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
February 25, 2007
HARTFORD, Conn. -- Despite a recent $3.2 million renovation, one of the nation's oldest historic state houses is on the verge of closing its doors.
Unless the state comes to the rescue, visitors won't be able walk the halls of the 211-year-old Federal-style building where the Amistad slave ship trial began, where presidents from Andrew Jackson to George H.W. Bush have visited...
The Connecticut Historical Society, which took over operations at the Old State House about
Source: CNN
February 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Lt. Col. Bruce Crandall's heroics in Vietnam were immortalized in a movie and a critically acclaimed book.
More than 40 years after Crandall repeatedly risked his life to rescue American soldiers fighting one of the toughest battles of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military officially recognized his heroism Monday, when he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for military valor."For the soldiers rescued, for the men who came home, for the
Source: UPI
February 26, 2007
Researchers at Harvard Medical School said the disorder known as repressed memory has a cultural rather than a scientific basis.
In an unusual study conducted by a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars, the Harvard group was unable to uncover any examples of the phenomenon in Western writings that are more than 200 years old, The Washington Post reported.
Study leader Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School says dissociative amnesia or repressed memory first a
Source: The Register (UK)
February 23, 2007
Detailed maps of the UK created by the KGB between 1950 and 1990 have gone on sale in digital format for the first time.
The maps show 16,000 square kilometres and 103 UK town and cities in more detail than Ordnance Survey maps. The Russians used satellite images and spies on the ground to create the maps, which include army camps and warehouses that don't appear on other maps.
The maps include other information likely to be useful for an invading army, such as the
Source: by Dennis Dutton, New York Times
February 26, 2007
It seemed almost too good to be true, and in the end it was. A talented, conscientious pianist who had enjoyed an active if undistinguished career in Britain falls ill and retreats to a small town. Here in the last years of her life she launches a project to record virtually the entire standard repertoire for the piano. Her recordings, CDs made in her late sixties and seventies, are staggering, showing a masterful technique, a preternatural ability to adapt to different styles, and a depth of mu
Source: AP
February 26, 2007
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- The U.N.'s highest court cleared Serbia Monday of genocide against Muslims in Bosnia's bloody war. But it said the country's former government should have stopped the 1995 slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica and ordered Serb leaders to hand over the alleged architect of the massacre.
The case marked the first time a state had been taken to court over allegations of genocide, outlawed in a U.N. convention in 1948 after the Nazi Hol
Source: Guardian
February 26, 2007
The question goes out, and the response is always the same.
"I'm proud of my language and culture. Are you?" Bok van Blerk demands of the emotionally charged crowd.
Up goes the cheer, and then comes the song - an Afrikaans folk number about a Boer war general that has become a sensation in South Africa as an anthem for young whites who say they are tired of being made to feel guilty about the apartheid past.
The song, De La Rey, has swept into rug
Source: New York Daily News
February 26, 2007
MARIANNA, Fla. -- She is white and related to a U.S. senator who championed segregation.
She also shares the surname of a prominent black civil rights leader -- not because of any blood connection but because of her family's long-ago ties to the slave trade of the South.
Sharon Sharpton Hyatt, a 61-year-old widow who lives in a ranch house along a dirt road in this rural section of Jackson County, was unaware of the connections until the News contacted her...
Source: USA Today
February 25, 2007
"Sorry" may be too expensive a word.
Once the heart of the Confederacy, Virginia has become the first state to express remorse for its past support of slavery, an action other states are in line to follow. The General Assembly passed a resolution of "profound regret" for "the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans."
Virginia, which passed its resolution without objection Saturday, went further than any st
Source: New York Times
February 26, 2007
SAYVILLE, N.Y. -— A congressman from Long Island wants the United States government to grant honorary citizenship to Anne Frank, at least in part to atone for having denied her family entry in the years before her arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.
The House of Representatives is likely to take up the question this year, yet the proposal is not quite as easy and unobjectionable as it sounds. Only six people in history have been granted the honor, and some of Anne F
Source: Washington Post
February 26, 2007
Frederick Douglass rarely lacked for visitors at his estate in Anacostia [Washington, DC]. All sorts of people, including many of his 21 grandchildren, were often about, and the abolitionist writer saw to it that his home was equal to his hospitality.
For the past three years, preservationists have been working to keep it that way. And now the first major restoration project in more than three decades is complete, nearly 130 years after Douglass paid $6,700 for the hilltop mansion a
Source: Boston Globe
February 20, 2007
There is no reason to be nostalgic about the Cold War nightmare of a thermonuclear Armageddon, superpower proxy wars across the Third World, the Soviet gulag, the censorship imposed throughout the communist bloc, or the opportunistic witch-hunting of the McCarthy period in America. Yet there is something quaint about the revelation that the CIA had Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago" surreptitiously published in Russian to boost his chances of winning the 1958 Nobel Prize in liter
Source: Telegraph
February 26, 2007
Experts are excited about a rare coin unearthed by an amateur treasure hunter which could change the accepted ancient history of Britain.
The silver denarius which dates back to the Roman Republic —- before Julius Caesar made Rome an empire —- was unearthed near Fowey in Cornwall.
Dating from 146 BC, it shows how ancient Britons were trading with the Romans well before the country was conquered in AD 43.
"It proves that there was a lot more going on be
Source: Times (of London)
February 26, 2007
HIRAKATA, Japan -- For 62 years Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he had done. But to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he experienced such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team.
Last year, at
Source: UPI
February 26, 2007
XINING, China -- Experts in China have restored a 700-year-old copy of the Koran, the sacred book of Islam.
The state-run news agency Xinhua reported that the two-volume, 867-page set is the oldest known in China and is written in Arabic.
The ancient copy of the Koran is believed to have been brought to China about 700 years ago when the Salar ethnic group moved east from Uzbekistan. Experts believe it was written some time between the eighth and 13th centuries.
Source: AP
February 26, 2007
TOKYO -- A group of South Koreans filed a lawsuit Monday against a Tokyo war shrine criticized for glorifying Japan's militaristic past, demanding it remove relatives' names from the list of war dead honored there.
The suit, filed at the Tokyo District Court, is the first ever filed by South Koreans against Yasukuni Shrine, their Japanese supporter Naoyoshi Yamamoto said Monday.
The 11 plaintiffs, including a former soldier and 10 others whose fathers were impressed int
Source: International Herald Tribune
February 26, 2007
MANTUA, Italy -- The world of culture loves anniversaries, but rare is the occasion when an entire art form can celebrate a major birthday as opera did during the weekend, exactly four centuries after Monteverdi's pioneering work, "L'Orfeo," was created in this medieval Italian city.
Naturally enough, "L'Orfeo" was again presented in Mantua, albeit not in the Palace of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga I, where it was first performed on Feb. 24, 1607, but in the 18th-century
Source: Telegraph
February 26, 2007
Japan's kamikaze pilots are to be honoured in a new film praising their bravery, sacrifice and "beautiful lives" in the Second World War.
The release in May of I Go To Die For You confirms a growing nostalgia in Japan about its wartime generation, even among the majority who accept the cause was wrong.
The film tells the story of the young men based at Chiran air base in southwest Japan, where they trained for the suicide missions they hoped would spare their
Source: Independent
February 25, 2007
With its exhaustive dissection of 19th-century Russian society, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is arguably the greatest, and certainly one of the longest, novels ever written.
Now, for those unable to face wading through its 1,500 pages, there is hope. What is being billed as Tolstoy's "original version" is to be published -- some 600 pages lighter, with the removal of Tolstoy's philosophical musings and the prospect of a happy ending. Not everyone, however, is pleased. Acade
Source: Independent
February 26, 2007
Iraq's minorities, some of the oldest communities in the world, are being driven from the country by a wave of violence against them because they are identified with the occupation and easy targets for kidnappers and death squads. A "huge exodus" is now taking place, according to a report by Minority Rights Group International.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says 30 per cent of the 1.8 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan, Syria and elsewhere come from the minorit
