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: NYT
August 1, 2007
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed some irritation on Tuesday at the resolution approved by the House of Representatives in Washington that calls on Japan to acknowledge its wartime sex slavery. His reaction indicated strongly that the Japanese government would not offer surviving victims an official apology.
“The resolution’s approval was regrettable,” said Mr. Abe, who caused a furor in Asia and the United States in March by denying that the Japanese military had directly coerced
Source: Kansas City Star
August 2, 2007
Who owns the voice of John J. Pershing?
You can hear the World War I general’s address to Americans from the battlefields of France at the Library of Congress or on its Web site — and nobody has a problem with that.
You can also hear it at the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial — and there’s at least one person who has a problem with that.
Edward Golterman of St. Louis says he holds the rights to the Pershing speech and at least three other rec
Source: Arizona Republic
August 1, 2007
The Phoenix Museum of History is asking city residents to become a part of its next exhibit.
"The Mexican American Mirror: Reflections of Our City's Heritage" will open Oct. 12, and museum officials are looking for donations and loans for the temporary exhibit. Residents can donate or loan items that pertain to Mexican-American history in Phoenix.
"This is a really great opportunity for the community to share what they have with the public," said mus
Source: Guardian
August 2, 2007
Google is set to keep a closer eye on what you do online with a new service that tracks of every web page you visit.
Web History, which is already available for American users, is being released to users worldwide in 26 languages today. The service allows surfers to keep tabs of the sites they have visited, and allows Google to provide more targeted results based on the sites users have looked in the past.
The system requires a piece of software to be installed which mo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 2, 2007
For the past five days, it has been an extraordinary international celebration of youth and goodwill.
A rainbow of uniforms and flags has come together in a tented city as thousands of Scouts from more than 160 nations have marked the centenary of their movement.
A 100 years after Lt Gen Robert Baden-Powell founded the Scouts with an experimental camp of just 20 boys, 40,000 of their successors have descended on his native country for a two-week jamboree remembering him
Source: BBC
August 1, 2007
There is no plaque on the wall outside the premises at 52 Friars Vennel in Dumfries.
Sandwiched between a Chinese takeaway and a fishing tackle store it hardly has the aura of historical importance.
Yet it was from that doorway that a "mischievous" young man emerged who would go on to receive the Croix de Guerre from France and Britain's Distinguished Flying Medal.
Now a retired journalist and author from Whitehaven hopes to take the story of Edwa
Source: http://www.alamogordonews.com
July 29, 2007
Operation Paperclip was the code name used for an extraction process of German scientists from Nazi Germany during and immediately after the last stages of World War II, which brought together a team at White Sands Proving Grounds (now White Sands Missile Range) that assembled and tested the Nazi V-2 rocket, with all initial components having been brought from the fatherland as well.
The immigration process allowing for the entry of these individuals, some with questionable ties to
Source: http://en.rian.ru/russia
July 30, 2007
Russia's Foreign Ministry condemned Monday a meeting of veterans of Estonia's Waffen SS division in the Baltic state over the weekend, calling it an outrageous event and regretting that it received official backing.
Estonian SS veterans and their supporters gathered Saturday in the northeast of the country to commemorate one of the bloodiest battles in Estonia during World War II. Reunions to glorify so-called fighters against the Soviet occupation have become a tradition in the Bal
Source: AFP
July 30, 2007
The last living witness to the final hours of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader's personal bodyguard Rochus Misch, has turned 90 but vowed to keep his secrets to himself, a report said.
Mr Misch was 27 when he left Hitler's bunker on May 2, 1945 as Soviet troops stormed the chancellery in Berlin, two days after the Fuhrer killed himself with a gunshot to the head, Spiegel Online reported.
He has kept quiet on who killed Hermann Fegelein, who was married to the sister of Eva
Source: Army Times
August 1, 2007
The Army will present the Silver Star on Tuesday to the daughter of a World War I Army nurse who treated wounded soldiers while under artillery fire in 1918.
Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, acting surgeon general of the Army and chief of the Army Nurse Corps, will present the posthumous award for Linnie Leckrone at a 1:15 p.m. ceremony at The Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Va., according to an Army press release.
Leckrone, who died in 1989, was aut
Source: BBC
July 29, 2007
A bid to exhume the remains of a man who is thought to be the last recoverable Battle of Britain pilot from a site in Kent has been abandoned.
Flt Sgt Eric Williams was 28 when he was shot down on a combat mission over the Thames Estuary on 15 October 1940.
His squadron was attacked by German fighters led by Major Adolf Galland - the leading German ace of the period.
The operation to recover his remains from the site in Albion Parade, Gravesend, was called
Source: NYT
August 2, 2007
Nowhere in the ponderous rules of the United States Senate is there any reference to the Mae West hold, the chokehold or the rotating hold.
Yet over the past 50 years, all three variations on the Senate hold — one of the most secretive backroom weapons in Congress — have been used to tie the chamber in knots by allowing senators to block legislation and nominations anonymously, and to do so for reasons as simple as pique or payback.
Now senators are considering bringing
Source: NYT
August 1, 2007
All branches of science search for origins. Biologists want to know how life on earth began. Astronomers want to know how the universe got started. Even in mathematics, questions about how different numerical systems came to be constitute a legitimate line of inquiry.
Linguists are different. In the middle of the 19th century, the main professional bodies governing linguistic research formally banned any investigation into the origins of language, regarding it as pointless. The topi
Source: LAT
August 1, 2007
In a sweeping deal to end years of controversy, the J. Paul Getty Museum agreed today to return to Italy 40 antiquities from its collection, including several masterpieces and its prized 5th century BC statue of Aphrodite, a touchstone of its collection.
The draft agreement, reached over a furious exchange of faxes late Tuesday night, includes broader cultural cooperation and loans. It is expected to be finalized in the coming days. With the deal, the Getty will avoid a threatened c
Source: NYT
August 1, 2007
Supreme Court justices guard their medical privacy fiercely, and Chief Justice Roberts has proved no exception. All that he authorized the court’s public information apparatus to disclose were the bare facts of the incident on Monday and his release from a Rockport, Me., hospital on Tuesday “to resume his vacation,” as Kathleen Arberg, the court spokeswoman, put it. No further information would be forthcoming, Ms. Arberg said.
The chief justice was following the model of his former
Source: Chicago Tribune
August 1, 2007
The neighborhoods along Chicago's southern lakefront have been so thoroughly studied that sociologists sometimes confront each other, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, as if they were competing for choice territory....
Chicago's South Side is "the most studied place in the world," according to Howard Becker, one of the most influential of American sociologists. Pattillo's book, published this year, is the latest to explore the Black Belt, the area's historic name.
Source: Monsters and Critics
August 1, 2007
Memorial ceremonies across Poland Wednesday marked the 63rd anniversary of the tragic Warsaw Uprising of Polish Home Army (AK) partisans against occupying Nazi German forces, bent on systematically destroying the Polish capital and its population during World War Two.With Poland's post-war communist authorities bent on trivializing the Home Army's wartime drive for Polish sovereignty, the uprising was relegated to the margins of history until the demise of communism in 1989.
Source: Hindustan Times (India)
August 1, 2007
Stung by the costly exercise of rescuing a draft article of Mahatma Gandhi from an auction, the government has decided to evolve a national policy on the acquisition and preservation of Gandhi manuscripts.
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, in consultation with the Ahmedabad-based Navjeevan Trust - the sole custodian of all Gandhi manuscripts - is preparing a legal brief which will be sent to Indian missions abroad to help them acquire Gandhi's letters found in possession of col
Source: NYT
August 1, 2007
A 62-year-old sculpture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima is getting the heave-ho from the museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid while the ship is docked in Staten Island for an overhaul, museum officials and the sculpture’s owner said yesterday.
The five-ton sculpture, which served as a model for the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., has been on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum since 1995. But museum officials, who are starting to renovate
Source: NYT
August 1, 2007
Norma Gabler, a Texas homemaker who recoiled at material in her children’s textbooks and became the public face of a crusade with her husband to rid schoolbooks of content they considered antifamily, anti-American and anti-God, died on July 22 in Phoenix. She was 84....
From its origins at the Gablers’ kitchen table in Hawkins, Tex., in 1961 to its incorporation as Educational Research Analysts in 1973, the mom-and-pop textbook-criticism enterprise grew to occupy a prominent niche i
