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
December 13, 2006
A collection of about 1,000 letters to French impressionist painter Claude Monet from his friends and admirers fetched more than $1 million at an auction Wednesday, Artcurial auction house said.
The letters sold for $1.7 million — more than double the estimated price.
Source: AFP at Yahoo News
December 13, 2006
In this central Turkish village, peasants and archaeologists celebrate a unique achievement -- a 3,246-year-old dam, once buried under mud and slime, is back in service to irrigate farmlands.
The dam is a heritage of the Hittites, who ruled over vast areas of the Middle East from 2000 to 1000 BC, fought Pharaoh Rameses The Great, among others, and built some of the biggest cities of the time in the heart of Anatolia, the Asian part of modern Turkey.
The 2,500 inhabitant
Source: AP
December 13, 2006
Israel's prime minister asked Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday to urge Christians to protest Holocaust denials, Israeli government officials said.
During their meeting at the Vatican, Benedict told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert he would consider the request, which followed an Iranian conference questioning the Nazi genocide against the Jews.
Benedict met with Olmert alone for 35 minutes, longer than the 10 minutes expected, and praised Israel's restraint in Gaza, Israeli s
Source: NYT
December 13, 2006
The chancellor of the City University of New York yesterday directed the president of City College to remove the names of two fugitives linked to violent crimes from the entrance to a student clubroom.
Matthew Goldstein, the chancellor, called the designation of the room as the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center “unauthorized and inappropriate.”
Ms. Shakur — once known as Joanne Chesimard — was a member of the Black Liberation Army convicted in
Source: Salon
December 13, 2006
The blast rocked Washington's
Embassy Row on Sept. 21, 1976, ripping through the car of one of Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet's most outspoken critics.
The assassination of Orlando Letelier and his American assistant two miles
from the White House prompted demands for explanations and helped expose
what President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a series of
CIA officials tried for years to conceal: U.S support for a military
dictatorship that was killing thousands of
Source: Salon
December 13, 2006
A memorial marking the slaughter of Chinese
citizens of Nanjing by Japanese troops will soon include exhibits showing
visits by Japanese politicians to a Tokyo shrine that honors war dead,
state media reported Wednesday.
The visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted Japanese war criminals
are honored, have become a sticking point in relations between Beijing and
Tokyo.
Lu Yunfei, Web master for the Patriots League, a nationalist Web site,
called the planned exhibition"a si
Source: Breitbart
December 13, 2006
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - The mother of a high school senior who posed in
chain mail with a medieval sword for his yearbook picture has sued after
the school rejected the photo because of its"zero tolerance" policy
against weapons.
Patrick Agin, 17, belongs to the Society for Creative Anachronism, an
international organization that researches and recreates medieval history.
He submitted the photo in September for the Portsmouth High School
yearbook.
But the school's principal ref
Source: Breitbart
December 13, 2006
Top US neoconservative Richard Perle, a key former architect of US
President George W. Bush's foreign policy, has admitted there were
mistakes in the execution of the Iraq war, saying the invasion had
needed"an Iraqi De Gaulle."
Perle, who was an advisor to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
told German weekly broadsheet Die Zeit in an issue to be published
Thursday that a string of tactical errors had resulted in the chaos
reigning in Iraq today."The idea was good, the executio
Source: Reuters
December 13, 2006
The Chilean army will punish Augusto
Pinochet's grandson for criticizing the judiciary at his grandfather's
funeral, the army said in a statement on Wednesday.
Pinochet's grandson, also called Augusto, was roundly criticized for his
funeral speech on Tuesday, in which he praised Pinochet for overthrowing
the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973, and attacked
prosecutors who tried to bring the ex-dictator to trial for human rights
abuses.
Source: Reuters
December 13, 2006
The appeals chamber of Bosnia's war crimes court on
Wednesday sentenced Bosnian Serb Nedjo Samardzic to 24 years in jail after
his original sentence of 13 years and four month was overturned.
Samardzic had been sentenced in April for abetting and aiding persecution,
rape and torture of Muslims in an eastern Bosnian town early in the
1992-95 war but the appeals chamber then ordered a re-trail because of
procedural errors.
In Wednesday's verdict, the chamber said Samardzic took pa
Source: AP
December 13, 2006
Russia's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday criticized Iran for hosting a conference of Holocaust deniers, saying Moscow opposed "the concealment of the truth about the monstrous crimes of the Nazis."
In a statement posted on the ministry's Web site, spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Russia had condemned Tehran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the past for threatening Israel and denying the systematic killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.
Rus
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 8, 2006
Scotland's first contemporary feature film in Gaelic is in post-production. The BBC has begun broadcasting live sports coverage in Gaelic. A Gaelic-only high school has opened in Glasgow. A leading Scottish politician is seeking, via Brussels, to ensure Gaelic's place as a European language.
Currently spoken by fewer than 2 percent in Scotland, Gaelic is enjoying a revival here that has blossomed since the country held elections in 1999 to create a Scottish Parliament for the first
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 8, 2006
The kindest thing one can say about Gerhard Schröder's return to private life last year is that it was not as unseemly as that of his predecessor as German chancellor, Helmut Kohl.
Kohl admitted to taking illegal cash payments, which shredded his reputation. Schröder, 62, took a job as chairman of a Russian-German pipeline venture and was roundly condemned by critics who said he had championed the pipeline while in office and was improperly cashing inon his friendship with Vladimir
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 13, 2006
Archaeologists digging to reach the tomb of St Paul have stumbled across a life-size "sketch" of the dome of St Peter's produced by one of its architects in the 16th century.
The excavation of St Paul's tomb at the church of St Paul's Outside-the-Walls in Rome is now complete, and the sarcophagus will be on view from the beginning of next year.
However, three feet below the floor of the enormous church, which is the second-largest in the city, the project's te
Source: Media Matters
December 14, 2006
Fox News Washington bureau managing editor Brit Hume, CBS national political correspondent Gloria Borger, and Fox News host Neil Cavuto reported that if Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD), who was hospitalized on December 13 with intracerebral bleeding and underwent brain surgery, were "incapacitated" or "unable to serve in any way," or his condition were to "worsen," then South Dakota Gov. Michael Rounds (R) would appoint a replacement to take Johnson's seat until the 2008 ge
Source: Newsday
December 14, 2006
The tipping point for Donny George came the day last summer his sister found a letter with a bullet in it in the driveway of their mother's home in Baghdad.
George, an antiquities expert recently recruited for the faculty of Stony Brook University, said the letter threatened to kidnap and behead his son Martin, 17, for allegedly "cursing Islam and teasing Muslim girls," unless he apologized and paid a $1,000 fine.
"The letter also mentioned his father wa
Source: Inside Higher Ed
December 14, 2006
The president of a Canadian university on Wednesday condemned the “conference” on the Holocaust held in Iran this week — amid shock at his institution and elsewhere in Canada at the news that one of his professors had presented a paper there.
“I express my shock and regret that the name of St. Francis Xavier University has been associated with the recent ‘conference’ in Tehran due to the presence of a member of university faculty,” said the statement from Sean Riley, president of th
Source: NYT
December 14, 2006
Iran’s so-called Holocaust conference this week was billed as a chance to force the West to reconsider the historical record and, thereby, the legitimacy of Israel. But why would the Iranians invite speakers with so little credibility in the West, including a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and disgraced European scholars?
That question misses the point. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, portrays participants like David Duke, the former Louisiana Klan leader, and Robert Fauris
Source: NYT
December 14, 2006
Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota, was in intensive care today after undergoing surgery late Wednesday night for a brain hemorrhage, a development that highlighted the fragility of the Democrats’ new majority in the Senate.... [HNN: If he dies or resigns, he would be replaced by the Republican governor. The new senator would remain in place until Johnson's term is up in 2008.]
According to information from the Senate historian cited on CQ.com, at least nine senator
Source: NYT
December 14, 2006
Behind the dusty stools and the old towels, under the broken telephones and the picture frames, amid the spider webs, sits one of the country’s most important collections of artifacts devoted to the history of African-Americans.
Painstakingly collected over a lifetime by Mayme Agnew Clayton — a retired university librarian who died in October at 83 and whose interest in African-American history consumed her for most of her adult life — the massive collection of books, films, documen
