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: AP
March 9, 2007
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Moving more quickly than expected, the 11-nation body overseeing a long-secret archive of Nazi war records set procedures in motion Thursday to open millions of files on concentration camps and their victims before the end of the year.
Member nations made the decision knowing that within a year 10 percent of all Holocaust survivors now living may be dead, one American archive director said.
The governing commission of the International Tracing
Source: Daily Times (Lahore, Pakistan)
March 9, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- US Ambassador Ryan C Crocker on Thursday handed over 38 Gandhara antiques, which were smuggled to US two years ago, to the Ministry of Culture. American Department of Customs has discovered these smuggled antiques...
...He praised the smuggled antiques like sculptures of Buddha in meditation in 1st and 2nd centuries and some artefacts of 3rd and 4th centuries.
He said US security agencies were tracing the smugglers, adding bilateral cooperation wa
Source: AP
March 8, 2007
ATHENS -- If you have ever wandered around a dusty Greek archaeological site in midsummer, clueless about what you are seeing or where you are going, help is finally at hand. Greece's Culture Ministry on Thursday unveiled a hand-held gadget for visitors that offers high-resolution video, detailed diagrams of sites such as ancient temples, position indicators, and imagery along with stereo sound.
The battery-powered, touchscreen devices are about the size and weight of a personal ste
Source: AP
March 8, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- A federal judge Thursday ordered former de facto president Reynaldo Bignone arrested in connection with human rights abuses stemming from Argentina's 1976-83 dictatorship, local media reported...
The Todo Noticias network and two local news agencies cited unidentified court officials as saying Bignone, 78, was to be held at a military base outside Buenos Aires ahead of a court appearance.
The Diarios y Noticias news agency, also citing an unidentified co
Source: Independent
March 9, 2007
An entirely elected House of Lords? Oliver Cromwell's boys would have heartily approved. Almost exactly 358 years ago, in March 1649, a Cromwell-dominated House of Commons voted to abolish the Lords altogether. "The House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England," MPs declared. A week later Charles I was executed.
It was not the first row and it won't be the last. From intrigue and conspiracy to sleaze, cronies and cash for peerages, over the course of ne
Source: Washington Times
March 8, 2007
Sen. Sam Brownback wants Congress to apologize to American Indians for the egregious federal actions committed against them, while a freshman House member wants the same courtesy extended to black Americans.
Mr. Brownback said he has introduced the legislation in the 108th and 109th Congresses, the bill being passed out of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs both times, but he has never been able to get the bill to the floor.
"The arguments against the bill are
Source: Los Angeles Times
March 9, 2007
For his first season as music director of Los Angeles Opera, James Conlon...put together [on Wednesday night] a special introduction to what he plans as the company's multi-year look at operas by composers the Nazis considered "degenerate" artists and wanted silenced. That project is called "Recovered Voices," and it is a passion for Conlon...
On a human-interest level, the semi-staged program couldn't help but fascinate. It included excerpts from works by Viktor
Source: AP
March 8, 2007
NICOSIA, Cyprus -- Greek Cypriots early Friday demolished a wall along the boundary that splits Europe's last divided capital, Nicosia.
"Tonight, we demolished a checkpoint on our side," Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos said from Brussels. "Now we will see whether Turkey's troops will withdraw so that the passage will be opened or not."...
Earlier this year, Turkish Cypriots dismantled a footbridge in the area, angering Greek Cypriots and frustr
Source: AP
March 8, 2007
STRASBOURG, France -- They claim they were locked up in mental homes and denied education, the victims of a monstrous Nazi scheme and decades of public prejudice.
Now a group of Norwegian "war children", born as part of a German plan to create a genetically pure race, are taking their case to the European court of human rights, demanding compensation and recognition of their suffering from the government in Oslo.
Up to 12,000 children with a Norwegian mother a
Source: Independent
March 9, 2007
Developers seeking to build skyscrapers in Britain's world heritage sites will be banned under proposals published yesterday in the Government's long-awaited White Paper on heritage protection.
The document gives Britain's 27 world heritage sites the same protection as national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, and proposes buffer zones around them. Measures enacted have the potential to thwart high-rise building plans supported by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone,
Source: AFP
March 8, 2007
JERUSALEM -- German bishops were criticised for comparing the plight of Palestinians to that of Jews during the Second World War. The bishops accused Israel of racism and said that the occupied West Bank had similarities to the Warsaw ghetto. “It is infuriating,” Gregor Maria Hanke, the Bishop of Eichstätt, said during a visit to the region.
Avner Shalev, the director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, said that the comments showed a “woeful ignorance of history”. “These unwarran
Source: Elisabeth Grant in the AHA blog
March 5, 2007
March is Women’s History Month, and for the occasion the Library of Congress is honoring a variety of women from U.S. history on their Women’s History Month site. The site contains an abundance of resources on influential women as well as links to related web sites, like the American Memory site on women, the
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
March 8, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The city of Palo Alto has agreed to issue a demolition permit for the city's oldest home after losing a nine-year legal tussle.
Preservation groups and city officials had sought to maintain the 160-year-old Juana Briones House, built by one of California's early settlers, which is to be leveled and could make way for a luxury home.
After a trial court and appeals court both ruled that the city's heritage ordinance was unenforceable, Planning Directo
Source: Dallas Morning News
March 8, 2007
The faculty senate of Southern Methodist University split down the middle Wednesday on whether the campus should consider dissociating from a partisan institute that would be part of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
The senate voted 13-13 on the resolution, which called on SMU to consider two options: reject any affiliation with the institute, to the point of not allowing it on campus; or make the institute nonpartisan and bring it under SMU's control. Three senators abstain
Source: NYT
March 8, 2007
SYDNEY, Australia, March 7 — Wu Hsiu-mei said she was 23 and working as a maid in a hotel in 1940 when her Taiwanese boss handed her over to Japanese officers. She and some 15 other women were sent to Guangdong Province in southern China to become sex slaves.
Inside a hotel there was a so-called comfort station, managed by a Taiwanese but serving only the Japanese military, Ms. Wu said. Forced to have sex with more than 20 Japanese a day for almost a year, she said, she had multiple
Source: AP
March 8, 2007
ATLANTA -- Black legislative leaders said Thursday they will propose that Georgia apologize for the state's role in slavery and segregation-era laws.
"It is time for Georgia, as one of the major stake-holders in slavery, as one of the major players in lynchings, to say it's sorry," said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a Democrat. "Sorry for the fact that it was involved in slave trade, sorry for the fact that it was involved in Jim Crow laws."
The measure
Source: International Herald Tribune
March 7, 2007
PARIS -- A court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered blockage of all access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
The ban followed a week of what the media in Turkey dubbed a "virtual war" of videos between Greeks and Turks on YouTube and came as governments around the world —- including France — grappled with the freewheeling content now readily posted on the Internet.
Source: Telegraph
March 8, 2007
The Pope tried to stop Bob Dylan playing for the late John Paul II because he feared the musician was a "prophet" whose beliefs were at odds with the Roman Catholic Church.
In a new book of memoirs about his predecessor, Pope Benedict recalls the events of the World Eucharist Congress at Bologna in 1997, a gathering of 300,000 young Catholic pilgrims who were to be exposed to the singer's iconoclastic songs and their "completely different" message.
P
Source: AP
March 8, 2007
WASHINGTON -- An eclectic collection of 25 recordings deemed among the most culturally important to the US were selected on Tuesday for preservation in a special sound archive, the National Recording Registry. Among recordings are: president Franklin D Roosevelt's December 8 1941 address to Congress to obtain a declaration of war against Japan the day after the Pearl Harbor attack; the Rolling Stones' most famous songs -- (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; and Paul Simon's Graceland. Each year the L
Source: New York Times
March 8, 2007
In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”
The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.
Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gatew
