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: Observer
April 15, 2007
MADRID -- As Spain prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the first mass terror bombing of a civilian population, the German and Italian attack on Guernica during the Spanish civil war, an extraordinary battle is taking place through the country's obituary columns.
It began with the decision last year by the family of Commander Virgilio Leret Ruiz, General Franco's first victim, to commemorate his death. It is a process that has brought back the language and the painful mem
Source: Observer
April 15, 2007
People living near a pagan statue that draws thousands of tourists every year to Northern Ireland's lakelands are threatening a campaign of civil disobedience amid concerns it could be moved to Belfast.
The Janus, which has stood in the Caldragh graveyard on Boa Island in Co Fermanagh since it was put up by the Celts more than 2,000 years ago, inspired the Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney to write the poem, 'January God'. Locals hold the 2ft tall figure, depicting a man on one
Source: Independent
April 15, 2007
It was the reality contest that pitted crumbling palaces and decaying bathhouses against dilapidated factories and abandoned mines.
BBC2's Restoration was an unlikely TV hit: a prime-time show focusing on architecture and conservation, which regularly drew massive audiences, and raised millions of pounds to rescue historic buildings at risk of demolition or collapse. But now, after just three series, the programme is to be axed, presenter Griff Rhys Jones said...
Initia
Source: Xinhua
April 15, 2007
Tens of thousands of Turks, waving national flags and chanting slogans, rallied in the capital Ankara on Saturday to voice their determinations to protect the secular republic...
Carrying a two-km-long Turkish flag, the participants shouted " Turkey is secular and will remain secular forever."
The rally came amid widespread concerns that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will run for president in May.
The country's secularists fear that if Erdog
Source: AP
April 14, 2007
JERUSALEM -- Felix Muller, 20, was born long after the Holocaust ended, but that doesn't diminish his sense of obligation to the victims.
"As a German, it's part of my history whether I want it or not," Muller said.
Last summer, he and two dozen other German volunteers arrived in Israel for a year of service through a group called Ot Hakapara, Hebrew for "Sign of Atonement," working at libraries, nursing homes and community centers around the country
Source: Erik Hedegaard in Rolling Stone
March 21, 2007
Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible....It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. In the CIA, he'd helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktai
Source: AP
April 14, 2007
PARIS —- Wars and weather have left few scars on Paris' Arc de Triomphe. Commissioned by Napoleon to celebrate his victories, the 15-story tower of bone-white stone stands as an eternal monument to French glory, a time when Europe trembled before this nation's might.
The national mood now, as France enters the final week before Sunday's presidential election, is far less exultant. To Roland Perrossier, whose great-great grandfather fought for Napoleon, the arch has become a symbol o
Source: Times (of London)
April 14, 2007
PARIS -- Early one Monday morning this month Raymond Lansoy awoke to discover workers armed with pneumatic drills outside À La Pomponette restaurant in Montmartre.
“They were digging up the cobblestones and covering the road with asphalt,” he said in a tone of outrage.
The work was part of a €3 million (£2 million) development designed to turn Montmartre into the sort of green, car-free zone that councillors thought would appeal to tourists and to the wealthy young prof
Source: The Hindu (Chennai, India)
April 13, 2007
BAKU, Azerbaijan -- India and Azerbaijan are brainstorming ways to rediscover their centuries-old commercial and cultural bonds.
"For several reasons, we, in India, have not been conscious enough about our geography. The Silk Route linked us to the people in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea. We need to know that in order to build our future," Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh said here.
Mr. Ramesh is in Baku to sign an agreement on forming an India-
Source: Jerusalem Post
April 13, 2007
Pensioners' rights group Ken Lazaken called Thursday for a boycott of official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies to protest the government's failure to sufficiently help the more than 70,000 Holocaust survivors who live in poverty in Israel.
"People should not participate in ceremonies to remember the dead, when really we should be remembering and helping those who are still living," Nathan Lavon, director of Ken Lazaken, said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
Source: New Zealand Herald (Auckland)
April 14, 2007
Captain Cook's landing site at Botany Bay is to Australians as Plymouth Rock is to Americans, according to some.
Historians say a plan to build a desalination plant close to where Captain Cook first landed in Botany Bay is an act of cultural vandalism.
Campaigners say the plan is the latest in a long line of ventures with which New South Wales has "wiped its bum" on the historic location -- Australia's birthplace -- where the Union flag was first hoisted in A
Source: Xinhua/China View
April 13, 2007
ZHENGZHOU, China -- Chinese archaeologists have discovered a complex of 50 tombs, most of which date back 1,800 years, in Jiaozuo City, in central China's Henan Province.
Some of the tombs date from the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220), others belong to the Eastern Jin dynasty (317 to 420), the Northern Dynasties period (386 to 581) and the Tang dynasty (618 to 907).
Archaeologists unearthed more than 200 historical artifacts, including pottery utensils, china objects, bronz
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
April 14, 2007
The East German secret police the Stasi ruled East Germany with a Big Brother like omnipresence until the Berlin Wall was knocked down in 1989.
That era of covert surveillance, spying and intrigue has been brought to life with the screening...of "The Lives of Others", the movie that won Best Foreign Film at this year's Academy Awards.
But a visit to Leipzig, now a blossoming city in the heart of the former East Germany, also allows visitors to experience just
Source: AP
April 11, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate is urging quick action by six countries to allow the opening of a secret Nazi archive holding millions of pages that document the lives and deaths of millions of World War II concentration camp inmates.
In a resolution passed Wednesday, the Senate urged a the international commission that controls access to the archives to speed up at its meeting next month in Amsterdam, Netherlands, a process to make them public.
Until recently the archive
Source: Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
April 13, 2007
Hundreds of thousands of books and many thousand Judaica items, which belonged to Holocaust victims and were distributed to public and private bodies in Israel in the 1950s, may now be reclaimed and returned to their heirs.
The state-owned Company for Locating and Retrieving Assets of Holocaust Victims intends to round up the cultural treasures and attempt to restore them to their rightful claimants.
It has recently transpired that more than 5,000 Judaica items, hundred
Source: ABC News
April 13, 2007
As radio shock jock Don Imus apologizes to the Rutgers women's basketball team for his racist characterization of its players, the event is playing out exactly 60 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball.
When Robinson took the field, he faced racist taunts, and while much has changed since that time, it's clear that much has stayed the same.Related Links
Source: AP
April 13, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Three Frank Lloyd Wright structures and nine other sites in 10 states have been designated U.S. National Historic Landmarks.
The buildings by the famed American architect are the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pa., a glazed glass pyramidal tower built in the 1950s; the Aline Barnsdall Complex (Hollyhock House) in Los Angeles, lauded for emphasizing the relationship between the building and the landscape; and Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., a cantilevered 19-story buil
Source: BBC News
April 13, 2007
TOKYO -- China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao strode into the parliamentary chamber of Japan's Imperial Diet to a warm round of applause from lawmakers...
Both governments have agreed it seems time to try to reduce the chances of the "history issue" causing problems for them.
They have set up a joint committee of Chinese and Japanese historians to study 2,000 years of their shared history and draw up a report setting out their positions and discussing why they di
Source: Times (of London)
April 14, 2007
Passenger lists from the Titanic can be seen online for the first time from today to mark the 95th anniversary of the disaster this weekend.
Documents recording the details of all who sailed on the ill-fated maiden voyage were previously kept under tight security at the National Archives, and could be viewed only under supervision.
But amateur historians and descendants of the 1,500 passengers and crew who died when the ship sank on April 15, 1912, can now read the hand
Source: Times (of London)
April 14, 2007
To howls of indignation from literary purists, a leading publishing house is slimming down some of the world’s greatest novels.
Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray would not have agreed with the view that 40 per cent of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Vanity Fair are mere “padding”, but Orion Books believes that modern readers will welcome the shorter versions.
The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads “in half the time”, will go on sale
