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: Telegraph (UK)
January 10, 2007
An amateur historian produced evidence yesterday to back his claim to have found the island homeland of Homer's legendary Greek king, Odysseus.
Scholars have argued for centuries over the whereabouts of Ithaca, the lost kingdom of the hero of the Trojan war. But Robert Bittlestone, a management consultant from Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, and two professors of classics and geology have suggested the location is not the Greek island of Ithaki, but Paliki — a peninsula of Kefalonia.
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 11, 2007
Fourteen members of a Carter Center advisory board – including a former U.S. ambassador – quit today in protest of Jimmy Carter's latest book, which they view as being critical of Israel.
In a letter to Carter, the members of the Board of Councilors wrote that the former president had "clearly abandoned your historic role of broker, in favor of becoming an advocate for one side."
"I wish the Carter Center continued success, but they they also have to traf
Source: Center for American Progress
January 9, 2007
The 110th Congress has an important responsibility to shape the country’s national security policy in order to make Americans safer and advance U.S. national security interests more effectively.
In sharp contrast to the 109th Congress, this new Congress will do more to exercise its powers and responsibility as a co-equal branch of government in shaping the future direction of the country’s Iraq policy. Such a policy will be successful only if it enjoys the informed consent of the American
Source: CBS 4 Boston
January 10, 2007
The Atlanta police officer who arrested a Tufts University professor for jaywalking has contradicted the man's account, insisting he was in uniform at the time and saying the professor has no one to blame but himself.Officer Kevin Leonpacher said if anything, "I used an excessive amount of discretion," in the encounter that landed Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in jail.
Fernandez-Armesto, 56, who was arrested Jan. 4, said earlier in an interview that he was
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
January 10, 2007
The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has been under attack for months, from an unlikely quarter: veterans who say one text panel in the museum insults the airmen of Royal Air Force Bomber Command in which large numbers of Canadians participated in the Second World War. Yesterday, in a Globe and Mail op-ed article, retired chief of defence staff Paul Manson, who had just stepped down as a member of the board of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp. -- which is responsible for the war museum -- j
Source: Guardian
January 10, 2007
Robin Cook openly defied his prime minister over the war in Iraq, and resigned from his cabinet post in protest on the eve of the invasion. Now his family has made that defiance his epitaph. It emerged yesterday that Mr Cook's gravestone in a cemetery in Edinburgh has been engraved with a quote from his memoirs, which reads: "I may not have succeeded in halting the war. But I did secure the right of Parliament to decide on war."
Mr Cook died suddenly, aged 59, in August 20
Source: NYT
January 10, 2007
Intimates of President Bush have singled out Southern Methodist University as the likely site of his presidential library, but faculty members, complaining of being bypassed, are raising sharp questions about the school’s identification with his presidency.
In a meeting Tuesday, faculty members complained of a lack of consultation over the emerging agreement and all but demanded answers from the university’s president, R. Gerald Turner, on the relationship that would develop betwee
Source: NYT
January 10, 2007
History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.
It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.
The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here — history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1
Source: NYT
January 9, 2007
Before the great pyramids, ancient Egyptian kings left less grandiose monuments to themselves: fortresslike sanctuaries enclosed by mud-brick walls. Inside these mortuary complexes, people presumably gathered to worship and perpetuate the memory of their departed ruler.
The crumbling, almost vanished remains of such structures, archaeologists say, attest to the political hierarchy and religion of the newly unified Egyptian state, beginning more than 5,000 years ago. As symbols of th
Source: NYT
January 10, 2007
A 13th-century Hebrew Bible, stolen from the French National Library in the late 1990s, has been recovered after complex negotiations between French officials, Christie’s and a Brooklyn antiquities dealer, Yosef Goldman, who bought the leatherbound book from the auction house in 2000 for $368,000. Library officials said Mr. Goldman purchased the manuscript in good faith and had already resold it when its theft was discovered.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
January 8, 2007
Sometimes it’s not just what you are against, but how you are against it. On Saturday, every member who spoke at the business meeting of the American Historical Association expressed opposition to the war in Iraq and support for free speech.
But there was fairly intense debate on how to express those ideals. In the end, the association’s members at its business meeting backed a resolution calling on members to “do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.” Supp
Source: Guardian
January 9, 2007
The newly established international criminal court risks being "fatally damaged" by demands that it cancel its first ever war crimes indictment because it is an obstacle to ending Uganda's 20-year civil war.
The dispute over a slew of charges against the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, who is accused of mass murder, rape, mutilations and abducting children to become soldiers, has opened a rift between African governments, which believe trials should be
Source: JTA--Global news service of the Jewish people
November 29, 2006
General Motors is rightly famous for the Chevrolets, Pontiacs and Buicks that roll off its assembly lines. But the company is infamous, as well. As this JTA exclusive [by Edwin Black] reveals, GM has a Nazi-era skeleton that has been lurking in its closet. The company was in league with Hitler commercially and helped power the Third Reich’s war machine.
Car wars: Doing business with the NazisGermany’s glorious militaristic destiny, according to Hitler, was dependent on a mass, four
Source: NYT
January 9, 2007
As remnants of a vanished culture and a lure to tourists, the mysterious giant statues that stand as mute sentinels along the rocky coast here are the greatest treasure of this remote place.
For local people, though, they also present a problem: what should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons scattered around the island, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground?
Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothi
Source: NYT
January 9, 2007
The Roman Catholic Church in Poland was in turmoil on Monday as a second prelate stepped down because of his Communist-era secret police ties, after Sunday’s resignation of this city’s archbishop over similar allegations.
Questions spread about just how broad and deep a stain secret-police collaboration has left on a church long regarded as a beacon of faith and freedom during the Communist era. Many people also have asked how or why the Vatican could have invited the storm by appoi
Source: Atlantic Monthly
January 9, 2007
As the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and the Democrats prepare to take over Congress, it is clear that this administration’s credibility is under heavy scrutiny. A year ago, Stephen Colbert coined a term, “truthiness” to describe Bush’s proclivity for telling the American people what feels like the truth, rather than verified facts. Now, with his article, “Truth in the White House,” Carl Cannon puts Bush’s complex tango with the truth into historical context, taking a look back at
Source: FrontpageMag.com
January 9, 2007
The government of Pakistan has banned my book The Truth About Muhammad, confiscating all copies and translations. Why? Because it contains “objectionable material” about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Said Shahid Ahmed, counselor of community affairs at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington: “The book is very, very damaging — let me tell you.”
Objectionable material? Damaging? I confess it: they’re right. There is plenty of objectionable material in this book. Here’s a small sampling:
Source: NPR (audio)
January 7, 2007
In the Middle East, a recent series of diplomatic moves has raised faint hopes for renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. But one maverick Palestinian believes the key to Middle East peace lies in greater Arab understanding of the Nazi Holocaust. He's set up what is believed to be the only museum in the Arab world on the Nazi slaughter of European Jews. But as NPR's Eric Westervelt reports, the display has attracted the ire of both Arabs and Jews.
ERIC WESTERVELT: The Arab Inst
Source: AP
January 8, 2007
LAS VEGAS -- The way Allen Moss sees it, vast stretches of the West and all of their wealth belong to the Indians.
And despite being turned back in lawsuit after lawsuit for decades, the Western Shoshone leader says he won't rest until the U.S. government honors a 19th-century treaty that, according to the tribe, entitles it to reclaim ancestral lands extending from California through Nevada and Utah to Idaho.
The lands include much of the Las Vegas area. The Shoshone
Source: AP
January 8, 2007
It's the California earthquake hardly anyone has heard of -- strong enough to rip 225 miles of the San Andreas Fault and make rivers run backward, but leaving nothing like the cultural scar inflicted by the San Francisco Quake of 1906.
Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the magnitude-7.9 Fort Tejon quake, which was blamed for just two deaths in what was then sparsely populated California.
No museum exhibits or musical tributes will mark the 1857 event, sometimes
