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: NYT
Mar 7, 2009
“We were victims, too,” said Him Huy, the head of the guard detail at the Tuol Sleng torture house, who took part in the executions of thousands of people at a Khmer Rouge killing field....
As the trials of five senior Khmer Rouge figures get under way near Phnom Penh, the capital, they raise questions about the guilt — or victimhood — of lower ranking cadres like Mr. Him Huy, the people who carried out the arrests, killings and torture, who are unlikely to be tried.
As
Source: WaPo
Mar 7, 2009
It has been called a Robin Hood budget: The spending plan President Obama sent to Congress last week would give the poor new tax cuts, new college loans and a new health care system by taking nearly $1 trillion from the rich in new taxes....
Tax analysts say Obama is taking a page out of the playbook of former president Bill Clinton, whose administration supplied many of the key players on Obama's economic team, including Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Counci
Source: USA Today
Mar 7, 2009
The economic downturn has forced states around the country to shutter historic sites and reduce visiting hours for parks. But in Florida, Illinois, California and a few other places, closures have been forestalled after outcries from the public and budget-juggling by officials.
Still, funding shortfalls threaten public access at 69 recreation and historic sites nationwide, including the oldest building in Idaho, a sacred Native American ancestral village in Arizona and a Washington
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 7, 2009
The world’s earliest astronomical chart is 300 years older than previously believed, according to research by the British Library.
The chart was among 40,000 ancient documents found in a cave in Dunhuang, China, a trove compared with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It has now been conclusively dated to the 7th century AD. It was among tens of thousands of objects acquired in China by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, the British adventurer.
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 7, 2009
An era is passing in New York with the retirement of the legendary prosecutor who was the model for the district attorney on the TV programme Law and Order.
Robert Morgenthau has announced that he will step down at 90 after almost 35 years in office, rather than run for a tenth term in November.
The Manhattan district attorney has brought more than three million prosecutions against everyone from the mob chieftain John Gotti to John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman.
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 7, 2009
China's aggressively ambitious business community, tormented by the global financial crisis, is turning to an unexpected mentor for advice: a 17th-century Japanese feudal warlord.
Despite its bulk, the 13-volume epic Tokugawa Ieyasu, a work that charts the struggles of one of Japan's most famous historical figures, has proved an explosive commercial success in China. In Ieyasu's difficult and stressful quest, say his modern-day Chinese fans, lie the secrets to prosperity, order - a
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 7, 2009
It is a rivalry that could prove to be a plague on both their proposed houses.
Four hundred years after Shakespeare began writing plays in the foetid backstreets of East London, the race is on to build a state-of-the-art theatre in the neighbourhood where he cut his artistic teeth.
Two companies – one professional and backed by one of the country’s leading classical actors, one venerable and amateur – are seeking funding to construct theatres on sites only a few hundr
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 7, 2009
A quarter of a century ago, his was the second most recognisable face in the country: a sneering, self-righteous icon of Far Left class warfare whose air of menace was not diminished by his thick, ginger sideburns and a Brillo Pad thatch of hair combed across his balding pate.
On the eve of the 1984 miners' strike - or the Great Strike For Jobs, to use the romantic term he prefers - only Margaret Thatcher was better known than Arthur Scargill, then President of the mighty Natio
Source: The Age (Australia)
Mar 7, 2009
CHARLES Robert Darwin is immortal. The more that new-wave creationists condemn his theory of evolution, the more oxygen the 200-year-old is given, and the more life is breathed into his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, now 150 years old. For years, publishers have commissioned and authors have written Darwin books, from brilliant biographies to garden-variety expositions of evolution. I'm not alone in needing to re-organise the bookshelves periodically: move along for more
Source: New Scientist
Mar 6, 2009
SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in contemporary documents.
Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice.
At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by "vampires&
Source: International Herald Tribune
Mar 6, 2009
As if economic depression were not enough, the city of Kirov is reviving the long-dormant Russian debate over whether or not to change its name.
Name-changing was all the rage after the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia reached back to its roots for old-new identity. Gorky Street, the main shopping boulevard in Moscow, reverted to Tverskaya; Leningrad to St. Petersburg, and so on.
After that initial burst of remaking history, the fashion for substituting old names for S
Source: http://www.welt.de
Mar 6, 2009
There are certain words that tend not to engage very much sympathy in a person, and "archive" has traditionally been one of them. It is generally associated with something dried out and perhaps a little dull. Could it be that the collapse of the Cologne city archives building will mark a change in this mentality in Germany?
Even after the Anna-Amalia Library in Weimar burnt down, it was possible to sense a change in Germany – perhaps a very subtle change, but a change none
Source: UPI
Mar 6, 2009
Canadian historians are fighting to save a World War II German prisoner of war camp east of Toronto where the Allies kept high-ranking officers.
Camp 30 is in Bowmanville, 45 miles east of Toronto, and its 18 buildings sit on 100 acres of land owned by The Kaitlin Group of developers, the Toronto Star reported.
Some 880 German prisoners were housed at the facility during the war, one of them a top U-boat captain Adolf Hitler reportedly planned on rescuing by sending a s
Source: NYT
Mar 6, 2009
What would Mohandas K. Gandhi have thought of Vijay Mallya?
Mr. Mallya, an airline and liquor tycoon, bought Gandhi’s personal effects in a controversial New York auction on Thursday. He said Friday that he planned to give the items to the government of India.
“Mahatma Gandhi is the father of the nation, and there could not be anything more important historically or culturally than his belongings,” and their return home, Mr. Mallya said in a telephone interview from Fra
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 6, 2009
Mrs Donovan only discovered that the man who tried to break up her parents' marriage 50 years ago had been approached to spy for both the Russians and British, when secret files were released by MI5 this week.
The files include an impassioned letter from her father, Fred, who worked as a television repairman in Mitcham, Surrey, begging the Home Office for help by throwing the Romanian spy, Alexandru Ionescu, out of the country.
Neither Mr Donovan, nor his family knew
Source: Spiegel Online
Mar 6, 2009
The wife of the alleged concentration camp guard is petite and rather friendly. She's wearing a blue-green checkered blouse, and her long hair is pulled back in a bun. Standing there at the door of her yellow farmhouse in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, she seems a bit lost.
Vera Demjanjuk speaks a mishmash of German and English. She looks exhausted as she explains that everything is starting over again and that, once again, she will have to fear for the fate of her 88-yea
Source: Spiegel Online
Mar 6, 2009
Bernauer Strasse used to be just another unassuming residential street -- that is until the Berlin Wall catapulted it to international fame overnight. The street, which was built into the city's Cold-War-era divide, saw east Berliners flee to the West by clambering out of upper-story windows towards the crowds on the street below.
The historic images were beamed around the world and the road which lined the east-west border became an icon of the human tragedy behind the Berlin Wall.
Source: History Today
Mar 6, 2009
This Sunday, March 8th, International Women’s Day will be celebrated in countries across the world. Here is a brief history of the day and of the fight for women’s rights.
The British MP John Stuart Mill was the first Member of Parliament to call for women’s right to vote, in 1869.
On September 19th 1893, New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote.
In 1910, at the second International Conference of Working Women held in Cope
Source: History Today
Mar 6, 2009
The Iranian news agency Tabnak reported on Tuesday that the Third Secretary of the South Korean Embassy of Iran had been caught smuggling an Iranian relic from the Achaemenid era out of the country. The relic, an inscribed stone from Persepolis was found, during check-in, by officials in Shiraz airport in the diplomat’s suitcase. The diplomat was, however, released due to diplomatic immunity and the stolen piece was sent back to the ruins of Persepolis.
Source: National Security Archive
Mar 6, 2009
In a break in one of Guatemala's most notorious human rights crimes, a Guatemalan police officer has been arrested in connection with the abduction and disappearance 25 years ago of labor activist Edgar Fernando García. The arrest yesterday of Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos is the result of an investigation of García's case by Guatemala's Human Rights Prosecutor using records found recently among the massive archives of the former National Police.
García was kidnapped by police agents
