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
January 28, 2007
NEW YORK -- The museum planned for the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York should include a memorial to workers who died after becoming ill during recovery and cleanup, two state lawmakers said.
Assemblyman Michael Gianaris and Senator Martin Golden said Sunday they would introduce legislation to ensure those workers are recognized.
"We want to tell the story of the 9/11 workers who rushed here to help put the city back on its feet, who got sick because
Source: The Independent
January 29, 2007
MADRID -- Cesare Borgia, son of Rodrigo Borgia - Pope Alexander VI - brother of Lucrezia, a serial murderer by his early twenties, whose family name has long been a byword for corruption, greed and violence, is to be rehabilitated in the northern Spanish town where he died.
The family was originally Spanish - "the Borjas" - and, in Viana in Navarra, where Cesare fell in battle in 1507, a campaign is afoot to recycle this symbol of Catholic depravity as a local hero.
Source: Telegraph
January 29, 2007
One of Britain's most notorious traitors was tricked into staying in exile in Moscow by a Government that knew it had insufficient evidence to convict him of espionage. Guy Burgess could have come home untouched by British justice whenever he wanted despite having worked within the Establishment for almost two decades as a Soviet agent.
Formerly top secret Cabinet documents discovered by The Daily Telegraph show that Harold Macmillan, then prime minister, organised a top-level cover
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
January 29, 2007
TAIPEI -- Taiwan has revised its high-school history textbook to show that Taiwan is an independent country, not part of China, a newspaper reported Monday.
The China Times said that under the order of the Education Ministry, the title of the national history textbook for high school to be used after the winter vacation has been changed from 'National History' to 'China History.'
In this textbook, terms like 'our country,' 'this country' and 'the mainland' have been cha
Source: http://www.sun-sentinel.com
January 26, 2007
A petition drive to get Confederate-themed clothing banned from school grounds has exposed a rift at Hollywood Hills High. The episode may lead the Broward School Board to examine whether its student conduct code should address the Confederate flag.
Sophomore Ilana Hostyk started a petition this week at Hollywood Hills in hopes of pressing officials to ban the symbol, considered a show of Rebel pride by some and a reminder of Southern race-based prejudice by others.
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com
January 28, 2007
Former US President Jimmy Carter once complained there were "too many Jews" on the government's Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council's former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.
Freedman, who served on the council during Carter's term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council's board by Carter's office because the scholar's name "sounded too Jewish."
Source: AP
January 28, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who -- over the objections of his superiors -- became the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday.
Drinan, 86, had suffered from pneumonia and congestive heart failure during the previous 10 days, according to a statement by Georgetown University...
An internationally known human-rights advocate, Drinan represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House for 10 years during the turbulent 1970
Source: AP
January 28, 2007
Egypt is scoffing at a global contest to name the new seven wonders of the world, saying it is a disgrace that the ancient Pyramids of Giza — the only surviving structure from the traditional list of architectural marvels — must compete for a spot.
Top Egyptian officials have criticized the popular contest that urges people around the world to vote for their top sites from a list of 21 finalists that lumps the pyramids with upstart wonders like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Towe
Source: AP
January 28, 2007
OSWIECIM, Poland -- Dozens of people who lived near Auschwitz and risked their lives to help inmates at the Nazi death camp were honored Saturday on the 62nd anniversary of the camp's liberation.
At a ceremony outside the site, Holocaust survivors and local residents listened to a letter from President Lech Kaczynski in which he said that the world has underestimated the determination of people outside the camp to save prisoners.
"World public opinion has often hel
Source: AP
January 28, 2007
HANOI, Vietnam -- A bowl of noodle soup for breakfast was beyond the dreams of most people back in the days before Vietnam's economic reforms...
These memories pour back at an exhibit at Hanoi's Museum of Ethnology titled "Thoi Bao Cap" -- the Subsidized Period...
The show has drawn record crowds and earned praise for its frank depiction of the shortcomings of the past, when the government micromanaged even the smallest economic transactions, consumer goods we
Source: AP
January 28, 2007
BEIRUT, Lebanon -- At a makeshift roadblock of iron bars and car tires, a masked gatekeeper shines a flashlight into the driver's eyes and asks: Where do you live?
In Lebanon, even that's a disturbing question.
It dredges up all the ghosts the country had hoped were banished for good: factions clawing for the upper hand, and freelance thugs demanding home addresses to see if the neighborhood is an ally or enemy in Lebanon's patchwork of religious and political loyalties
Source: Independent (UK)
January 28, 2007
Its archives hold the Magna Carta, Beatles manuscripts and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Visitors to its fabled reading room in the British Museum included Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. But the future of the British Library as a world-class, free resource is under threat fromplansto cut up to 7 per cent of its £100m budget in this year's Treasury spending round.
To survive, the library proposes to slash opening hours by more than a third a
Source: NYT
January 28, 2007
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON dashed to Iowa this weekend to hang an open-for-business sign on her new campaign operation. Barack Obama is besieged by admirers begging to join his team. And John Edwards has already dipped his toes into each of Iowa’s 99 counties — and started his second lap.
So is the Democratic stable too full for a dark horse presidential candidate to emerge?
The current thinking suggests that only famous candidates, Democrat or Republican, can seize their p
Source: Dorothy Samuels on the editorial page of the NYT
January 28, 2007
The news reports that President Bush’s representatives seem to be closing in on a deal to put a half-billion-dollar presidential library and policy institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas has inspired the predictable lame jokes and references to “The Pet Goat.”
But the project raises issues that are no laughing matter, touching on the writing of history, the university’s scholarly mission, governmental integrity and the rule of law.
S.M.U.’s negotiations re
Source: NYT
January 28, 2007
STANDING ROCK RESERVATION, S.D.
Here, on a snow-dusted bluff overlooking the Missouri River, rests Sitting Bull. Or so it is said.
Stand before the monument and see the pocks left in the granite by bullets. Notice where the nose was replaced after vandals with chains and a truck yanked the bust from its pedestal. Spot where the headdress feather was mended after being shot off. And wonder, along with the rest of the Dakotas:
Is Sitting Bull here?
Source: http://www.chron.com/
January 28, 2007
Virginia Sen. John Warner's words betray the guilt he still carries about the Vietnam War and help explain why this pillar of the Republican establishment is leading a bipartisan revolt against the war plans of a president in his own party.
"I regret that I was not more outspoken" during the Vietnam War, the former Navy secretary said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. "The Army generals would come in, 'Just send in another five or ten thousand.' You know, mo
Source: The Guardian
January 28, 2007
The foreign office has made a last-ditch attempt to stop one of its former senior diplomats from publishing a book claiming that the government knew that Iraq did not represent a significant threat to the West in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Last night Carne Ross, who was a member of the British mission to the United Nations, declined to comment on a letter asking him to 'reconsider' his decision to publish his book, Independent Diplomat, other than to describe it as 'unpleasant'...
Source: The Independent
January 27, 2007
It was a film that portrayed some of the most harrowing and controversial images of modern British troops at war. 'Tumbledown' [directed by Richard Eyre] shocked the nation with gruesome scenes of hand-to-hand fighting in which a young lieutenant speared Argentinian troops with a broken bayonet and nearly met his own end when he was shot in the head by a sniper.
Now, with the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War looming, Robert Lawrence, on whose life Tumbledown was based, plans to
Source: Sunday Telegraph
January 28, 2007
ROME -- For years it was derided by unwilling schoolboys for being "as dead as dead could be". Now, despite the Vatican's best efforts, the Pope's top adviser on Latin has reluctantly joined them by saying the language of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas is almost extinct.
"It is dying in the Church. I'm not optimistic about Latin. The young priests and bishops are not studying it," said Fr Reginald Foster, 68, a Carmelite friar who was appointed the Papal Lati
Source: The Times (London)
January 27, 2007
BERLIN -- The hideaway villa used by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, to entertain his lovers is to be put up for sale in an attempt to bail out the cash-strapped city of Berlin.
The rundown, empty Waldhof estate, set in woodland 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of the city, has become a financial burden for the Berlin council, which has been contemplating the closure of opera houses and other desperate measures to avert bankruptcy...
Goebbels took over the pla
