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: WaPo
Jun 19, 2008
What expression would an 18th-century woman have donned as her husband left for war? It depends on which government official you ask.
After nearly a decade of lobbying by a group to erect a memorial in Leesburg honoring local Revolutionary War participants, recent debate over whether to approve the monument's proposed design has centered largely on that historical, and somewhat existential, question.
The Patriot Project was proposed by the Loudoun Revolutionary War Memo
Source: McClatchy
Jun 19, 2008
The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practice
Source: Yahoo News
Jun 19, 2008
Behind a thicket of weeds and broken window panes, one of the former Soviet Union's dark secrets is the laboratory where captured German scientists worked to build an atomic bomb for Josef Stalin.
The Sukhumi Institute still exists, in a state of limbo. Limping along under semi-siege in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia whose existence the rest of the world does not recognize, its Cold War past has been all but forgotten.
Once, around 250 German specialists lived
Source: http://www.app.com
Jun 19, 2008
The Monmouth Junction route of the proposed Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex rail line may have met its Waterloo in the Monmouth Battlefield State Park.
A May letter from the state Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Parks and Forestry gave a thumbs down to the Monmouth Junction route's proposed crossing of the famed Revolutionary War battle site.
The letter cites adverse effects from commuter trains on the park — which is crossed by rails where a freight trai
Source: http://www.examiner.com
Jun 19, 2008
Preservationists say it is not enough to protect the grounds at Manassas National Battlefield Park without protecting its views as new development spreads in fast-growing Prince William County.
Researchers extensively photographed and mapped the home of the first major land battle of the Civil War for months, selecting 25 lookouts, including the 10 most pivotal ones to visitors, that they will attempt to preserve from new construction of roads, office parks and apartment buildings.
Source: AP
Jun 19, 2008
Surrounded by royal guards and the occasional tourist, Her Majesty Mahealani Kahau and her government ministers hold court every day under a tent outside the palace of Hawaii's last monarch, passing laws and discussing how to secure reparations for the Native Hawaiian people.
Kahau and her followers are members of the self-proclaimed Hawaiian Kingdom Government, which is devoted to restoring the Hawaiian monarchy overthrown in 1893. Nearly two months ago, they stormed the gates of t
Source: WaPo
Jun 19, 2008
When Janet Wiggins was a student at Loudoun's all-black Banneker Elementary School in the 1950s, she used hand-me-down textbooks from white students. Her school didn't have a library, so she checked out books every couple of weeks from a bookmobile.
Banneker, founded in 1948 in the community of St. Louis near Middleburg and named after African American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker, was racially integrated in 1968. Today it is the only one of Loudoun's historically
Source: http://lohud.com
Jun 19, 2008
Putnam County prides itself on its 196-year history and promotes tourism by touting its Revolutionary War roots.
But some Putnam officials now say the paid post of county historian is expendable. Eliminating it would require a charter change but would save the financially strapped county about $31,000 a year in part-time salary and benefits.
Under a proposal informally presented to the Legislature by the administration, the nine town and village historians would elect o
Source: AP
Jun 19, 2008
After decades of denials, the Chinese have acknowledged burying an American prisoner of war in China, telling the U.S. that a teenage soldier captured in the Korean War died a week after he "became mentally ill," according to documents provided to The Associated Press.
China had long insisted that all POW questions were answered at the conclusion of the war in 1953 and that no Americans were moved to Chinese territory from North Korea. The little-known case of Army Sgt. R
Source: WSJ
Jun 19, 2008
A high court in South Africa ruled on Wednesday that Chinese-South Africans will be reclassified as “black,” a term that includes black Africans, Indians and others who were subject to discrimination under apartheid. As a result of this ruling, ethnically Chinese citizens will be able to benefit from government affirmative action policies aimed at undoing the effects of apartheid.
In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its members were be
Source: WaPo
Jun 19, 2008
Democratic leaders worried about the impeachment obsession of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ain't seen nothing yet.
Kucinich tells us he's giving the House Judiciary Committee 30 days to act on his resolution proposing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush before he raises even more hell on the House floor. This time, he says, he'll go back with perhaps 60 articles of impeachment.
"The minute the leadership said, 'This is dead on arrival,' I said that I
Source: Politico.com
Jun 19, 2008
Joe KLEIN in the new Time magazine – “Obama says he wants to hire a Team of Rivals for his Cabinet. He should start by keeping Robert Gates”: “Barack Obama has never been shy about comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. … Obama has said he admires Doris Kearns Goodwin's wonderful Lincoln biography, ‘Team of Rivals.’ ‘He talks about it all the time,’ says a top aide. He is particularly intrigued by the notion
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/secondworldwar
Jun 19, 2008
He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.
Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.
"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda
Source: Bloomberg News
Jun 19, 2008
The lives of Abner Mikva and Newton
Minow have been intertwined since 1942, when they were 16 and
competed for the editorship of their Milwaukee high-school
newspaper. Now 82, they are still working together, energized
by their latest passion: Barack Obama.
``It's the first candidate I've been excited about since
Kennedy,'' Minow says, turning to Mikva. ``What about you?''
``Same here,'' says Mikva, patting his friend's hand.
Over the past 50 years, the two men sittin
Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com
Jun 18, 2008
Bushwhacking through knee-high weeds and thorny kiawe, John Bond points out the stretches of asphalt and concrete where World War II fighters once roared into the sky at the former 'Ewa Marine Corps Air Station.
There's not much left to see of the airfield, with only foundation outlines, a quonset hut and concrete building or two standing, but the original runways are still there.
Tucked away in a jungle on the old base are also dozens of arched concrete aircraft revetm
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Jun 18, 2008
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, founded 112 years ago to protect all that is noble about the South, is itself racked by angry divisions these days.
Since the 1990s, clusters of Sons members have aligned themselves with "heritage groups" like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens, both considered hate groups by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. The center says the Sons itself may have been taken over by extremists.
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Source: National Geographic News
Jun 18, 2008
Two wine presses found in Egypt were likely part of the area's earliest winery, producing holy wine for export to Christians abroad, archaeologists say.
Egyptian archaeologists discovered the two presses with large crosses carved across them near St. Catherine's Monastery, a sixth-century A.D. complex near Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula.
Source: Time
Jun 18, 2008
There is a common misconception among Americans that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen. Yet the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, did no such thing — or, at least, it didn't do a very good job of it. Two and a half years later, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers sailed into Galveston, Texas, announced the end of the Civil War, and read aloud a general order freeing the quarter-million slaves residing in the state. It's likely that none of th
Source: http://www.wral.com
Jun 18, 2008
The North Carolina Museum of History has acquired a Confederate battle flag associated with a major turning point of the Civil War – the death of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
The flag was carried by the 18th Regiment North Carolina Troops, which was responsible for the accidental shooting of the Confederate general at Chancellorsville, Va., on May 2, 1863. Severely injured by gunfire, Jackson died a week later of pneumonia.
The regiment's battle flag was captured by Union s
Source: National Security Archive
Jun 18, 2008
The CIA failed to identify the storage bunkers for Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, despite obtaining numerous photographs of the sites, according to new materials -- including a selection of photos -- being published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.
The precise location of the Soviet nuclear storage bunkers at Bejucal and Managua is revealed for the first time in a new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs base
