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 Online (UK)
December 17, 2006
A fierce legal tussle has broken out between Cherie Booth, QC, and MI6 over top-secret files that relate to “The Griffin”, an Austrian who provided Britain with vital intelligence on the Nazi atom bomb programme during the Second World War.
The Prime Minister’s wife, who is representing the family of the secret agent, Paul Rosbaud, has lodged a claim demanding that MI6, then usually known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), release all its information on the case “so that the
Source: Times Online (UK)
December 17, 2006
A BRITISH rabbi who angered fellow Jews by speaking at a “Holocaust denial” conference in Iran now says millions did die in gas chambers but may have deserved it.
Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from Greater Manchester and a leading member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, sparked new controversy on his return from Tehran by suggesting that God would have saved the victims of the Nazis if they had deserved to live.
Cohen, whose house in Salford was pelted with
Source: LAT
December 17, 2006
BERLIN — In a wacky corner of cyberspace, rubber duckies with Adolf Hitler faces sing in the bathwater. Their voices in unison, they bob to reggae music as bombs fall on Berlin, while the Fuehrer himself, a manic cartoon trapped in a bunker, sings: "Surrender? No, it's not my cup of tea."
The voice belongs to Thomas Pigor, a cabaret singer with a mischievous sense of timing. He and irreverent comic-book writer Walter Moers collaborated on the short video "Adolf — The
Source: AP
December 17, 2006
A bomber pilot from World War II says he was shot down while being escorted by Tuskegee Airmen, an account that supports a recent report by two historians that the famed black fighter group, contrary to legend, did lose at least a few bombers to fire from enemy aircraft.
Warren Ludlum, who lives in Old Tappan, N.J., said that his B-24 bomber was shot down by enemy planes over Linz, Austria, in July 1944, while he was being escorted by P-51 fighters piloted by the Tuskegee Airmen.
Source: NYT Book Review
December 17, 2006
Theorists, novelists and partisans of all stripes have written on war. The Book Review asked a range of writers to recommend titles they find particularly illuminating.
Source: AP
December 15, 2006
The chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor urged the Security Council on Friday to pressure Serbia and Bosnia to arrest fugitive leaders from the Bosnian war, saying it was clear after 11 years that neither country was willing to do so.
Successive Serbian and Bosnian governments have lacked the political will to arrest wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladic, said Carla Del Ponte.
"My assessment remains that the Serbian gover
Source: AP
December 16, 2006
DALLAS -- An art collector has paid about $2.3 million for a $1,000 bill printed in 1890, according to the auction house that brokered the transaction between two anonymous private collectors.
"This $1,000 bill is one of only two known of its type; the other surviving example is in the museum at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco," Greg Rohan, president of Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, said Friday.
Rohan said that type of bank note is known
Source: AP
December 16, 2006
Latin America is finally owning up to its "dirty wars" -- the nightmarish campaigns of state-sponsored violence in which hundreds of thousands died or "disappeared." But the death of Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet shows the continent's leftist leaders of today must act fast to expose the truth while the masterminds of this savagery are still alive.
Momentum is growing behind new human rights investigations in Chile and other countries where dictators ruled with i
Source: AP
December 16, 2006
ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- They see themselves as patriots who shed blood for their freedom in a rebellion that foreshadowed the demise of the Soviet Union.
But the Kazakhs who took to the streets in mass protests in December 1986 were dismissed as drunkards and hooligans by the Communist authorities who crushed their uprising. Now, 20 years later, these middle-aged former rebels feel their sacrifice and struggle have never been recognized.
Instead, this weekend's annivers
Source: Baltimore Sun
December 17, 2006
CHEVY CHASE, Md. At the height of the flu pandemic in 1918, William H. Sardo Jr. remembers the pine caskets stacked in the living room of his family's house, a funeral home in Washington, D.C.
The city had slowed to a near halt. Schools were closed. Church services were banned. The federal government limited its hours of operation. People were dying -- some who took ill in the morning were dead by night.
"That's how quickly it happened," said Sardo, 94, who
Source: WaPo
December 16, 2006
For years, he was known only as the faithful servant. Through the long campaigns of the Revolutionary War, he toiled alongside his famous master. In a painting that has hung in the U.S. Capitol since 1899, he is the figure by the fire, roasting sweet potatoes.
Now Oscar Marion is anonymous no longer. He has had his name restored.
In a ceremony yesterday at the Capitol, Marion was recognized as the "African American Patriot" he always was. A proclamation signed
Source: Richard Cohen at Slate.com
December 15, 2006
I confess to being in the market for an expensive watch. I say I confess because I know the watch I buy for a lot of money will not be more accurate than a watch I could have bought for a lot less, but there you have it. This explains why I gave more than cursory attention to a double-page ad in the Sunday New York Times for expensive watches. One caught my eye. It seemed oversized, which is the fashion these days, and built to take a bullet or two, which is required these days, and undoubtedly
Source: Reuters
December 15, 2006
KENT, Ohio (Reuters) - Jerry M. Lewis has seen anti-war protests at their mightiest and most tragic. As a faculty peace marshal in 1970, he saw Ohio National Guardsmen kill four students at Kent State University during a protest against the Vietnam War.
Today, the sociology professor sees little anti-war sentiment at the liberal arts school. Iraq, he says, is a different war than Vietnam, in one big way.
"It's a pretty short explanation: D-R-A-F-T," Lewis said
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
December 15, 2006
Rita Weiss has some questions she'd like to put to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ms. Weiss was just 18 when the Nazis came to her village in Hungary in 1944, and put her entire family on a train to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp. She lost her father, her mother, her brother and seven sisters in the gas chambers and crematoria. Of 49 relatives, she was the only survivor.
"I now ask you, Ahmadinejad, what happened to them? Where are they?" M
Source: AP
December 15, 2006
Not to be outdone by their husbands, the
first ladies are getting their chance to shine on the nation's coins.
Starting next year, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams and all the rest will
begin appearing on a new series of gold coins.
It will be the first time in history that the U.S. Mint has produced a
series featuring women.
While a new presidential series will be $1 circulating coins, the wives
will be on half-ounce gold coins with each likely to sell for more than
$300.
Source: Breitbart
December 15, 2006
Seventy years after the last streetcar vanished from the streets
of Paris, the tramway, increasingly touted as a clean, fast mass
transport solution, makes its big comeback to the capital on
Saturday.
Once criss-crossed by more than 120 tramway lines -- horse-drawn from
1855, then steam- and finally electric-powered -- Paris, like most major
European cities, was gradually seduced away by the car and underground
train, closing its last line in 1937.
Running 7.9 kilometres (4.7 mi
Source: Breitbart
December 15, 2006
US authorities indicted 16 former soldiers in the Bosnian Serb
military, including one who allegedly took part in the 1995
Srebrenica massacre, for hiding their past to obtain refugee
status.
Indictments issued in six states by the US Justice Department accused 15
of the 16 of fraudulently immigrating into the US by lying about their
background in Bosnian Serb military forces, the department said in a
statement.
Source: Reuters
December 15, 2006
Bangladesh celebrated the 35th anniversary of its independence on Saturday
amid continuing strife ahead of parliamentary elections due next month,
with rival leaders laying wreaths at a war memorial near the capital.
Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan on December 16, 1971, following
a nine-month guerrilla war which cost millions of lives.
Source: NPR (audio)
December 17, 2006
President Bush has resisted comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, but this week, he started citing body counts as evidence of U.S. effectiveness in Baghdad and elsewhere. That raised a comparison with a PR tactic generally discredited after Vietnam.
Source: NYT
December 16, 2006
The Smithsonian Institution has agreed to develop a system to document and explain its decisions about why television and film producers are granted or denied access to its collections outside of a widely criticized contract the institution entered into with Showtime Networks.
The agreement was disclosed in a report issued Friday by the Government Accountability Office that rebuked the Smithsonian for failing to provide the public with sufficient details about the Showtime contract.
