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: BBC
Nov 9, 2009
The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?
Yet they fought in the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and over the skies of Germany. A shrinking band of veterans, many now living in poverty, bitterly resent being written out of history.
For Africa, World War II began not in 1939, b
Source: BBC
Nov 9, 2009
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has posted on Facebook a picture of himself at the Berlin Wall, saying he had chipped away at it with a pickaxe.
The image shows Mr Sarkozy, then a 34-year-old French MP, standing before a graffiti-covered section of the wall.
His caption dates the image to 9 November 1989, but French observers say it was probably taken the next day. In the caption, the French president says he arrived in West Berlin wit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 9, 2009
Mr de Paolis came across the paintings after deciding to add a bathroom in the apartment, which partly extends into an abandoned medieval tower that was thought to have been part of a military fort in Civitavecchia, a port west of Rome.
Bit by bit, De Paolis uncovered copies of the frescoes in Raphael's Room of Heliodorus at the Vatican museums, thought to have been painted by a contemporary student of the Renaissance master, Ugo da Scarpi, best known for his wood carvings.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 9, 2009
Relatives of passengers on United flight 93, the hijacked 9/11 plane which crashed in a field after an on-board fight for the controls, have broken ground on a permanent memorial park in their honour.
At a ceremony at the weekend that was led by Ken Salazar, the US Interior Secretary, 39 relatives of the 40 passengers and crew who died turned shovels of soil in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The government intends to have the first phase of a national monument
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 9, 2009
Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, has been accused of ripping off work by a military historian for a Remembrance Sunday poem.
Ben Shephard said Motion's poem An Equal Voice had used 17 passages from his book A War of Nerves, which documented the effects of shell shock on soldiers.
Motion, who said his poem "stitched together" accounts from "a variety of sources", dismissed Shephard's claim of plagiarism by saying he was working in a long
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 9, 2009
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has joined former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Polish leader Lech Walesa to recreate the historic walk across the Berlin Wall on the 20th anniversary of its collapse.
Crowds thronged the areas where the 96-mile wall encircled West Berlin in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Chancellor Merkel, Mr Gorbachev and Mr Walesa walked across the site of the Bornholmer Strasse where the first crowds were filmed crossing freely fr
Source: Fox News
Nov 9, 2009
The president does not plan to travel to Germany to attend the 20th anniversary celebration Monday of the fall of the Berlin Wall, drawing heated criticism from those who say he's ignoring a shining triumph of American-inspired democracy.
"A tragedy," is how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described Obama's absence.
For its part, the administration is citing a scheduling conflict. The White House says the president simply does not have the time to go, with
Source: Fox News
Nov 9, 2009
Germans from both sides of the former Berlin Wall celebrated on Monday, 20 years after the Iron Curtain fell, sending East Germans flooding west and setting in motion events that soon led to the country's reunification.
Chancellor Angela Merkel — reunited Germany's first leader to grow up in the communist east — started the day with President Horst Koehler and other leaders at a prayer service at a former East Berlin church that was a rallying point for opposition activists in 1989.
Source: Discovery News (via OpEdNews.com)
Nov 8, 2009
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.
Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said
Source: NYT
Nov 8, 2009
For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.
Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new e
Source: NYT
Nov 8, 2009
The historical legacy of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the cold war thawed, is as political as the upheavals of that decisive year....
In general, said James M. Goldgeier of George Washington University, a historian of the period, “the big question out there for 20 years is who gets the credit.”
For many in the United States, he said, most of the credit now goes to President Ronald Reagan and his aggressive military spending and antagonism toward Communism. That v
Source: The National Security Archives
Nov 8, 2009
Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, even the hardline Czechoslovak Communist leaders called for the opening of the German border, according to documents from high-level archives in Berlin, Bonn and Prague published for the first time in English and posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Compiled and edited by Czech historian Vilem Precan and translated by Todd Hammond, the documents show that waves of East German r
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 8, 2009
Canada's war dead were commemorated at a Remembrance Sunday service attended by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
The royal couple joined a congregation in Victoria, British Colombia, to mark the sombre occasion on the same day the Queen led the nation in honouring Britain's fallen servicemen and women.
Canadians who have died fighting in the First and Second World Wars and in the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were remembered.
Source: AP
Nov 8, 2009
The family of the alleged Fort Hood shooter held his mother's funeral at the same Virginia mosque that two Sept. 11 hijackers attended in 2001, at a time when a radical imam preached there.
Whether the Fort Hood shooter associated with the hijackers is something the FBI will probably look into, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Sunday it's important
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 8, 2009
In a bid to remind the world of the prominent role that Scots played in laying the foundations of colonial India, the Scottish government has launched a campaign to renovate some of the sub-continent's finest imperial buildings before they decay beyond repair.
The conventional view of Indian colonial life as a quintessentially English experience - all G&Ts, tea and cricket - has long overlooked the fact that Scots were heavily represented in HMG's vast imperial civil service, an
Source: Time
Nov 8, 2009
The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church traditionally couch even the harshest disagreements in decorous, ecclesiastical language. But it didn't take a decoder ring to figure out what Rome-based Archbishop Raymond Burke meant in a late-September address when he charged Boston Cardinal Seán O'Malley with being under the influence of Satan, "the father of lies."
Burke's broadside at O'Malley was inspired by the Cardinal's decision to permit and preside over a funeral Mass fo
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — Gen. Casimir Pulaski finally became an American citizen, 230 years after he died fighting in the Revolutionary War.
President Obama signed a joint resolution of the House and the Senate on Friday that made Pulaski, a Polish nobleman, an honorary citizen.
Pulaski’s contribution to the American colonies’ effort to leave the British Empire began with a flourish. He wrote a letter to Gen. George Washington with the declaration: “I came here, where freedom
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 7, 2009
The staples were removed from a list of rationed foods that most Cubans depend on, permitting them to buy as much of the products as they want – at 20 times more than they used to.
The move comes amid efforts by Raul Castro's government to scale back Cuba's subsidy-rich, cash-poor economy. Lunches which cost so little they were almost free lunches were eliminated from some state-cafeterias in September. In October, the Communist Party's Granma newspaper published a full-page editori
Source: WSJ
Nov 7, 2009
For decades a hilly region in central Germany divided by the Iron Curtain was at risk of becoming the ground zero of a nuclear World War III. During the Cold War, troopers of the U.S. 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment -- known as the Blackhorse regiment -- patrolled this border from Observation Post Alpha near the West German town of Fulda.
They were there to protect the so-called Fulda Gap -- a key weakness in the West's defense. It was the most difficult area for the North Atlantic Tr
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2009
BERLIN — “The Quiz of the Germans,” a lighthearted entry amid a crush of serious examinations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, pitted three West German celebrities seated behind the sloping hood of an old Volkswagen Beetle against counterparts from the East perched above the front of a clunky Trabant.
On a television stage emblazoned with an oversize map of unified Germany, the questions about the divided old days were as symmetrical as the antique cars. The t
