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)
November 26, 2006
TONY BLAIR is to express his “deep sorrow” for Britain’s role in the slave trade tomorrow, but his carefully worded comments will fall short of the full apology demanded by campaigners.
In a characteristic piece of positioning, the prime minister will issue a statement to the black community newspaper New Nation, atoning for the country’s involvement in the trade nearly 200 years ago.
But it will disappoint those who wanted the prime minister to make an apology in a parliam
Source: Telegraph
November 23, 2006
New computer software that can read lips at almost any angle has helped make sense of one of the Second World War's lingering mysteries —Hitler's home movies.
The technology allows the dialogue to be dubbed on to the silent films, many of them made by Eva Braun at Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof. With the new soundtrack, Hitler can be heard encouraging young children towards a life in the military, criticising even his closest henchmen and flirting with Braun.
Th
Source: NYT
November 26, 2006
SOME old soldiers don’t even fade away. They keep on fighting, trapped in their own past as the world around them changes, ghosts of a long-dead war.
“I have the duty to liberate my country!” shouted Ly Tong, wearing bright yellow prison pajamas, through a double screen of wire mesh at Bangkok’s central jail.
“The only thing that matters is, the Communists still control my country,” he shouted over the hubbub in the caged visiting area recently. “I’m a pilot. This is wh
Source: NYT
November 26, 2006
Is Iraq in a civil war?
Though the Bush administration continues to insist that it is not, a growing number of American and Iraqi scholars, leaders and policy analysts say the fighting in Iraq meets the standard definition of civil war.
The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in p
Source: AP
November 25, 2006
The war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in the war that President Bush's father fought in, World War II.
As of Sunday, the conflict in Iraq has raged for three years and just over eight months.
Only the Vietnam War (eight years, five months), the Revolutionary War (six years, nine months), and the Civil War (four years) have engaged America longer.
Fighting in Afghanistan, which may or may not be a full-fledged war depending on who i
Source: VOA News
November 23, 2006
A French judge has issued international arrest warrants for nine Rwandans suspected of plotting the 1994 killing of a former president, which led to genocide in Rwanda.
Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued the warrants in Paris this week. The nine named suspects include Rwandan armed forces chief James Kabarebe and Army Chief of Staff Charles Kayonga, as well as two men, Franck Nziza and Eric Hakiziman, suspected of firing the missile that downed then-President Juvenal Habyarimana's ai
Source: Guardian
November 20, 2006
In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House. Then, on June 6, he was assassinated - apparently by a lone gunman. But Shane O'Sullivan says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder.
Related LinkMel Ayton: Did the CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy? The BBC's Blunder
Source: Reuters
November 22, 2006
Criminal gangs in Iraq and the Middle East
are selling forged art works on auction Web site eBay and in antique markets
in Britain to help fund terrorism, British police said on Wednesday.
The extent of the scam was not clear but the items, purportedly Iraqi or
heirlooms from the region, could each sell for up to a couple of thousand
pounds (dollars), according to London police's Arts and Antiques Unit.
"Archaeological stuff is being exported by the ton-load from Middle Eastern
co
Source: NYT
November 23, 2006
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert made history this year when he became the longest-serving Republican in that post. Now he is about to go into the books again as one of the few House speakers, and the first in almost 50 years, to rejoin the rank and file.
Defying expectations that he would immediately retire if the Republicans lost their majority, Mr. Hastert is preparing to remain in the House for at least the early months of the 110th Congress while he helps orchestrate a line of succes
Source: NYT
November 23, 2006
[Brazilians took part in their country’s drive to produce rubber for the Allies in World War. Now they want to be reimbursed for their services.]
The program originated in an agreement between the United States and Brazil. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut the United States off from its main source of rubber, in Malaya, and President Roosevelt persuaded Brazil’s dictator, Getúlio Vargas, to fill that strategic gap in return for millions of dollars in loans, credits and equ
Source: Reuters
November 22, 2006
DALLAS (Reuters) - The piano on which the late John Lennon composed his
famous anti-war song"Imagine" made an odd appearance on Wednesday at the
site where President John F. Kennedy was gunned down, competing for
attention with conspiracy buffs on the 43rd anniversary of the
assassination.
The plain-looking brown piano has been brought to America for exhibits by
British pop star George Michael and his partner Kenny Goss. Michael bought
it in 2000 at an auction for 1.45 million Britis
Source: Reuters
November 22, 2006
A lavishly illustrated"Atlas of Creation" is
mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey, proclaiming
that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is the real root of terrorism.
Arriving unsolicited by post, the large-format tome offers 768 glossy
pages of photographs and easy-to-read text to prove that God created the
world with all its species.
At first sight, it looks like it could be the work of United States
creationists, the Christian fundamentalists who believ
Source: NYT
November 22, 2006
The mayor of Philadelphia has asked that city’s Historical Commission to consider designating a renowned Thomas Eakins painting a “historic object,” a maneuver that would prevent the artwork from being moved without the commission’s approval, The Associated Press reported. Thomas Jefferson University, the owner of the 1875 canvas, “The Gross Clinic,” voted on Nov. 10 to sell the painting for $68 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Ar
Source: David Garrow in the NYT
November 22, 2006
“At no other time in U.S. history were the news media more influential than they were in the 1950s and 1960s,” argues “The Race Beat,” an important study of how journalists covered the civil rights movement. One might imagine that influence was all to the good, but Gene Roberts, a former managing editor at The New York Times, and Hank Klibanoff, a managing editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, describe here in richly instructive detail how, more often than not, the professional performance
Source: Reuters
November 22, 2006
Talks between Italy and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles over 52 art works that Rome says were looted have hit an impasse after the museum said it was prepared to return only half of them.
The Italian Culture Ministry said on Wednesday a letter from the Getty saying the museum would turn over only 26 objects -- not including two prized antiquities whose return Italy had demanded -- had been met with ``surprise and disappointment.''
It did not elaborate, adding si
Source: Inside Higher Ed
November 22, 2006
Professors normally want people to pay attention to their research findings.
But when anthropologists learned that some of their scholarship may have inspired tactics used in the Abu Ghraib prison — and may be increasingly central to the interrogation of prisoners being held by U.S. forces in many locations, sometimes without standard protections — many were taken aback.
As a result, scholars attending the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting last week
Source: Scientific American
November 15, 2006
Researchers have unearthed the graves of three Stone Age infants that may ultimately bear on the question of whether humans interbred with Neandertals. The rare find, from a 27,000-year-old site in Austria, includes two bodies that might be twins sheltered under a mammoth's shoulder blade.
The team discovered the skeletons in two separate burial pits: One uncovered last year contained two infants side by side--twins, apparently. A second pit containing a single body was found this y
Source: AP
November 21, 2006
Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class
wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching
up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the
items now belong to him because he"discovered" them. The reaction is
exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional
Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians
Source: National Security Archive
November 21, 2006
Mexican authorities released a groundbreaking report over the weekend on the government's use of violent repression to crush its opponents during the 1960s-80s. The National Security Archive posted the full report today on the Mexico Project Web page.
The report by the Office of Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, named by President Vicente Fox in 2002 to investigate past human rights crimes, accuses three Mexican presidents of a sustained policy of violence targeting armed
Source: Miami Herald
November 20, 2006
DALLAS - ''Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, you'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath,'' the rumpled reporter gasped as he interrupted a fashion model's televised chat about the appropriateness of zippered sleeves. ''But 10 or 15 minutes ago, a tragic thing, from all indications at this point, has happened in the city of Dallas . . .'' Though he didn't know it, the reporter was bringing news not just of President Kennedy's assassination, but of a revolution in American journalism: Telev
