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)
Jul 1, 2008
A Second World War murder mystery featuring Winston Churchill, the British double agent Kim Philby and Joseph Stalin could be solved after the Polish government called for the body of a national hero to be exhumed.
General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of Poland's wartime government in exile, died 65 years ago this month when his plane plunged into the sea off Gibraltar.
A British inquiry in 1943 found that the crash was caused by the plane's controls jamming. But rumo
Source: Neely Tucker in the WaPo
Jul 1, 2008
Zimbabwe, how it was before:
The smell of millet beer, the smoke from cooking fires, Oliver Mtukudzi singing at a club downtown, the grasses of the veld waving in the breeze. Drone of ceiling fans. Sadza meal, rolled up in the palm to eat. Rain, driving down so hard it explodes in the dust, sending up tiny showers of droplet shrapnel. Farms stretching for thousands of acres, people walking alongside the roads at first light, tourists drinking gin and tonics on safaris, elephants fla
Source: WaPo
Jul 1, 2008
A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.
The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrar
Source: WaPo
Jul 1, 2008
Millions of people around the world think they have heard Mahatma Gandhi speaking in English -- although it was actually Gandhi channeled through the voice of actor Ben Kingsley in the famous 1982 movie by Richard Attenborough.
But very few English speakers have heard Gandhi directly. That's because there were only two occasions when he was recorded speaking in English, according to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi. One speech, about religious issues, was recorded in the
Source: Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair
Jul 1, 2008
Old friends and longtime aides are wringing their hands over Bill Clinton’s post–White House escapades, from the dubious (and secretive) business associations to the media blowups that have bruised his wife’s campaign, to the private-jetting around with a skirt-chasing, scandal-tinged posse. Some point to Clinton’s medical traumas; others blame sheer selfishness, and the absence of anyone who can say “no.” Exploring Clintonworld, the author asks if the former president will be consumed by his ow
Source: AP
Jun 30, 2008
Preservationists are expected to announce Tuesday a state and federal initiative to protect more land in the Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where nearly a third of roughly 50,000 acres of Civil War battlefields are unprotected.
The effort follows the recent announcement by the National Trust for Historic Preservation that a quarry expansion threatens the Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Park battlefield, which is in the valley.
Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, director of Vir
Source: Reuters
Jun 30, 2008
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says Harry Truman, the common sense everyman from Missouri, was one of his favorite presidents. On Monday, he took a few minutes on the campaign trail to soak up some Truman history.
After Obama delivered a speech on the meaning of patriotism at an auditorium in the Truman presidential library complex in Independence, Missouri, he strolled over to Truman’s old house a few blocks away.
He stopped to visit well-wishers along
Source: NYT
Jun 30, 2008
Years ago, when William Miller talked about being in the Vietnam War — if he talked about being in the Vietnam War — he would tell people he served on a Swift boat.
At least now they have heard of it. But not in the way he would like.
“I was proud of what I did, and all the guys I was with,” Mr. Miller said. “Now somebody says ‘Swift boat’ and it’s a whole different meaning. They don’t associate it with the guys we lost. That’s a shame.”
“Swift boat” has be
Source: AP
Jun 30, 2008
Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.
But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years.
When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.
If death had a sound, this was it.
Source: http://www.newsobserver.com
Jun 30, 2008
A woolen flag with cotton stars flew the night Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson caught a bullet in the arm -- a quiet witness to one of history's great accidents.
You can see it inside a case on the third floor of the N.C. Museum of History, hanging over a Confederate ammunition chest recovered from a Johnston County farm: the flag carried by the regiment that inadvertently shot the man who was arguably the South's No. 2 general.
The museum just bought the flag for a
Source: National Security Archive
Jun 30, 2008
Near the end of the protracted negotiations that produced the historic Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) 40 years ago, U.S. government officials warned that countries could legally reach "nuclear pregnancy' under the Treaty and then withdraw and quickly acquire nukes, according to declassified U.S. government documents published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.
The documents detail the well-known resistance to the NPT from countries like India ("China
Source: McClatchy
Jun 30, 2008
A Chilean judge sentenced the country's former intelligence chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, to two life prison terms Monday for masterminding a double assassination that was one of the most notorious covert operations conducted by this country's military government.
The historic court decision, which can be appealed, holds Contreras responsible for the murders of Gen. Carlos Prats, the former army chief, and his wife in a 1974 bombing attack in the Argentine capital of Buenos
Source: BBC
Jun 30, 2008
US military prosecutors have filed charges against the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship that left 17 sailors dead.
Saudi-born Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, faces charges including murder and terrorism.
Mr Nashiri was arrested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in October 2002 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2006.
He told a hearing at the US base in Cuba last year that he confessed to the atta
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 30, 2008
The former foreign minister of the Khmer Rouge regime faced court in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh yesterday, seeking bail ahead of his trial for crimes against humanity.
Looking frail, 82-year-old Ieng Sary, who is one of five senior architects of the ultra-Maoist regime currently in detention, said little to the packed courtroom.
His lawyer, Michael Karnavas, said that his client's physical and mental health required proper assessment to determine his ability to st
Source: US News & World Report
Jun 30, 2008
The latest scholarship on the war for independence casts new light on some well-told tales, including why patriots really fought—it wasn't always for the cause of liberty—and what turned a famous war hero into an infamous traitor.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 30, 2008
French historians have accused the English of propagating the legend of King Arthur for "political reasons".
Even if a character who vaguely resembled the fabled leader did exist, he would probably have been a Welshman with strong connections to Brittany and whose sworn enemies were the Anglo-Saxons, they said.
The organisers of a conference and exhibition to be held at Rennes university in northern France next month said they will provide ample evidence that
Source: Reuters
Jun 29, 2008
The first rabbis ordained in Poland since World War Two received their diplomas from Warsaw's Rabbinical College on Sunday, PAP news agency said.
Nine students from the United States and Israel were granted rabbinical rights at a ceremony presided over by Poland's chief rabbi, U.S.-born Michael Schudrich, and attended by Jewish clergy from Poland, Israel and Britain.
"This was a ceremony of historic proportions," said Rabbi Szalom Ber Stambler, who heads the c
Source: http://www.masslive.com
Jun 29, 2008
A trove of Civil War-era memorabilia has made its way from the front lines, to a dusty trunk in an attic, to a university display and, finally, to one of the country's premier archives thanks to a donation by the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.
MassMutual gifted the historical collection of memorabilia and documents - including some signed by President Abraham Lincoln - to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center's Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa. A public anno
Source: FoxNews.com
Jun 29, 2008
WASHINGTON — A new report by Army historians levels heavy, unvarnished criticism against Pentagon leadership for its failure to plan beyond the initial invasion of Iraq."On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign" — which outlines the 18 months following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime — said too much focus was placed on a military victory, and not enough on post-war planning, due in part to optimism by the White House and the Pentagon that civilian agencies would take care muc
Source: NYT
Jun 29, 2008
The Fourth of July is approaching and with it the promise, or threat, of another long, hot summer.
It serves as a reminder, as if there were any danger of forgetting, that of all the seasons, summer can be the cruelest....
It’s not surprising, then, that American literature is a catalogue of summer disturbances, especially the literature of the South, thanks to geography. Its swamplands and deltas bristle with heat-stoked tensions. In William Faulkner’s fiction, the “ar
