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: Guardian (UK)
Nov 1, 2008
Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, in a first interview since the 1995 killing, says he acted because hawkish former generals warned that the Israeli prime minister's land-for-peace negotiations with the Palestinians would bring disaster.
Yigal Amir shot Rabin at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Amir opposed the 1993 Oslo peace accord Rabin signed with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which involved returning war-won land.
He told Israel's Channel 10 TV he was spurred into
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 1, 2008
Interest in Britain's first potential saint for 300 years yesterday was only a dribble which turned into a trickle, but advocates for Cardinal Henry Newman weren't dismayed. "It takes a very long time to make a saint," said Peter Jennings of Birmingham diocese, as another handful of the devout or curious drifted into the city's Oratory to examine the latest stage in a 30-year campaign.
Displayed to the public for the first time this weekend in a gold and glass reliquary, b
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 31, 2008
Who is the greatest of them all? While Barack Obama and John McCain battle to become the 44th President of the United States, we asked a panel of experts from The Times to rank the previous Commanders-in-Chief in order of greatness.
1. Abraham Lincoln
1861-65 (Republican, National Union)
The No 1: our panel chose the radical Republican who kept the fledgling nation alive when it could have collapsed altogether.
The first Republican Presiden
Source: BBC
Oct 31, 2008
Libya has paid $1.5bn into a US compensation fund for relatives of victims of terror attacks blamed on Tripoli, the US state department says.
The fund was agreed in August to settle remaining lawsuits in the US.
The attacks include the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people and the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco which killed three and wounded more than 200.
Under the deal, Libya did not accept responsibility for the attacks, but agreed to compensa
Source: NYT
Oct 31, 2008
A high-ranking Japanese military official was dismissed Friday for writing an essay stating that the United States had ensnared Japan into World War II, denying that Japan had waged wars of aggression in Asia and justifying Japanese colonialism.
The Defense Ministry fired Gen. Toshio Tamogami, chief of staff of Japan’s air force, late on Friday night, only hours after his essay was posted on a private company’s Web site. The quick dismissal seemed intended to head off criticism from
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 31, 2008
Happy 200th birthday, Honest Abe! The nation is preparing to throw you a party.
The celebration will be focused in the nation's capital, where museums, theaters and other attractions announced plans yesterday for more than 80 exhibits and programs in the coming months to celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The events will run from January through the end of April.
"I haven't heard anything about a birthday cake," a Lincoln look-alike said,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 31, 2008
The Vatican appears to be dragging its feet over releasing secret files which could solve once and for all the question of whether a wartime Pope turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.
Jewish groups and critics of Pope Pius XII, who was pontiff for the duration of the Second World War, have long called for the Vatican archives to be made available so that Pius's record on speaking out against Hitler and the Nazis can be examined.
In an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, Rab
Source: Times (of London)
Oct 31, 2008
Three hundred years after Alexander Selkirk, the castaway who was the inspiration for the fictional Robinson Crusoe, was marooned on an island off the coast of Chile, archaeologists believe that they have unearthed evidence of his campsite.
Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe spent years on a tropical island, surviving by hunting and foraging, scouring the azure horizon for any sign of a ship to rescue him.
Selkirk, a sailor born in Fife in 1676, was stranded in 1704 on the island of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 31, 2008
They were one of the first groups to suffer under Mao's ruthless purges.
Millions of the 'hated landlord class' were denounced, killed or driven to suicide in the push which paved the way for each peasant to have his own slice of land.
But 60 years on, the Communist Party is preparing to renounce the country's final trace of collectivism.
Each of China's 800 million farmers will be given the right to sell their land to a landlord in a move designed to trans
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 31, 2008
'It is raining Death on earth," Hélène Berr wrote in her journal on November 1, 1943.
She was a young Parisian student, a Jew, whose friends were daily disappearing to the concentration camps and she knew the net was tightening. Rumours had reached her that asphyxiating gas was being administered to convoys of Jewish deportees at the Polish border.
"To think that every person arrested yesterday, today, this very minute," she wrote, "is probably desti
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 31, 2008
Berliners turned out on Thursday to say their goodbyes to historic Tempelhof Airport, to share a few memories and to protest its closing one last time.
Two vintage airplanes, a DC-3 and a Junkers Ju-52, took off shortly before midnight as the final flights from the airport, which had been the focus of a legal battle that went on for several years.
To those who advocated for its closing, like Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, Tempelhof was an unprofitable drain on the city
Source: CNN
Oct 31, 2008
Campaigners in London planned to petition the British government Friday for a posthumous pardon for the hundreds of people executed for witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries.
They said Halloween is a good time to highlight the "grave miscarriage of justice" suffered by the men and women falsely accused of being witches.
Their petition asks Justice Minister Jack Straw to recommend that Queen Elizabeth II issue a pardon.
"We felt
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 31, 2008
GREENVILLE, South Carolina: The former Buddhist temple sits opposite a waterfall on the campus of Furman University, with vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains when the trees are bare.
On dark winter mornings, students will be asked to sit on the hinoki wood floors and meditate for 90 minutes. A class called "Realizing Bodymind" will be taught there next semester.
The structure — donated by a Japanese family with roots in Greenville's textile past and connections
Source: Guardian
Oct 31, 2008
The chief of staff of Japan's air force is to be sacked after he claimed the country had been drawn into the second world war by the US and denied it had been an aggressor during its occupations of the Asian mainland.
In an essay entitled "Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?" General Toshio Tamogami claimed that Japan had been provoked by the then US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, and that many of Japan's wartime victims took "a positive view" of its actions.
Source: BBC
Oct 30, 2008
A few dozen miles south of Berlin, Germany, in the province of Brandenburg, a narrow tree-lined road weaves across scenic meadows and lake-side villages.
Near the town of Kummersdorf, a complex of old brown buildings resembling military barracks stands at the intersection of a seemingly abandoned railway line.
Right across from it, a barricaded road made of rough concrete blocks cuts through the thick pine forest.
As it curves into the wilderness, strange r
Source: History Today
Oct 30, 2008
The prominent South African academic and writer, Es'kia Mphahlele, died on October 27th, aged 88. He was particularly famous for his autobiography Down Second Avenue (1959) about his life as a herdsman, teacher and journalist for the magazine Drum.
He became a teacher, but was banned from teaching in the early 1950s as a result of his opposition to the 1953 Bantu Education Act, which notably enforced the separation of races in all educational institutions.
In 1957, Mphahlele
Source: Reuters
Oct 30, 2008
Two German entertainers will use hundreds of Playmobil men to re-enact the history of Germany from 1949 until 1990 on live television, a spokeswoman for the production company said on Thursday.
The re-enactment is based on a 500-page book by German historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and will be aired on Thursday night on public channel ARD, said the spokeswoman for Bonito TV.
"We want to show that today's television still has something to do with culture," comedian
Source: UPI
Oct 30, 2008
A Texas A&M University researcher says a veritable "arsenal" has been found on a ship that sank in the Gulf of Mexico between 1808 and 1820.
Texas A&M nautical archaeologist Ben Ford said in a recently released research report that while the so-called Mardi Gras Wreck was found in 2002 off the coast of Louisiana, cannons and other weapons weren't found on board until last summer, the Houston Chronicle said.
Ford said using remotely operated vehicles, r
Source: BBC
Oct 30, 2008
An ancient civic body is to admit women as members for the first time in its 1,000-year history.
The Freemen of the City of Oxford are thought to have formed in Saxon times and were recorded in the Domesday Book.
The price of becoming a freeman was £5. Only Freemen could set up business and vote in council elections.
Source: WaPo
Oct 30, 2008
Travel and other spending by the Smithsonian's former American Indian Museum director was imprudent and at times "lavish," but most of it conformed with institution rules, the Smithsonian inspector general said in a report distributed to Congress yesterday.
W. Richard West Jr., who retired last year as founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, has agreed to reimburse the Smithsonian $9,700 for payments that he should not have received, said Inspector
