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: LAT
March 30, 2007
Josef Stalin is speaking to his son Yakov, who has just telephoned to say that he will soon head off to battle the Nazi invaders.
"I sometimes was not fair to you. Forgive me. I devoted little time to you," the Soviet dictator apologizes. "Son, go and fight. This is your duty." He then switches to Georgian, the language of his childhood, and adds with even greater feeling: "If you have to die, do it with dignity. And you must be confident that your father, S
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
April 3, 2007
CAIRO -- Al-Ahram daily reported on Tuesday a new archaeological discovery by an Egyptian excavation mission in northern Sinai.
Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawwas was quoted as saying that an old military fort dating back to the 18th Dynasty (1347-1337 BC) was discovered after 10 years of excavating the area situated on the route linking Egypt to Israel.
Hawwas also said that the fort found was constructed on the ruins of a mili
Source: Reuters
April 3, 2007
ATHENS -- After almost 20 centuries of quietly flowing underground, the ancient Athenian river Eridanos openly and loudly gushes through a subway station in the heart of the capital, to the delight of visitors.
Since its opening to the public last week, the small river has instantly become Athens' version of Rome's Trevi fountain, with visitors dropping thousands of coins to its bottom.
When archaeologists started excavations under the central Monastiraki square to buil
Source: AP
April 2, 2007
CHICAGO -- A new 15-foot totem pole that marries traditional carving styles with contemporary techniques was erected Monday at The Field Museum, replacing a pole that was returned to an Alaskan tribe.
The new totem pole was carved by a father-and-son team from a western red cedar tree given as a gift to the museum from the Tlingit community of Cape Fox, Alaska.
In 2001, the museum returned one of its most treasured items -- a 26-foot totem pole removed from southeast Al
Source: Moscow Times
April 4, 2007
The [Russian] Foreign Ministry on Tuesday criticized the Polish curators of the Auschwitz museum for delaying the opening of an exhibit over the identity of the camp's victims.
The directors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum near Oswiecim, Poland, are insisting that those killed at the Nazi death camp be referred to as Polish, not Soviet, citizens in the exhibit, which is dedicated to Soviet liberation of thousands of the camp's prisoners...
The ministry called the
Source: Reuters
April 3, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The United States on Tuesday announced the arrests of three former South American military officers suspected of war crimes, including the accused chief interrogator of Argentina's former military government.
The three suspects, who also include two former Peruvian Army officers accused in the 1985 killing of 69 villagers known as the Accomarca massacre, were arrested during the past week by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.
Source: Reuters
April 3, 2007
BRUSSELS -- European countries should put on trial 37 suspects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide who are living in Europe, human rights groups said on Tuesday.
They accused major European governments including France and Belgium of giving the suspects safe haven.
Speaking ahead of the 13th anniversary of the genocide, when 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of state-sponsored killings, rights group REDRESS and the International Federation f
Source: Inside Higher Ed
April 3, 2007
Norman G. Finkelstein has been more controversial off his campus than on it. On his frequent speaking tours to colleges, where he typically discusses Israel in highly critical ways, Finkelstein draws protests and debates. When the University of California Press published Finkelstein’s critique of Alan Dershowitz and other defenders of Israel in 2005, a huge uproar ensued — with charges and countercharges about hypocrisy, tolerance, fairness and censorship. But at DePaul University, Finkelstein h
Source: Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
April 4, 2007
Education Adviser Ayub Quadri yesterday said the interim government has already taken initiatives to correct all sorts of history distortion from primary and secondary level textbooks to be distributed among students next year.
"I also directed my colleagues to identify all types of distortion of history, especially that of liberation war and contribution of liberation war heroes including Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman. I hope we will be able to amend or re
Source: New York Times
April 3, 2007
Humans are born time travelers. We may not be able to send our bodies into the past or the future, at least not yet, but we can send our minds. We can relive events that happened long ago or envision ourselves in the future.
New studies suggest that the two directions of temporal travel are intimately entwined in the human brain. A number of psychologists argue that re-experiencing the past evolved in our ancestors as a way to plan for the future and that the rise of mental time tra
Source: Xinhua/China View
April 3, 2007
PYONGYANG, North Korea -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday lashed out at Japan for distortion of history textbooks, calling Japan's moves an open mockery and challenge to its neighbors and the world at large.
The Japanese authorities had become "all the more undisguised in their moves to distort history despite unanimous censure and condemnation by the public at home and abroad" the official KCNA news agency reported, quoting a Foreign Ministry s
Source: New York Times
April 3, 2007
MONSEY, N.Y. -— The bitterness felt toward the Neturei Karta congregation had been evident since December, when members of the congregation, an anti-Zionist Jewish group, traveled to Tehran and shook hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a conference on the Holocaust.
In the months that followed, the ultra-Orthodox group with the unorthodox beliefs received threatening phone calls at its synagogue. A protest was held outside its doors. Rocks were thrown at its windows.
Source: Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr. at their website, Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph
March 1, 2007
“In the past decade,” the Yale historian David Blight has recently written, “the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm . . . has contended that thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their ‘homeland’ . . . . Slaves’ fidelity to their masters’ cause - - a falsehood constructed to support claims that the war was not about slavery - - has long formed one of the staple arguments in Lost Cause ideology.”
Source: BBC News
April 2, 2007
Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has attended a private ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of the Falklands invasion.
Lady Thatcher stood in silence [and laid a wreath] during the brief ceremony to remember the 255 Britons who died during the 74-day war...
Earlier, Prime Minister Tony Blair met Falklands veterans in Fife.
The 74-day war claimed the lives of 255 Britons, 655 Argentines and three islanders.
Lady Thatcher was prime minister w
Source: AFP
April 2, 2007
PRAGUE -- One of the Czech Republic's oldest noble families put its family treasure trove of works of art on show to the public on Monday at a restored palace in the heart of Prague.
The "Prince's Collection" exhibition includes paintings by Bruegel, Canaletto and Velasquez, collected over the centuries by the Lobkowicz family and returned to them at the start of the 1990s following confiscation by the former communist regime...
As well as paintings, the colle
Source: New York Times
April 3, 2007
An announcement two years ago of the discovery of a trove of small drip paintings thought to be the work of Jackson Pollock set off an uproar in the world of art scholarship that has yet to die down. The paintings have been scrutinized by connoisseurs, been subjected to computerized pattern tests, undergone chemical analysis at Harvard and elsewhere, and deeply divided a group of once-united Pollock experts.
Now questions about their authenticity may begin reverberating in the art m
Source: New York Times
April 3, 2007
NORTH SINAI, Egypt -— On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt’s chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency’s latest discovery.
It didn’t look like much —- some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquitie
Source: New York Times
April 3, 2007
Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms. Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.
Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enem
Source: AP
April 2, 2007
BEAUMONT, Tex. -- A team of anthropologists said their study of South Texas fossil deposits revealed evidence including ancient teeth that shows the area was home to numerous types of primates 42 million years ago.
Lamar University Professor Jim Westgate and two colleagues announced the discovery of three new genera and four new species of primates based on their examination of material removed from Lake Casa Blanca International State Park near Laredo and the Mexican border.
Source: AP
April 2, 2007
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A Dutch businessman appealing his war crimes conviction denied Monday that he knew chemicals he sold to Saddam Hussein's regime would be used to make poison gas.
Frans van Anraat, 64, is petitioning to overturn a 15-year prison sentence handed down in December 2005 for selling tons of chemicals made into mustard and nerve gas that was unleashed on Kurdish villages in northern Iraq in 1987-88 and against Iran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Wh
