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: Observer (UK)
December 10, 2006
The Tories are to launch the biggest crusade for personal morality since John Major's ill-fated 'back to basics' campaign, demanding the right for citizens to tackle teenage yobs physically and calling for a reduction in family breakdowns.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow Attorney General, told The Observer that people who slapped others or scuffled with youths while trying to stop crimes being committed should not be prosecuted. His words mark a clear break with David Cameron's 'hug a h
Source: AP
December 8, 2006
An effort to clean up some of the city's seedier neighborhoods and rid the streets of junkies, hookers and runaways has run headlong into San Francisco's free-to-be-who-you-are ethos.
Nearly four decades after the Summer of Love, residents and merchants frustrated with what they regard as blight are turning to the city for help or taking revitalization into their own hands.
But other residents of the Tenderloin district and Haight-Ashbury contend a crackdown would rob
Source: AP
December 8, 2006
Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.
A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generall
Source: IHT
December 8, 2006
JACKSON, Mississippi -- Moses Hardy, believed to be the second-oldest man in the world and the last black U.S. veteran of World War I, has died at age 113, family members said Friday.
Evelyn Davis, 68, one of Hardy's eight children, said her father died Thursday at a nursing home in Aberdeen. He would have been 114 on Jan. 6.
"He had been doing great. He didn't suffer and he wasn't sick — he died of old age," said Davis, of Aberdeen. "He knew everybody an
Source: NYT
December 11, 2006
Three star General Frederick Weyand was the secret source for a front page New York Times story in 1967 that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, according to an op ed published in the paper today by Murray Fromson.
The 1967 story in the Times was written by the late R.W. Apple and dealt a thunderous blow to the Johnson administration's claim that the war was being won.
Weyand, now 90 and living in Hawaii, agreed to reveal his identity in time for a public memorial that is
Source: AP
December 11, 2006
SANTIAGO, Chile -- Hundreds of supporters of Gen.
Augusto Pinochet, many in tears, filed Monday past the brown wooden coffin
for the ex-dictator, who was denied a state funeral normally granted to
former presidents.
While Pinochet's relatives mourned his death Sunday from heart failure at
age 91, his many opponents celebrated with champagne and lamented that he
escaped justice for the torture and killings that marked his 17 years in
power after a bloody 1973 coup.
Police surrou
Source: AP
December 11, 2006
The J. Paul Getty Museum announced
Monday that it would return to Greece an ancient gold wreath and a marble
bust that Greece claims were illegally spirited out of the country.
At a news conference with the Greek culture minister, museum director
Michael Brand said they had"reached an agreement in principle on the
return of two objects."
Source: AP
December 11, 2006
Iran on Monday opened a Holocaust
conference that it said would examine whether the genocide took place,
claiming the meeting was an opportunity for discussion in an atmosphere
free of Western taboos.
The conference,"Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," was initiated by
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has described the Holocaust as a"myth"
and called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Even before it opened, the
gathering was condemned by Germany, the United States and Israel.
Source: Breitbart
December 11, 2006
The sarcophagus containing the remains of Saint Paul will in
future be displayed for followers to visit in Rome at the
Christian apostle's tomb, the Vatican said.
The Vatican's archaeological services made an opening under the main altar
of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, to allow visitors to see
the sarcophagus of the saint buried there, said Giorgio Filippi, head of
the Epigraphical department of the Vatican Museums, in a news conference.
The authenticity of the tomb
Source: Breitbart
December 11, 2006
An oil painting by Sir Winston Churchill, Britain's prime minister
during World War II, sold at auction for nearly three times its
estimate, Sotheby's said."View of Tinherir", painted in 1951 during one of his frequent trips to
Morocco after the conflict, made 612,000 pounds (1.2 million dollars)
including premium, from an estimate of just 250,000 pounds.
The price tag is a record for a work by Churchill, who was a keen artist.
He gave it to United States General George Marsha
Source: Reuters
December 11, 2006
NICOSIA (Reuters) - The skeleton lying on the white sheet, identified only
by a serial number on the wall above, is a stark reminder of years of
conflict in divided Cyprus and the legacy of bitterness that remains.
Nobody knows who this man was: all they know is that he wore dark gray
trousers, a pale shirt, probably lace-up shoes and pale brown socks, which
remained surprisingly intact during years buried in the damp earth.
It's not much to go on.
"How many men were wearing
Source: AP
November 10, 2006
In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for
the capture of"the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous
of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her."
The dangerous woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in
France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an
artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a
decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun
while hunting in Turkey.
The
Source: Toronto Star
December 11, 2006
... For many analysts, analogies with the Vietnam War are useful; for others, they are anathema.
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow in defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations concedes there are similarities. But he cautions against taking them too far. Vietnam was "a people's war," he notes, a class-based insurgency against a ruling regime. Iraq, by comparison, is a "communal civil war," a battle in which sectarian factions are fighting for survival.
Source: Radio Free Europe
December 11, 2006
Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki addressed the participants, saying that Iran intends neither to confirm nor deny the Holocaust. Drawing an implicit comparison with Western countries in which denying the Holocaust is a crime, Mottaki said the gathering provides a platform for open discussion of the topic and questioned a Europe "which claims to be free."Iranian officials' assault on one of the most thoroughly documented campaigns of mass murder in histor
Source: NYT
December 10, 2006
Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption, died today at the Military Hospital of Santiago. He was 91.
Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1975, during his rule.
Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara, head of the medical team that had been treating him, said his condition degenerated sharply a week after he underwent an angioplasty after an acute heart attack.
Source: NYT
December 9, 2006
A Fox News commentator accused former President Jimmy Carter of copying material from one of his books without proper attribution. The commentator, Dennis Ross, a former envoy to the Middle East who is now a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News, said Mr. Carter used maps he created without giving proper credit for the material, which was included in the former president’s controversial new book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.” “I think there should be a correction and an attribution,” Mr. Ross
Source: NYT
December 9, 2006
... In the past several weeks China Central Television has broadcast a 12-part series describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings....
The documentary, on China’s main national network, uses the word rise constantly, including its title, “Rise of the Great Powers.” It endorses the idea that China should study the experiences of nation
Source: NYT
December 9, 2006
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the Reagan administration’s first United Nations ambassador and a beacon of neoconservative thought who helped guide American military, diplomatic and covert action from 1981 to 1985, died Thursday at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 80.
Her death was announced yesterday by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she was a senior fellow. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her personal assistant, Tammy Jagyur.
Ms. Kirkpatri
Source: Reuters
December 6, 2006
A box containing 23 light bulbs used at the 1890 court
case where Thomas Edison defended his patent for the invention is to be
auctioned later this month and is expected to fetch up to 300,000 pounds
($600,000).
Christie's auctioneers said the bulbs disappeared after the tussle over
U.S. patent number 223,898, but were discovered by chance in 2002 in the
attic of a house in the United States in their original wooden case
complete with the original key.
According to Web sites de
Source: LA Times
December 6, 2006
In 1908, a former slave and retired Army chaplain named Lt. Col. Allen Allensworth realized his life's dream: a town started and run entirely by African Americans.
Long ago shuttered, the original Allensworth now is a state historic park, cherished by families and church groups who see it as a hardscrabble monument to California's black history.But they fear that despite the state's protection, the settlement named after the charismatic military man is in peril.
