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: Guardian
January 1, 2007
AWJA, Iraq -- Pledging revenge, hundreds of mourners flocked to Saddam Hussein's tomb in his home village in northern Iraq on Sunday, where the ousted leader was buried in private after being hanged for crimes against humanity.
In an outpouring of grief and anger from Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs at the Shia-led government that rushed through the execution, mourners knelt and prayed by the tomb in Awja over which the Iraqi flag had been draped.
Sectarian passions that h
Source: NYT
January 2, 2007
Gerald R. Ford was eulogized today as a president and a man who embodied the best of small-town American values and whose decency made him a player on the world stage.
“To know Jerry Ford was to know a Norman Rockwell painting come to life,” former President George H. W. Bush told a gathering at the National Cathedral. Mr. Ford was a man of uncommon toughness when necessary, but possessed of a heart “as big and open as the Midwest plains on which he was born,” Mr. Bush said.
Source: http://www.peer.org
December 28, 2006
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Respon
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
LYNDON JOHNSON in 1973. Richard Nixon in 1994. Ronald Reagan in 2004.
The last three former presidents to die dominated the world stage. They bent history to their will, for better or worse, and became the subjects of a crowded shelf of biographies. For the writers of memorials and obituaries, they were easy.
Not so Gerald R. Ford, who served only 29 months, never won a national election, and was constricted by an overwhelmingly hostile Congress. He is remembered mainly
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan — Maria Sadina hunched over fading pictures of her parents, ethnic Germans who were deported in 1941 from the Volga region in Russia to one of Karaganda’s many gulag camps.
Ms. Sadina’s father was imprisoned for praising the quality of a German-made tractor, and for a decade he worked as a slave laborer in the nearby coal mines. Her mother was sent to the Karaganda gulag simply for her German heritage.
They had married and reared their daughter, Ms
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
Saddam Hussein is one of the few modern leaders to have been tried and executed for his crimes and other abuses of power. Most dictators of the past century have died of natural causes at home or in comfortable exile — or at the hands of assassins.
But with trials of former leaders becoming more common in the past decade, there are other distinguishing features in the Hussein case: he was the first former leader to be tried by a domestic court for crimes against humanity — a crime e
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
NASHVILLE, Dec. 30 — In the anxious countdown to New Year’s Eve, clubs inventory their stockpiles of liquor and champagne, party hosts check and recheck invitation lists, and frantic revelers cast about for the most promising party destinations.
But in many black churches across the country, midnight on Dec. 31 marks the culmination of a far different observance. In a tradition with roots in the Civil War and a nod to the days of slavery, many black Americans spend New Year’s Eve in
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — The old mahogany furniture is shrouded in white dust covers, and the espaliered gardens overlooking the James River have gone to seed. Colonial Williamsburg is selling Carter’s Grove, an imposing 18th-century Georgian mansion and one of the most renowned plantations in Virginia.
Colin Campbell, Williamsburg’s chairman and president, said he had tried to interest other preservation groups in the property, with no luck. And so the 400-acre riverfront residence, clo
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
NORTHPORT, N.Y. — The King of the Beats was already a literary celebrity when he moved with his mother, Gabrielle, to this Long Island harbor town in 1958, but the locals remember him mainly as a broke barfly who padded about barefoot or in bedroom slippers.
“He never had any money, so he’d get your ear till you bought him a drink, always Schenley’s whiskey,” Bob Reid, a 69-year-old clammer, recalled of Jack Kerouac’s six years here, much of them spent in Murphy’s, a salty bar overl
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
It has been a while since America drew its face close to Betty Ford. But what the nation saw this week here in Southern California — an impossibly tiny face, lips pinched in grief and eyes blinking in the harsh midday sun — served as a poignant reminder of the woman whose reign as first lady, while brief and wholly unexpected, was among the most remarkable in modern history.
Former President Gerald R. Ford’s death on Tuesday at the age of 93 thrust Mrs. Ford back into a public spotl
Source: NYT
December 31, 2006
After a slow journey past the touchstones of his political life, Gerald R. Ford was brought to a place of honor Saturday under the Capitol dome, where a crowd of dignitaries gathered to commemorate the man whose presidency encompassed one of the most tumultuous periods of American history.
Many of Mr. Ford’s most prominent protégés came to mourn him, remembering the era of political unity, however brief, he oversaw after the Watergate scandal. Vice President Dick Cheney, who served
Source: AP
December 30, 2006
A historic church in the seaside city of Steinbeck can cut down four redwood trees that are damaging the structure, city officials said.
The roots from the 100-foot trees have grown into the foundation and crumbling sandstone walls of San Carlos Cathedral. Church officials also said the trees threatened an adjacent property, which contains pottery remnants and other artifacts dating back centuries to Monterey's early days.
"I will be granting their request to remov
Source: AP
December 29, 2006
Some ended up in prison, others were butchered at the hands of their own people. A lucky few lived out their days in comfortable exile or in positions of privilege in the lands they ruled. India's independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi said dictators "can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall."
That hasn't always proven true. Russia's Josef Stalin, North Korea's Kim Il-Sung, China's Mao Zedong, Spain's Francisco Franco, Albania's Enver Hoxha and Syria's Hafez A
Source: UPI
December 28, 2006
An academic and diplomatic review of historic relations between China and Japan will not dilute Japan's record of massacres, China Radio International reports.
The remark was made Thursday in Beijing by Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, who discussed the conclusion of the first joint historical review between the two countries aimed at narrowing differences.
Qin was asked if the so-called Tokyo Tribunal, or the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, h
Source: AP
December 30, 2006
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- A key witness in a human rights trial stemming from Argentina's military dictatorship was found beaten Friday, two days after he went missing.
Luis Gerez, who has accused a former police chief of torturing him during the 1966-73 dictatorship, was found by a police patrol in a street of Garin, a town just north of Buenos Aires, said Leon Arslanian, the Buenos Aires security minister.
A friend who spoke to Gerez at a hospital, Alberto Fernande
Source: Deutsche Presse
December 30, 2006
Disputes over history are the biggest contributing factor to friction between Japan and China, coming in ahead of economic rivalry and China's rise as an Asian power in a poll released Saturday.
More than 900 people in seven Asian countries were queried for The Straits Times-Asia News Network (ANN) poll on the state of relations between the two countries.
Disagreements over history were identified by 54 per cent of those polled as the major sticking point. Economic ri
Source: UKTV
December 29, 2006
An Ofsted report suggesting that many pupils find history teaching too hard has caused consternation among historians.
Historians have expressed fears that history in schools is being "dumbed down" following calls for courses in schools to focus on world events.
A report from schools inspectorate Ofsted discovered that large numbers of pupils would rather concentrate on current events than British history and teachers have called for courses to include more film and
Source: CNN
December 20, 2006
Searching for the perfect present for your children, one that won't get shoved in a closet or cost a fortune? Hoping to engage your children in activities other than video games and television over their winter break? Look no further than those piles of shoe boxes bursting with old photographs. This holiday season give kids the gift that they will treasure for a lifetime -- a family history.
"Family history is about stories, not necessarily who married whom and all the way back
Source: NYT
December 30, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 — This supremely political city has a keen sense of history and its uses. So, not surprisingly, it also has a thing for memorials: marble, granite and otherwise. Six presidents and seven wars have monumental tributes in or near downtown Washington.
But presidents are not the only people so honored. Ground was broken for the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the Mall six weeks ago, and Congress has approved a monument to Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” of the Car
Source: NYT
December 30, 2006
The hanging death of Saddam Hussein tonight ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed— that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the American military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.
The despot, known universally as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once pro
