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: Times (of London)
February 16, 2007
A previously unseen Turner watercolour is published for the first time in The Times today after its owner’s decision to sell a collection of 14 important works.
'A Swiss Lake, Lucerne', which was unrecorded because it has been in private hands until now, is among the shimmering landscapes that make up the finest collection of watercolours by the 19th-century master to come on the market in decades.
They are expected to send prices soaring to around £15 million at Sotheb
Source: Telegraph
February 16, 2007
Repairs to Stalin's depot threaten St Basil's
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 2:06am GMT 16/02/2007
Like any dictator fearful of his people, Joseph Stalin had a contingency plan to prevent a popular revolution.
Unknown to the Muscovites that shivered their way along the cobblestones above, he hid a unit of his best and most powerful tanks in the basement of the Lower Trading Rows on the eastern perimeter of Red Square.
If the
Source: AP
February 15, 2007
PARIS -- France rejected an asylum appeal from the widow of late Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana on Thursday, saying she was at the heart of the regime responsible for her country's 1994 genocide.
The French refugee agency originally rejected Agathe Habyarimana's request on Jan 4. The case went before the Appeals Commission for Refugees, which denied her appeal Thursday.
The decision came nearly three months after Rwanda cut off diplomatic relations with Paris ove
Source: Times (of London)
February 16, 2007
Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, says that his country will cement its bitter divorce from France and the French-speaking world, which he holds responsible for the 1994 slaughter of up to one million of his countrymen, by joining the Commonwealth later year.
“There are many benefits for us in joining the Commonwealth — cultural, economic, political,” he told The Times.
Mr Kagame has been invited to attend the next Commonwealth summit as an observer. “I hope they will then approve our me
Source: Reuters
February 13, 2007
ADDIS ABABA -- The countdown has started on a flickering billboard high above a roundabout in Ethiopia's capital, blinking out recently in red and gold letters: only 209 days, 15 hours, 22 minutes and 22 seconds to the Millennium...
A variation on the archaic Julian calendar -- which started disappearing from the West in the 16th century -- means Ethiopia will not enter the year 2000 until September 12 this year.
"When everyone else celebrated their millennium, the
Source: AP
February 15, 2007
AUSTIN, Tex. -- On Aug. 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson had a busy day juggling his civil rights initiative, a growing crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin and the discovery of the bodies of three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi.
He also got a call from the first lady with a gentle reminder about dinner and a quick "I love you."
Under a new Web-based archive project launched Thursday, audio and visual records of Johnson's day are just a mouse click away
Source: AP
February 16, 2007
ATHENS -- Sections of an ancient Greek theater were discovered on Thursday during construction work in an Athens suburb, archaeologists said.
Until now, only two such buildings were known in the ancient city where western theater originated more than 2,500 years ago.
Fifteen rows of concentric stone seats have been located so far in the northwestern suburb of Menidi, according to Vivi Vassilopoulou, Greece's general director of antiquities.
Source: Reuters
February 15, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Three women who were forced into sexual servitude by Japan in World War II on Thursday told the U.S. Congress harrowing tales of abuse and said they rejected Japanese official apologies as an insult.
The now elderly "comfort women" -- a Japanese euphemism for the estimated 200,000 mostly Asian women forced to provide sex for Japan's soldiers -- testified in a debate on a House of Representatives resolution calling on Japan to apologize for that practice.
Source: AP
February 15, 2007
MASHPEE, Mass. - The tribe that shared in the first Thanksgiving celebration received federal recognition Thursday as a sovereign American Indian nation, 32 years after it began its quest.
The ancestors of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe were at the area where Plymouth was founded long before the Pilgrims arrived, but their population was nearly wiped out by war and disease.
The roughly 1,500 members of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe learned last March that the Bureau of India
Source: Prensa Latina (Havana, Cuba)
February 15, 2007
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The more than 460 minors who disappeared in the 12-year combat between the guerrillas and the Army during the Salvadorian Civil War are searched for by the humanitarian organization Pro-Search, at the request of the relatives."We still have an unresolved matter with the families of those boys and girls who disappeared during the 1980-1992 armed conflict, assured Ester Alvarenga, general director of Pro-Search.
The director pointed out that 323 of the 787 missing c
Source: http://www.courant.com
February 8, 2007
After years of complaints, Yale University is taking down a painting of Elihu Yale that shows the wealthy merchant being waited on by a black man with a silver collar around his neck - an unmistakable symbol of bondage.
Elihu Yale apparently did not own slaves but critics over the years have objected to the painting's racist overtones and the significant place it is displayed at the university named for him. The portrait hangs over an ornate fireplace in the Corporation Room in Wood
Source: BBC News
February 15, 2007
Peter Hain has apologised for Northern Ireland's involvement in the slave trade, or as it was back then, simply Ireland.
While there was opposition to slavery across the island there were also men who made fortunes out of the exploitation of slaves.
Part of Belfast's commercial and industrial advances of the time were linked to trade with the slave economies of the West Indies.
Waddell Cunningham, founding president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce and fi
Source: BBC News
February 15, 2007
Turkey is to send an inspection team to survey excavation work being carried out near the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif in East Jerusalem...
The work on an ancient mound near Jerusalem's holiest site has caused widespread anger in the Muslim world.
Israel is now showing the work live on the internet in a bid to calm Muslim fears the site is being damaged...<http://www.antiquities.org.il/home_eng.asp>
Source: ireland.com
February 15, 2007
Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain has been caught up in a political storm today over an apology he made in the United States about the slave trade.
He appeared to apologise in a BBC Wales television interview for Northern Ireland and Wales's role in the slave trade.
Mr Hain, who addressed an event on slavery, said: "I'm here on behalf of both Northern Ireland and Wales to say we have had a part to play in the slave trade.
"We acknowledge that.
Source: UPI
February 15, 2007
SAN ANTONIO, Tex. -- The body of U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Dudley Ives is set to return to his Texas home after being lost in New Guinea nearly 63 years ago.
The Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times reported that since Ives' plane was downed by a massive storm on April 16, 1944, the airman's body was lost until plane wreckage was found in 2002.
Among the wreckage discovered in the jungles of Papua, New Guinea, authorities found 10 bodies and using DNA from relatives of
Source: Aruna Lee in New America Media
February 14, 2007
Editors Note: The addition onto class reading lists of a novel written by a
Japanese American depicting her experiences in wartime Korea has led to a
bitter dispute between supporters of the novel and the Korean American
community, who say their history being distorted. Aruna Lee is a writer for
New America Media.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Korean American parents in Los Angeles, New York and Boston
are protesting the addition of a novel in school reading lists that they say
inaccurately
Source: AP
February 15, 2007
AMSTERDAM -- Concentration camp and incarceration records would be the first Nazi documents released under a just-completed plan to make millions of files stored in Germany accessible to Holocaust researchers, the archive director said Thursday.
The 11 nations overseeing the huge archive must still ratify the plan approved by technical experts at a three-day meeting in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The plan is a critical step toward opening files maintained by the International Tracing Serv
Source: AP
February 15, 2007
LONDON -- A permanent memorial to the victims of the 2005 bombings of three London subway trains and a bus will be built in Hyde Park, the government said Thursday.
The 350-acre park -- already home to a memorial to Princess Diana -- had been chosen because of its "prominence, history and central London location," said Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell.
Four suicide bombers killed 52 commuters and wounded 700 during the morning rush hour on July 7, 2005.
Source: NYT
February 14, 2007
It was a moment of public sentimentality that seemed almost un-Bush-like.
Speaking on C-Span on Monday, President Bush said of his father, “I am actually more concerned about him than I have ever been in my life, because he’s paying too much attention to the news.”
Mr. Bush continued: “I understand how difficult it is for a person who loves somebody to see them out in the political process and to kind of endure the criticism. My answer to him is, ‘Look, don’t pay atten
Source: AP
February 15, 2007
MANNHEIM, Germany -- A far-right activist was convicted of incitement and sentenced to the maximum five years in prison Thursday for anti-Semitic activities, including contributing to a Web site dedicated to Holocaust denial.
Ernst Zundel was deported to his native Germany from Canada in 2005 and has also lived in Tennessee. He and his supporters have argued that he is a peaceful campaigner denied his right to free speech.
Zundel, 67, showed no emotion when Judge Ulrich
