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)
Dec 5, 2008
Stalin planned to blow up more than 1,200 buildings including the Bolshoi
Theatre and St Basil's Cathedral if the Nazis ever took Moscow, documents
have revealed.
An exhibition of secret papers staged to commemorate 90 years of military
counter-intelligence showed the extraordinary lengths the Soviet high
command was prepared to go to if the city fell.
The documents were drawn from archives of the so-called"Moscow Plan"
drawn up in the Autumn of 1941, when German forces were w
Source: CNN
Dec 5, 2008
Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic. They are household names, infamous for masterminding genocide. But who were the foot soldiers who did the dirty work?
In many cases they were equally notorious in their communities because they were the friends, neighbors and co-workers of those they raped, slaughtered and buried alive....
Researchers say most perpetrators of genocide were not destined for murder
and had never killed before.
"You don't have to be mentally ill or
Source: FoxNews.com
Dec 5, 2008
A white social studies teacher attempted to enliven a seventh-grade
discussion of slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls,
prompting outrage from one girl's mother and the local chapter of the
NAACP.
After the mother complained to Haverstraw Middle School, the
superintendent said he was having" conversations with our staff on how to
deliver effective lessons.""If a student was upset, then it was a bad idea," said Superintendent
Brian Monahan of the North Rockland
Source: AP (& White House press release)
Dec 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — President Bush on Friday established a World War II monument dedicated to those who fought in the Pacific.
The World War II Valor in Pacific National Monument will encompass nine sites, five in Hawaii, three in Alaska and one in California at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, where thousands of Japanese-Americans were detained after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
"The purpose of the monument is to remind generations of Americans of the sacrifices that Ame
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 5, 2008
On a bitterly cold winter night 30 years ago, an electrician from Beijing Zoo took the step that would cost him decades of freedom and create China's most defiant prisoner of conscience.
Wei Jingsheng was 28, invigorated by the tide of optimism and unprecedented freedom of expression that followed the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, but angry at signals that Deng Xiaoping wanted public discussion to end. He made his way to the focus of the debate, a brick wall dubbed “Democracy Wall”, bes
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 5, 2008
The medieval reconquest of Spain from the Moors left a genetic legacy that can be detected today in the DNA of men from the Iberian Peninsula, scientists have discovered.
A high proportion of Spanish and Portuguese males have a genetic profile indicative of North African or Jewish ancestry, according to research that sheds light on the region’s history. As many as one in five has a Y chromosome of apparently Jewish origin, while one in ten has a Y chromosome showing a North African
Source: NYT
Dec 4, 2008
The Khmer Rouge canals have come back to life.
By the time the brutal government of Pol Pot was toppled three decades ago, 1.7 million Cambodians were dead from overwork, starvation and disease, and the country was a ruin.
But the forced labor of millions of Cambodians left behind something useful — or that is how the current government here sees it.
The Khmer Rouge leaders were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irri
Source: http://www.newscientist.com
Dec 4, 2008
It's not often that cultural and religious persecution makes countries more diverse, but the Spanish Inquisition might have done just that.
One in five Spaniards and Portuguese has a Jewish ancestor, while a tenth of Iberians boast North African ancestors, finds new research.
This melting pot probably occurred after centuries of coexistence and tolerance among Muslims, Jews and Christians ended in 1492, when Catholic monarchs converted or expelled the Islamic population
Source: CBS News
Dec 4, 2008
Forty years before Democrats nominated their first candidate of color, President Lyndon Johnson told 1968 presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey that he should pick a Japanese-American as his running mate.
It was Sen. Daniel Inouye, who was awarded a silver star in World War II, and who lost an arm in battle.
"He answers Vietnam with that empty sleeve. He answers your problems with Nixon with that empty sleeve. He has that brown face," Johnson said.
Source: AP
Dec 4, 2008
AUSTIN — In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon B. Johnson suggested that associates of Richard M. Nixon were trying to persuade the South Vietnamese government not to join the peace talks until after the 1968 election, recordings of telephone conversations released Thursday show.
Progress on peace in Vietnam before the election might have given Hubert H. Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee and Johnson’s vice president, support among voters.
Source: USA Today
Dec 4, 2008
The [Obama] family says they expect Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, to leave her native Chicago early next year and move to Washington to help care for their two daughters — a job she held throughout the presidential campaign.
"If somebody's going to be with these kids other than their parents, it better be me," she told The Boston Globe.
It isn't clear whether Robinson will move into the White House; neither she nor Michelle Obama would comment....
Source: Time
Dec 4, 2008
Most political experts expect the Minnesota election to be decided in the courts or even in the state senate. In short, it's a mess. But it's not that unusual. A look back at some similarly close — and even closer — races provides some lessons on where things might go in the Minnesota contest, the only remaining undecided 2008 Senate race. (Republican Saxby Chambliss thumped Democratic challenger Jim Martin in a Dec. 2 runoff.)
The closest Senate race in history — for an open New Ha
Source: AFP
Dec 4, 2008
Americans will Friday toast the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition, a dry spell that began in 1920 when a constitutional amendment outlawed alcohol throughout the United States.
The nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, transportation, import and export of intoxicating beverages was brought into law by conservatives for moral and health reasons, and repealed in 1933 on economic grounds.
But to this day, pockets of Prohibition exist in the United States, with
Source: NYT Editorial
Dec 4, 2008
Congressional investigators recently outlined 13 issues for President-elect Barack Obama to focus on without delay. Most are obvious, such as military readiness, homeland security, financial regulation and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The 2010 census also made it onto the urgent 13. It deserves to be there.
As with any huge undertaking, the census requires years of planning, but preparations have been systematically sidetracked during the Bush years. The most plausible explanatio
Source: FoxNews.com
Dec 4, 2008
He was a charming man, someone who was only ever nice to me, a great boss
to work for," Rosa Mitterer, 91, told the Mail of the murderous dictator."You can say what you like, but he was a good man to us."
Mitterer, who worked at Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat alongside her
sister Anni before the start of World War II, said she only knew him as a
kind employer.
"I remember so clearly the first day I spoke to him in the kitchen,"
Mitterer told the Daily Mail."I said I was Anni's
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
Dec 4, 2008
Persepolis was the magnificent capital of ancient Iran, when that country ruled most of the civilized world, from Egypt to Central Asia and from Greece to Northern India. (Yes, some of the later pharaohs were vassals of Iran!)
Source: http://www.onenewsnow.com
Dec 4, 2008
A constitutional scholar says the new Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC, is an extremely biased and historically inaccurate exhibit that "twists and distorts" the Constitution.
The new $621 billion Capitol Visitor Center features an exhibition hall that is dominated by a very large marble wall called "The Wall of Aspirations." Dr. Matthew Spalding of The Heritage Foundation says the exhibit is not about the Constitution's limits on powers delegated to the
Source: BBC
Dec 4, 2008
The body of first Afghan President Mohammad Daud Khan has been identified
three decades after he was killed in a Communist coup, officials say.
The discovery was made by members of a government-appointed commission
during excavation at a military base outside the capital, Kabul.
Daud Khan overthrew the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, in 1973.
His death five years later ushered in a decade of Soviet occupation
followed by the rise of the Taleban.
Source: CNN
Dec 4, 2008
[This week: Richard Holbrooke.]
Richard Holbrooke first visited Bosnia in 1992 as a private citizen.
Three years later, he would become one of the most influential U.S. figures working to end a war that had introduced a new euphemism for genocide: ethnic cleansing.
Holbrooke, who had worked as a diplomat, journalist and investment banker, was intrigued, disgusted and challenged by what he saw in the early days of the war in Bosnia.
A month bef
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 4, 2008
The grandson of a German aristocrat who was forced by the Gestapo to sign away ownership of his family's estates has launched a legal battle for millions of euro in compensation.
Friedrich zu Solms-Baruth was swept up by the Gestapo the day after a failed 1944 bombing attempt on Hitler and thrown into the secret police's notorious Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison in Berlin.
Unlike scores of others connected with the Kreisau Circle of plotters who were executed, the Germa
