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: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 2, 2009
Plans to create a museum celebrating the "common historical memory" of the European Union have run into controversy over attempts to agree an account of key events including Second World War.
MEPs have given the green light to a multi-million pound state-of-the-art "House of European History" to be opened in Brussels by 2014.
The project to "promote an awareness of European identity" is the brainchild of Hans-Gert Poettering, President of t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 2, 2009
Adolf Hitler is one of the last names you would expect to be deployed in a tourism marketing campaign.
But the Fuehrer has been given centre stage by the next European City of Culture.
Liverpool naturally highlighted its connections to the Beatles, its most famous sons, when it became City of Culture in 2008.
But the Austrian city of Linz, with no lederhosen version of the Fab Four to exploit, has instead decided to showcase the works of the architect of th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 2, 2009
Millions of savers are braced for zero per cent accounts within days as the Bank of England is poised to cut interest rates to the lowest level in its 315-year history.
Experts have warned the return on savings could plumb new depths with the Bank expected to take unprecedented steps to regain control over the economy.
They widely believe the Bank will reduce borrowing costs to below their 2 per cent level - and possibly all the way down to 1 per cent - in its first meeting o
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 2, 2009
Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Germans are disappointed at what the country has achieved since reunification, a new survey shows.
The survey carried out by Forsa for the Friday edition of the Berliner Zeitung daily found that the majority of the 1,000 Germans polled were dejected by the developments of the last two decades in the country.
"The euphoria that dominated after the fall of the Berlin Wall has largely disappeared," Forsa chi
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 2, 2009
For many, the Marienfelde Refugee Center in Berlin was a first stop-off point, a place where people could prepare for a new life in the West after turning their backs on Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
But the refugee center, which served as a temporary home for close to two million people during its busy 55-year history, closed its doors for good on Wednesday, Dec. 31.
Refugee arrivals from eastern Europe have dwindled to a trickle in recent years, nega
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 2, 2009
The skull of philosopher René Descartes is to be moved from Paris to the school where he studied as a boy.
Prytanée military school near the north-western town of La Flèche has asked for the remains to be put on display in its adjoining church.
The institution believes the skull’s current home in the capital’s Musée de l’Homme – between busts of prehistoric man and retired footballer Lilian Thuram – is inappropriate.
Descartes’s body has been picked apart e
Source: BBC
Jan 2, 2009
The Vatican City State, the world's smallest sovereign state, has decided
to divorce itself from Italian law.
Vatican legal experts say there are too many laws in Italian civil and
criminal codes, and that they frequently conflict with Church principles.
With effect from New Year's Day, the Pope has decided that the Vatican
will no longer automatically adopt laws passed by the Italian parliament.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 2, 2009
MADRID -- After a two-year battle with the government, heirs of the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco have been ordered to open his flamboyant summer estate to the public.
The regional government of Galicia this week declared the late 19th-century property in the northern town of Sada a cultural heritage site...
The move is the most recent step in Spain's belated quest to come to terms with the legacy of its civil war and the Franco dictatorship. The last triump
Source: Times (of London)
Jan 2, 2009
Unpublished texts by Ernest Hemingway about the hunt for German U-boats off the Cuban coast during the Second World War are part of an important collection of the writer’s works to be released next week.
While serving on a ship tracking Nazi submarines in the Gulf of Mexico, Hemingway wrote in code about his exploits.
The notes are among 3,000 letters and other writings by the Nobel laureate to be made accessible online from Monday by curators at the writer’s former res
Source: Washington Post
Jan 2, 2009
NEW YORK -- For more than a hundred years, generations of New Yorkers, as well as tourists to the city, have made the trek up the spiral staircase to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, to peer through the small windows at the unparalleled view of New York Harbor.
But that iconic experience ended with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. All the national parks were briefly closed, but Liberty Island, the statue's home, remained shut for s
Source: Washington Post
Jan 2, 2009
White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley remember conferring with President Bush during the darkest days of the Iraq war, in 2005 and 2006, when violence was out of control. In daily 7 a.m. meetings in the Oval Office, Bush reviewed "blue sheets" detailing incidents involving U.S. soldiers; he would circle the casualty figures and press his top aides for details about the deaths.
"It was pretty grim news," Hadley
Source: BBC
Jan 1, 2009
The 90th anniversary of the wrecking of a ship carrying hundreds of
sailors home following the end of World War I has been marked on the
Western Isles.
About 300 people gathered at a memorial on Lewis dedicated to the Iolaire
disaster in which 205 of the 280 passengers died.
The yacht was wrecked on a reef called the Beasts of Holm off Lewis in the
early hours of 1 January 1919.
Source: CNN
Jan 1, 2009
The hotel that will be home to President-elect Barack Obama and his family
for the next couple of weeks offers one of Washington's best views of
their future home, the White House, and a past linked with political
movers and shakers.
The Obamas will be moving into the Hay-Adams hotel this weekend, aides
say. They're doing this in part so that the family's daughters, Sasha and
Malia, can begin school when classes reconvene after winter break.
They had hoped to move earlier into
Source: MSNBC
Jan 1, 2009
After more than 65 years, brothers find his sunken World War II submarine.
Longing can chart a better course than MapQuest. After more than 60 years,
the Abele brothers have finally found their father.
Lt. Cmdr. Jim Abele commanded the USS Grunion, a submarine that
disappeared off the coast of Alaska during World War II. Seven years ago
his sons made a deal with their hearts, not their heads, and went looking
for him.
It cost them a bundle."If this were an official Navy
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jan 1, 2009
Vietnam and China have completed the demarcation of their long-disputed
land border in what they hailed as an event of"great historic
significance" 30 years after their brief but bloody border war, state
media reported Thursday.
The two countries signed a land border agreement in 1999, but it took them
nine years to demarcate the 1,350-kilometer, or 840-mile, frontier.
The Vietnam News Agency reported that the two countries issued a joint
statement, at the conclusion of four d
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jan 1, 2009
Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami,
the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they
lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks,
their faces too putrified to be recognized.
The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda García thinks one of
them might be her son - and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years
after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering
once aga
Source: CNN
Jan 1, 2009
Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, when Fidel
Castro and a group of guerrillas toppled a longstanding U.S.-backed
dictator.
But January 1, 1959, was a long time ago. In Cuba today, when people refer
to"the revolution," they often mean the country's aging, established
government.
After so many years, people's hopes for the revolution's future are hardly
revolutionary."I hope that it continues to move forward, because this country needs
development.
Source: WaPo
Jan 1, 2009
After months of tortuous trading, Wall Street rang out its worst year since the Great Depression yesterday, leaving shareholders $6.9 trillion the poorer.
It hardly mattered that the market finished the last day of the year with a modest gain.
The losses in 2008 were so broad and deep that every sector in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index took a double-digit hit, and the financial sector lost more than half of its value. The Dow Jones industrial average, an inde
Source: Time Magazine
Jan 1, 2009
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Source: International Herald Tribune
Jan 1, 2009
Paul Hofmann, a Viennese who resisted the rise of Nazism in his homeland, acted as an informer for the Allies while serving on the staff of the German commandants of occupied Rome during World War II and later became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a prolific author of travel books, died Tuesday in Rome. He was 96.
His death was announced by his son Alexander Hofmann-Lord.
A diminutive, dapper man who spoke German, Italian, French and English fluently
