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
Jan 27, 2009
The war crimes trial against former Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga is "prejudicial", his lawyer has told day two of the case at The Hague.
She claimed the prosecution's use of anonymous witnesses and secrecy clauses for the International Criminal Court (ICC) trial would hamper the defence.
Mr Lubanga, 48, denies using hundreds of child soldiers in DR Congo's five-year conflict, which ended in 2003.
Source: IHT
Jan 27, 2009
But as a United Nations-backed tribunal prepares to hold its first trial session next month, it is embroiled in a wrangle over numbers that goes to the heart of longstanding concerns about the tribunal's fairness and independence.
The Cambodian government, critics say, is attempting to limit the scope of the trials for its own political reasons, a limit that the critics say would compromise justice and could discredit the entire process.
The first defendant is the man
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2009
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were the victims of an alleged assassination attempt on an official tour of Australia almost 40 years ago, it has emerged.
A retired senior detective has claimed that unidentified conspirators put a wooden log on a railway track to try to derail the official train transporting the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh from Sydney across Australia's Great Dividing Range of mountains.
The so-called Republican plot came to light when retired De
Source: CNN
Jan 27, 2009
Two former presidents reflected on their greatest regrets in office Monday, each looking back to issues that continue to plague the nation years later.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeared together at a question-and-answer forum before the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Asked his biggest regret after leaving office, Bush said he now wonders whether he should have tried to get Saddam Hussein to leave office at t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2009
The size of a postage stamp, the note indicates that the doomed Army officer expected troops to liberate him from the Sudanese capital.
General Charles George Gordon was part-way through the 10-month siege that led to his death when he sent the note, dated June 1884, back to friendly forces outside the city.
It was hidden in the hair of runner Mahamed Ahmed who smuggled it past the surrounding enemy.
General Gordon asked for news of his rescue and detail
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2009
More than 440 hours of testimonies - representing the library's entire audio collection - is being made available over the internet as part of a publicly funded project to digitise important cultural archives.
The recordings explore the lives of 66 Jewish people before, during and after the Second World War.
Subjects covered include anti-Semitism in the build-up to the war, the ghettos and concentration camps of the war period itself, survival in hiding, and making a ne
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2009
The, cards written by a British soldier to his sweetheart back home, are to be auctioned after being quietly kept for almost 100 years.
They were sent to Edith Dunn, then aged 22, from the love of her life, a soldier called Will who she met when he served in the same regiment as her brother, Tom.
The war started seven months after he sent the card in 1914 and Tom was killed. To this day no-one knows where his body lies.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2009
The pictures of Hitler were collected by his supporters and Nazi Youth who may even have swapped them in the playground.
The images from 1930s Germany portray the Nazi leader in both a powerful and caring light and were all part of Joseph Goebbels' propagandist policy.
The complete album is made up of 138 pictures in total which would have gradually been collected by Hitler fans over a period of time and stuck into the book.
It was brought back after the
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 27, 2009
Germany's leading Jewish organization, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said it was boycotting the memorial event in the German parliament because surviving victims had not been personally acknowledged in the past.
"I would understand it if we were talking about representatives of the second or third generations," Council General Secretary Stephan J. Kramer told AP news agency. "But it cannot be that actual survivors are treated like mere onlookers."
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
Jan 26, 2009
The Wilderness battlefield may gain another new neighbor.
A landowner next to Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park proposes to build medical offices and a wholesale nursery on part of his property across from the Civil War-era site of Wilderness Tavern near the Spotsylvania-Orange county line.
Dr. David Pagan, a dental specialist who lives on a 146-acre farm on State Route 3 beside Fox Chase subdivision in western Spotsylvania County, wants to develop
Source: MemriTV
Jan 26, 2009
Following are excerpts from a show featuring Egyptian cleric Amin Al-Ansari, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on January 26, 2009.
Warning: The show contains extremely disturbing Holocaust footage.
Amin Al-Ansari: Let us examine the civil strife the Jews have caused throughout the world. Of course, we know what problems they caused the Muslims. They have always been like that, but in modern times, they only turned to the Muslims [relatively] late. They went around the world –
Source: Free Lance-Star
Jan 26, 2009
Its recent peace overture got a frosty reception, but the Wilderness Battlefield Coalition remains committed to working with Orange County on developments proposed at the gateway to the Civil War site.
Two weeks ago, three Orange supervisors slam-med the coalition's offer to collaborate on planning the area's future, calling it a ruse to delay their decision on a proposed retail center anchored by a 138,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter. One called the offer a "cheap ploy to
Source: Spero News
Jan 26, 2009
Demonstrations are being held in many European countries to save the monastery of Mor Gabriel, a spiritual center for the Syriac Orthodox community in Turkey.
Founded in 397, it is the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world. It is located on the plateau of Tur Abdin, "The Mountain of the Servants of God," on the Turkish border with Iraq. The see of the metropolitan archbishop of Tur Abdin, Mor Timotheus Samuel Aktas, with its three monks, 14 nuns, and 35 young
Source: BBC
Jan 26, 2009
Sonja Karadzic was a very familiar presence to those of us who reported the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
Ms Karadzic told me how she had no contact with her father for five years. She and her mother had begun the legal process in Bosnia to have him declared officially dead.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, she has given the first real insight into how her father will defend himself at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY
Source: NYT
Jan 26, 2009
The shorthand verdict on Roosevelt, economists and historians say, is that he was an eloquent and skillful politician, and an innovator in jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and in regulatory steps like the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street. But Roosevelt, they say, while brilliant in many ways, did not have a sure grasp of how to guide the economy as a whole.
“Roosevelt had some successes, but we hope that Obama is going to do
Source: BBC
Jan 26, 2009
Two experts on Auschwitz argue for and against the idea that the former Nazi death camp should be allowed to crumble away.
Historian Robert Jan Van Pelt says that once the last survivor has died it should be left for nature to reclaim, and eventually forgotten.
But former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, once an inmate, says Auschwitz must be preserved to bear witness to the fate of its victims.
Source: NYT
Jan 26, 2009
Simple-to-use digital technology will make it more difficult to distort history in the future.
On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive.
This system is intended
Source: Spiegel Online
Jan 26, 2009
Almost 20 years after the fall fo the Berlin Wall an architect has come across an abandoned apartment in the eastern German city of Leipzig where time has stood still since the communist era.
It evidently hasn't been touched since early 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the place is filled with East German furniture, fittings and grocery brands that give a glimpse of everyday life in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) 20 years ago.
Mark Aretz, a
Source: AP
Jan 26, 2009
The Vatican said Monday that comments by a recently rehabilitated bishop that no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust were unacceptable and violate Church teaching.
In a front-page article, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reaffirmed that Pope Benedict XVI deplored all forms of anti-Semitism and that all Roman Catholics must do the same.
The article was issued amid an outcry from Jewish groups that Benedict last week lifted the excommunication of a tradition
Source: NYT
Jan 26, 2009
Since the Great Depression, presidents have frequently experimented with Keynesian economics to combat recessions. Three economists chronicle the history of government policy during past recessions and explain what worked and what didn’t.
