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: National Post (Canada)
July 30, 2007
Pierre Trudeau has topped the list of the 10 "worst Canadians" in an online survey conducted by the country's top history magazine, the Beaver.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper placed sixth on the list, and ex-PMs Brian Mulroney (fourth) and Jean Chretien (eighth) also made the top 10.
The Beaver's plan to rank the most-loathed Canadians had stirred advance media interest around the world, largely because the concept seemed to run counter to Canadians' internatio
Source: International Herald Tribune
July 31, 2007
ROCHEFORT, France: Piece by piece, a graceful structure of whimsy and magic is taking shape in this old river port, fulfilling the dream of a group of sea-faring Frenchmen to pay tribute to a founding father of French-American friendship.
For a decade now, historians, carpenters, boat builders, craftsmen and blacksmiths have lovingly - if slowly - sought to recreate the Hermione, the 44-meter, or 145-foot, 32-gun, three-masted frigate that in 1780 carried a young French nobleman kno
Source: BBC
July 31, 2007
An ex-Khmer Rouge prison chief has been charged with crimes against humanity by a UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia.
Kang Kek Ieu, also known as Duch, was in charge of the notorious S21 jail in the country's capital, Phnom Penh.
Duch is the first of five suspects whom prosecutors have asked the tribunal to investigate over their role in the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
More than a million people are thought to have died during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule betwee
Source: BBC
July 31, 2007
German journalists have obtained previously unheard recordings from the trial of notorious Red Army Faction (RAF) urban guerrilla leaders.
German media say the voices of gang members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and Jan-Carl Raspe can be heard on the audio tapes.
The trial in 1975-1977 took place at Stuttgart's Stammheim prison.
The 21 tapes, with about 12 hours of recordings, were obtained by researchers for a TV documentary.
Source: Newhouse News Service
July 31, 2007
It's out there. Somewhere underneath cat claw briars or mud flats or even modern subdivision tracts, there are shards of Spanish metal, burned clay and a palisaded wall waiting to be found, which could answer one of the South's famous mysteries: Where is Mauvilla?
Historians gleaning descriptions from written accounts of Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto's expedition across the South say the earliest and bloodiest battle between Europeans and Indians happened at Mauvilla, a fortifie
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
July 31, 2007
On July 30, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it had reached a non-exclusive agreement with CustomFlix Labs, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., to make thousands of historic films from the Archives’ holdings available for purchase on Amazon.com. CustomFlix DVD on Demand service will initially make the National Archives’ collection of Universal Newsreels, dating from 1920 to 1967, available on DVD. A limited number of titles are already available on Amazon.com.
Source: HNN summary of article in New Yorker
July 31, 2007
A well-financed group plans to back a ballot initiative that would give the Republican presidential candidate a chance to pick up twenty electoral votes in California even if the state goes Democratic in 2008.
The initiative, which would appear on the June 2008 ballot, would apportion most electoral votes by congressional district instead of by the traditional winner-take-all method. Some twenty districts in CA almost certainly will vote Republican in 2008.
Few voters
Source: http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News
July 31, 2007
A Namibian human rights group said on Tuesday it had filed a request with the International Criminal Court to investigate the country's founding president over the disappearance of thousands of people.
In its submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) accuses Sam Nujoma of gross human rights violations as well as responsibility for the disappearance of about 4 200 people during his country's struggle for independence.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
August 1, 2007
THE battle against global poverty is being won but most Australians do not realise it.
The proportion of the world's people living on less than $US1 a day has dropped from 21.4 per cent to 17.3 per cent since 2000 and the number surviving on that income has fallen by 132 million since 1990, says a report by Australia's biggest overseas aid agency, World Vision.
As the number of people living in abject poverty has fallen, child mortality has dropped, the number of childr
Source: Inside Higher Ed
July 31, 2007
A plan to create a permanent home for the City College of San Francisco’s campus in Chinatown has provoked a bitter fight, with critics opposing the plan for a 16-story building on the grounds that it would loom over the historic area — and obstruct views from a nearby Hilton Hotel.
"Right from the time it was unveiled as one of the options, it has generated a lot of energy and a lot of heat, some good, some bad,” says City College’s chancellor, Philip R. Day Jr. In response to
Source: Press Release--David Wyman Institute
July 31, 2007
In response to petitions by Holocaust scholars, Jewish leaders, and families of Holocaust rescue activists, and an appeal by Elie Wiesel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has for the first time publicly pledged to change its Permanent Exhibit to acknowledge the rescue work of the Bergson Group.
The Bergson Group, also known as the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, was a maverick 1940s political action committee that used newspaper ads, rallies, and
Source: IHT
July 31, 2007
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described as "regrettable" on Tuesday the approval of a resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives calling on Japan to acknowledge its wartime sex slavery, indicating strongly that the Japanese government would not offer surviving victims an official apology."The resolution's approval was regrettable," said Abe, who provoked anger in Asia and the United States in March by denying that the Japanese military had directly coerc
Source: BBC
July 30, 2007
One of the City of London's most prominent landmarks has closed for a 4.5m pounds restoration programme.
The Monument's stonework will be cleaned and repaired and the famous golden orb re-gilded during the work.
There are also plans for live views from the top of the tower to be relayed to visitors on the ground unable to climb the 311 steps to the top.
Every year more than 10,000 people visit Sir Christopher Wren's monument to the Great Fire of 1666.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
July 30, 2007
They were all good Lutheran men and women, happy to drop the pastor a line.
"Dear Pastor," Army Pvt. Edmund C. Lust wrote on Jan. 25, 1944, while stationed in Kansas. "Hope & pray our church doesn't have any more casualties. It's so hard on the families & if there is no Holy Spirit present the grief is very much harder to take."...
And Pastor Oden safely stored away all of his precious letters.
Last fall, two members of Irving Pa
Source: BBC
July 30, 2007
US lawmakers have called on Japan's government to formally apologise for its role in forcing thousands of women to work as sex slaves in World War II.
The symbolic and non-binding resolution was passed during a voice vote in the House of Representatives.
Up to 200,000 "comfort women" were part of Japan's wartime military brothel programme that started in the 1930s.
Japan says it has shown sufficient remorse over the issue, but survivors and relati
Source: International Herald Tribune
July 22, 2007
When terrorists tried to blow up civilians in London and Glasgow, Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, responded in his own distinctive way.
What had just been narrowly averted, he said, was not a new jihadist act of war but instead a criminal act. As if to underscore the point, Brown instructed his ministers that the phrase "war on terror" was no longer to be used and, indeed, that officials were no longer even to employ the word "Muslim" in connection
Source: Robert Townsend in the AHA Blog (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
July 29, 2007
Moving past the usual alarmist anecdotes, a new study by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) offers hard evidence that the social studies are being squeezed in America’s schools by test-driven pressures imposed by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
English Language Arts (ELA) and Math—the two subjects that are regularly tested under NCLB—are taking up an increasing amount of student time. In a survey of 491 school districts they found that 58 percent increased the amount of time
Source: BBC
July 30, 2007
Thousands of academics from around the world have condemned plans for a UK boycott of Israeli institutions over its treatment of the Palestinians.
More than 10,000 academics have signed a declaration saying they would not join any project which barred Israelis.
The group, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said the boycott plans attacked academic freedoms.
The UK's University and College Union voted in May to debate a boycott, and suspects this h
Source: Indian Country Today
July 30, 2007
A Los Angeles Native woman’s anger over “Native”-themed summer camps is echoed across the country as many Native people continue to object to non-Native people’s appropriation of tribal traditions, reports Indian Country Today. While walking her dogs in a Los Angeles Park, Marisol Crisostomo-Romo, 26, spotted a van with a tipi on it. A group of white children piled into the van, clutching bows and arrows. They were members of the five-week-long Camp Shi'ini, ''a Native American-themed summer cam
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
July 30, 2007
An evening crew of bustling sailors had taken over loading munitions at Port Chicago Naval Magazine on July 17, 1944 -- a night like most others at the Suisun Bay pier during World War II.
At a barracks half a mile away, 20-year-old Irvin Lowery was relaxing with friends just after 10 p.m. when reverberations from a massive explosion shattered his windows and sent him flying across his room. The blast, the largest stateside disaster during the war, killed 320 people -- 202 of them
