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: Reuters
February 18, 2007
WASHINGTON -- In the Lincoln Bedroom, President George W. Bush likes to show off one of the most treasured historical artifacts in the White House, a handwritten copy of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address.
The building's walls speak of past battles, victories, defeats, heartache. President George Washington's portrait hangs in the Oval Office. Civil War Commander and two-term President Ulysses Grant is placed in Bush's private study.
The Queen's Bedroom offers me
Source: AP
February 18, 2007
PARIS -- A prominent French political figure who ordered hundreds of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II will be buried wearing his Legion of Honor medal, his lawyer said Sunday, even though the deceased man was stripped of his right to wear the decoration in 1998.
Maurice Papon, the No. 2 official in the Bordeaux region in southwestern France during Germany's World War II occupation, was convicted in 1998 on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. The former Fren
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
February 18, 2007
A special event will be held in Silver Spring, Maryland this week to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the voyage of the S.S. Ben Hecht, an unusual Jewish refugee ship that not only tried to crash the British blockade of Palestine, but also brought down the barriers of racial segregation in Baltimore, and played a role in one of the most spectacular prison breaks in history.
The commemoration will take place at the Silver Spring Jewish Center, 1401 Arcola Avenue, on Sunday evenin
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
February 18, 2007
A tiny community of reindeer herders in Siberia holds intimate knowledge of the lives, the foraging and the rutting season of their priceless animals, and it's the kind of information that is vital to anyone concerned by the loss of human cultures -- and to biologists worried about the loss of species diversity anywhere in the world.
Of the 426 members of Siberia's isolated Chulym people, only 35 still speak Tuvan, their ancient language, fluently, and they're all older than 50. Eve
Source: Sky News
February 18, 2007
Two First World War soldiers shot for cowardice but pardoned 90 years later have been formally honoured on a war memorial.
The granddaughter of one of the men said her family now had the chance to "put everything to rest and carry on with our lives".
The names of Privates Harry Farr and James Swaine have finally been engraved on to Wealdstone war memorial in north-west London.
They were among 306 soldiers shot for military offences during the Firs
Source: AP
February 18, 2007
An Israeli archaeologist said Sunday that what could be a Islamic prayer room was found at the site of the Mugrabi ramp in the Old City of Jerusalem, where excavation work has sparked angry protests by Muslims who say that the work endangers the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Muslim leaders and critics of the work said the announcement of the find, three years after it was discovered, confirmed their fears that the Antiquities Authority is intent on hiding Muslim attachment to the site.
Source: NYT
February 18, 2007
Maurice Papon, a prominent French functionary convicted in 1998 of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity during the German occupation in World War II, died yesterday at a private clinic near Paris. He was 96.
He underwent heart surgery related to his pacemaker on Tuesday, and died in his sleep, said his lawyer, Francis Vuilleman, The Associated Press reported.
In the end, Mr. Papon served less than three years of his 10-year sentence for deporting hundreds of Jews
Source: Times (of London)
February 18, 2007
The KGB hatched a plot to smear the late Pope Pius XII as an antisemitic Hitler supporter and fostered a controversial play that tarnished the pontiff, according to the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer to have defected to the West.
Former Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who headed the Romanian secret service before defecting in 1978, has broken a silence of nearly half a century to reveal [in an article for the National Review Online January 25--link below] that
Source: New York Times
February 18, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -— For nearly 50 years, Bob Morgan and his family have kept a box full of charred debris that they swear fell out of the early morning sky on Dec. 8, 1957.
“My dad said it was glowing so bright that you couldn’t look at it with your naked eye,” Mr. Morgan said of the pieces of metal and plastic that came to rest behind his grandfather’s house in Encino, Calif. “So they grabbed some sunglasses until this thing had cooled down.”
Although no one has ever conf
Source: Boston Globe
February 18, 2007
Most people may believe that the reason for studying history is to learn what happened in the past," begins the foreword to Japan's "New History Textbook," "but that is not necessarily correct."
This is not the kind of opening that inspires confidence in a text's objectivity. The "New History Textbook" was introduced in 2001 by a group of right-wing scholars and politicians with the explicit aim of giving junior high school students a more positive
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
February 18, 2007
A New Jersey man charged Saturday with attacking Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel earlier this month was a "lone wolf" who had also stalked the Nobel laureate in Florida, authorities said.
Police found 22-year-old Eric Hunt at a mental health treatment center in Belle Mead, N.J., where he had sought treatment within the past week for undisclosed reasons. He remained jailed Saturday night in Somerville, N.J.
Hunt faces charges of attempte
Source: Times (of London)
February 18, 2007
GORAZDEVAC, Kosovo/Serbia -- To the outside world, they are the bullyboys of Europe. The Serbs have a rather more romantic image of themselves; not so much Roman-style imperialists as the plucky Gauls of Asterix fame.
Like the cartoon character’s besieged village, Serbia is surrounded by enemy garrisons, according to a postcard on sale in Mitrovica. “One small country of indomitable Serbs still holds out against the invaders.”
But it is in this western corner of Kosovo,
Source: Telegraph
February 18, 2007
Hundreds of memorials dedicated to soldiers murdered by terrorists in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years are to be moved amid fears they will be vandalised by Irish republicans.
More than 250 memorials, including plaques, stone carvings and trees, located at more than 20 bases across Ulster will be removed to more secure locations within the province and the British mainland during the next few months.
Defence chiefs have ruled out any possibility of permanent memo
Source: Telegraph
February 18, 2007
SAMARRA, Iraq -- The labour would be unpaid, but the rewards in Heaven would be guaranteed.
When Iraq's Shia religious leaders issued an appeal last summer for volunteers to help rebuild the bomb-damaged wreckage of Samarra's Golden Shrine, a task force of more than 3,000 people formed almost overnight.
Yet despite the massed show of willing hands, so far not a single tile of the distinctive gold-plated dome that once dominated the city's skyline has been put back in pl
Source: Telegraph
February 18, 2007
The US's standing in the world may have plummeted under President George W. Bush, but a bizarre cargo cult in the Vanuatu island nation holds America in god-like esteem.
The Jon Frum movement celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding yesterday with a lavish feast in which village men dressed up as US soldiers and marched in front of a giant Stars and Stripes flag on a bamboo pole...
The origins of the cult date back to the 1930s, when Britain and France jointly ra
Source: Independent
February 18, 2007
The rarest and most elaborate collection of religious manuscripts in the world, including one of the earliest Korans and a Torah from a lost community of Chinese Jews, is to be displayed at the British Library in a unique exhibition on the great religions.
Sacred texts from Christianity, Judaism and Islam are to be displayed side by side in an exhibition showing what the three great faiths have in common.
The exhibition includes one of the earliest surviving Korans, com
Source: Independent
February 18, 2007
A fierce bidding war erupted yesterday over a rare bottle of 1943 Führerwein featuring a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the label. The bottle, with a predicted auction price of £500, finally sold to an anonymous buyer for almost £4,000.
It came from a batch given to German officers during the Second World War. But, rather like the Nazi dream of a 1,000-year reich, the wine has spectacularly failed to stand the test of time and is undrinkable.
A spokeswoman for Plymouth Auc
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
February 16, 2007
On February 14, the U.S. Senate passed a continuing budget resolution (H.J. Res. 20) to fund most federal government programs through the remainder of the 2007 fiscal year on September 30, 2007. The continuing resolution passed 81-15. Despite this show of bi-partisan support, many Republicans were upset that the new Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) brought the bill to the floor utilizing a parliamentary rule that did not allow amendments. Like the version passed by the House, the bil
Source: NYT
February 17, 2007
A sharply divided House of Representatives passed a resolution on Friday formally repudiating President Bush’s decision to send more than 20,000 new combat troops to Iraq.
The rare wartime rebuke to the commander in chief — an act that is not binding, but that carries symbolic significance — was approved 246-to-182, with 17 Republicans breaking ranks to join all but two Democrats in supporting the resolution....
Several historians compared its significance to the repeal
Source: Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2007
PARIS —- More than a decade after the genocide, a mystery still lies at the heart of Rwanda's darkness.
But France's most celebrated anti-terrorism magistrate believes he knows who assassinated two African presidents on April 6, 1994. The shooting down of the Rwandan presidential jet that night was followed by the killings of an estimated 800,000 people, most of them members of the Tutsi minority.
In a report to French prosecutors late last year, Magistrate Jean-Louis B
