viewed for decades through the prism of Nazism.
In particular, a book by Australian historian Christopher Clark has stirred a debate about Prussia which Germans have vilified since World War Two for representing the militarism, discipline and blind obedience that helped Hitler rise to power.
"The Rise and Downfall of Pr
Source: Chicago Tribune
August 22, 2007
The Chicago History Museum is making some history of its own as it offers its first exhibit on a Chicago suburb, picking Schaumburg for the honor. That's Schaumburg as in Woodfield Mall, IKEA and "autoburb."
After 150 years of marking such big-city milestones as the Great Fire, Al Capone and the first "L" train, the museum has gone suburban, officials say.
"We finally broke out of the city limits because Chicago extends -- it's not just the city
Source: AP
August 21, 2007
The Justice Department said Tuesday that records about missing White House e-mails are not subject to public disclosure, the latest effort by the Bush administration to expand the boundaries of government secrecy.
Administration lawyers detailed the legal position in a lawsuit trying to force the White House Office of Administration to reveal what it knows about the disappearance of White House e-mails.
The Office of Administration provides administrative servic
Source: Sabre Foundation, Inc. via IraqCrisis email announcement
August 22, 2007
Last week brought two front page articles on Iraqi universities and scholars. The Financial Times, August 26, 2007 article, "Gates Foundation to help Iraqi academics escape persecution" describes a new fund, administered by New York City-based International Institute of Education, to relocate persecuted Iraqi scholars to neighboring countries. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 August 2007 article offers a sharp contrast, "Oasis in Iraq: Universities Flourish in Kurdistan&q
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 22, 2007
A branch of the Women's Institute has been told it cannot organise a market in a town square - despite a charter from Henry VIII granting permission to hold one there "forever".
Jacky Roberts-Wake, the president of Colyton WI, in east Devon, said they had been told by Devon county highways that there was no legal mechanism for closing the road.
The WI went ahead yesterday with its "buzzing" farmers' market in the local churchyard. Customers signed a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 22, 2007
Lord Puttnam, the Labour peer and Oscar-winning film-maker, has stirred up controversy by suggesting Michael Collins, the violent Irish patriot, was a peace icon.
His remarks drew an irate response from those who view Collins as a cold-blooded killer and contest the romantic republican view of him as a man who helped liberate Ireland from British oppression.
Lord Puttnam was speaking at a gathering held to mark the 85th anniversary of the rebel's death in an ambush duri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 22, 2007
A campaign to preserve a unique hybrid language spoken by the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on an isolated South Pacific island has been given a boost by the United Nations.
Norfolk Island's blend of 18th-century English and Tahitian, known as Norf'k or Norfuk, will be featured by Unesco in the next edition of its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing.
The language, one of the world's rarest, is under threat because Norfolk Islanders are increas
