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: AFP
Dec 26, 2008
For over 50 years, the inhabitants of this small east German town of Treuenbrietzen kept quiet about a World War II massacre. And many today still have no wish to revisit the past.
The long-forgotten slaughter of some 1,000 German civilians occurred after Russian Red Army soldiers occupied the town, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) southwest of Berlin, in April 1945, in the final days of the war.
Under East German communist rule, it would have been unwise to mention the m
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 26, 2008
It was one of the most infamous episodes of the bloody French Revolution.
In early 1794 – at the height of the Reign of Terror – French soldiers
marched to the Atlantic Vendée, where peasants had risen up against the
Revolutionary government in Paris.
Twelve"infernal columns" commanded by General Louis-Marie Turreau were
ordered to kill everyone and everything they saw. Thousands of people –
including women and children – were massacred in cold blood, and farms and
villages to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 26, 2008
The mysterious explosion which sank a 17th century Royal warship may have
been caused by the lavatory habits of its crew, a historian believes.
HMS London sank in 1685 after exploding without warning in the Thames
Estuary near Chatham Docks in a blast which killed 300 people and was
recorded by diarist Samuel Pepys.
Naval historians have long argued about the cause, suggesting a build-up
of chemicals could have ignited the ship's supply of gunpowder.
But now one research
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 26, 2008
The victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 were honored by thousands
of mourners who prayed, burned candles and shared meals on beaches from
Indonesia to India on Friday, the fourth anniversary of the disaster.
For many, the modest ceremonies were a time to reflect on their lives and
weigh progress in rebuilding homes and communities wiped out by the
enormous waves that proved deadly and destructive in a dozen nations.
Ibrahim Musa, a 42-year-old civil servant in the hard-
Source: BBC
Dec 26, 2008
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has marked its 40th
anniversary with a call to arms.
It outlined a strategy of confronting government and military officials,
and their relatives and friends.
Self-exiled leader Jose Maria Sison said more party members were needed,
and expected, amid financial turmoil.
The communists gained public support during the martial law years of the
1970s but lost dominance when the country returned to democracy in 1986.
Source: AP
Dec 26, 2008
The author and publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir defended the book's story of love between two survivors, but also called it a work of memory and not of scholarship.
"This is my personal story as I remember it," Herman Rosenblat said in a statement issued Thursday through Berkley Books, which will release his "Angel at the Fence" in February.
Berkley added its own comments, noting that a leading Holocaust expert, Michael Berenbaum, had found t
Source: P.S. Ruckman, Jr. at PardonPower.com
Dec 25, 2008
"Experts said they knew of no other instance in which a presidential pardon had been revoked. They said it was not clear whether Bush was legally allowed to do so." - Chicago Tribune, December 25, 2008
One can hardly blame the Tribune for printing this statement. Lord knows countless other news agencies are doing the same thing today. There were deadlines to meet. There are plenty of people willing to talk about pardons, and even more willing to talk about the president! But there are ver
Source: NYT
Dec 25, 2008
In the past decade, China has invested upward of $1 trillion, mostly earnings from manufacturing exports, into American government bonds and government-backed mortgage debt. That has lowered interest rates and helped fuel a historic consumption binge and housing bubble in the United States.
China, some economists say, lulled American consumers, and their leaders, into complacency about their spendthrift ways.
“This was a blinking red light,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a pr
Source: USA Today
Dec 25, 2008
A month before his inauguration, Americans choose Barack Obama as the man they admire most in the world, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. It's the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century.
President Bush falls to a distant second after seven years as the most-admired man.
Hillary Rodham Clinton leads the list of most-admired woman, a spot she's held for 13 of the past 16 years — as first lady, then New York senator a
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 25, 2008
Every president for more than three decades has had to talk with federal
prosecutors at one time or another. President-elect Barack Obama may have
set a land speed record by giving his first interview to investigators
even before taking the oath of office.
Obama sat down last week with four investigators looking into the alleged
attempt to sell his former Senate seat. As a witness, rather than a
target, Obama seems to have had an easier time with the experience than
some of his pred
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 25, 2008
Forty years after millions of students were sent to the provinces during the Cultural Revolution, the economic downturn has forced students to head for rural areas once again.
A record 5.6 million students will graduate this year, according to government figures, and jobs are scarce. They will have to compete with the 700,000 graduates from 2007 who remain jobless. Major international companies are now receiving tens of thousands of desperate applications for every available post.
Source: Washington Times
Dec 25, 2008
They differ markedly on policies, but President Bush and President-elect Barack Obama both struck the same note in their Christmas weekend radio addresses -- right down to using the same image of Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas night 1776.
Mr. Bush called Washington's raid on Hessian troops in Trenton, N.J., a "miracle" of the nation's birth.
"Two hundred and thirty-two years have passed since George Washington crossed the Delawa
Source: AP
Dec 25, 2008
The pardons President George W. Bush granted this week couldn't have been better Christmas gifts if Santa himself had delivered them.
But a Brooklyn, N.Y., man, Isaac Robert Toussie, received the legal equivalent of a lump of coal.
Toussie, convicted of making false statements to the Housing and Urban Development Department and of mail fraud, was among 19 people pardoned Tuesday.
But after learning in news reports that Toussie's father had donated tens of t
Source: CNN
Dec 24, 2008
While President-elect Barack Obama will certainly be making history when he takes the oath of office on January 20, he'll also be repeating it -- by placing his hand on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used during the inauguration of 1861.
The Constitution does not require presidents to be sworn in on a Bible, though almost every chief executive since George Washington has chosen to do so. Presidents have differed greatly, however, on the question of which passage the Bible shoul
Source: http://www.catholicculture.org
Dec 24, 2008
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone on Sunday praised Pope Pius XII’s efforts for peace during World War II. Highlighting the pontiff’s efforts on behalf of the Jews, the Vatican secretary of state recalled that Pope Pius gave “refuge to Jews who fled the Nazi fury … When the persecution against the Jews was unleashed, he gave precise and urgent orders to Catholic institutions in Rome so that they would open their doors to men, women and children, who were saved thanks to the courage and sensitivity of th
Source: Forward
Dec 24, 2008
The audience was a receptive one at the Brookings Institution during a recent presentation on foreign policy recommendations for the incoming president. Experts explained in detail their view of the Bush administration’s blunders and how the Obama team should reverse almost every policy the outgoing administration has set in place over the past eight years.
Still, as the litany of criticism continued, one person in the back row of the Brookings briefing room seemed to draw attentio
Source: San Francisco Examiner
Dec 24, 2008
Imagine San Francisco without the Bay Bridge. Or the airport. Or Treasure Island. Or Aquatic Park. Or the zoo.
That is just a partial list of local landmarks that exist as a result of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic policy in the 1930s to help dig the nation out of the Great Depression.
Those investments, which continued until World War II, put millions of people to work and created much of the infrastructure we still rely upon today, historians say.
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 24, 2008
The Afghan Government has called on Nato troops to guard an alleged war crimes site that has been plundered and as many as 2,000 bodies apparently removed.
The mass grave at Dasht-e-Leili in northern Afghanistan is thought to contain the remains of between 1,000 and 2,000 Taleban prisoners massacred by fighters loyal to the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum in November 2001. The killings occurred in the remote Leili desert as General Dostum’s forces fought alongside US spec
Source: Time Magazine
Dec 24, 2008
Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion - it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric
Source: Deutsche Welle
Dec 24, 2008
Germany is challenging an October ruling by Italy's highest court ordering Germany to pay around 1 million euros in damages to the families of nine victims killed by the German army in Civitella, Tuscany in 1944. The massacre claimed the lives of 203 people.
On Tuesday, Germany urged the ICJ, the UN's main judicial body set up in 1945, to overturn the Italian court's ruling.
"In recent years, Italian judicial bodies have repeatedly disregarded the jurisdictional im
