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
Feb 15, 2008
A proposal from President Nicolas Sarkozy that French 10-year-olds should sponsor the memory of Jewish children who were murdered by the Nazis set off an outcry on Friday among psychologists, parents and the political left.In an address to Jewish leaders, Sarkozy said that from the start of the next academic year pupils in their last year of primary school should be "entrusted with the memory of one of the 11,000 French children who fell victim to the Holocaust."
Source: AP
Feb 15, 2008
Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.
"You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office.
"We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, s
Source: Reuters
Feb 14, 2008
Over 100 Bulgarian ministers, who came to power since the fall of communism, had served as agents of the former secret police, a historical commission said on Wednesday.
Bulgaria, a European Union newcomer, has been among the last former Soviet bloc countries to deal with its painful communist past and in late 2006 approved a law to unmask members of its Cold War spy agency, Darzhavna Sigurnost.
Former agents will not have to quit their posts and will not be banned from
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
Feb 14, 2008
In time for the upcoming tourist season, Gettysburg officials are on schedule to approve an ordinance that places a 26-person limit for guided walking tours in the borough.
Controversy about a potential limit - which affects the town's many ghost-tour companies - was sparked last summer, when the borough's public safety committee proposed a 15-person cap.
Objections from the owners of ghost-tour companies prompted the committee to increase that number to 26, including t
Source: http://www.standardnewswire.com
Feb 14, 2008
On Tuesday, President George W. Bush used an annual White House ceremony recognizing Black History Month to denounce displays of nooses and jokes about lynching. The president's remarks grew out of concern over increased reports of racial tensions. President Bush recognized several prominent black Americans and introduced Rev. Al Sharpton. The following is Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson's statement about what transpired at the White House ceremony:
"President Bush is a decent man and
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 14, 2008
BORDEAUX: The plan's scope was enormous. The surviving examples are as common across Europe as Roman ruins. More than 330,000 men struggled against the clock to meet construction schedules. Yet all the effort proved fruitless.
Today, 63 years after the end of World War II, the remains of the Nazis' Atlantic Wall are there for all to see, although few observers realize the extent of what they are seeing. No complete inventory has ever been done, but specialists estimate that some 6,0
Source: Economist
Feb 14, 2008
WHEN Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia's federal security service (FSB), spoke to his staff to mark the 90th anniversary of the Soviet secret service last year, he made an odd historic diversion. “Those who study history know that security existed before. Sophia Paleologue married Ivan III, and being a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, paid close attention to questions of security.” Few understood what he was talking about.
The mystery was cleared up a few weeks later, when Russi
Source: Adam Holland's blog
Feb 14, 2008
Will Williams, who was a leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance Party for two decades, someone with connections with racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Church of the Creator, appeared on the Tennessee Republican primary ballot on Ron Paul's slate of delegates.
Source: Japan Today
Feb 14, 2008
A site of a Japanese village dating back to the 17th century has been found in the outskirts of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, a Japanese archaeologist said Wednesday. Hiroshi Sugiyama, chief research fellow at Japan's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, said that based on research since 2004 and analyses of excavations and documents, the site in Ponhea Lueu Commune, about 25 kilometers north of Phnom Penh, is a Japanese village dating back to the 17th century.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 14, 2008
For decades generations of Cambridge undergraduates have fantasised about a secret stash of Victorian pornography in the university's library tower.
Many have tried to gain access to the chamber to uncover its illicit secrets. So intrigued was Stephen Fry by the collection that he wrote about it in his first novel, The Liar.
Despite the brilliant scientists, spies and politicians that the university has produced, no student is believed to have gained access to the close
Source: CNN
Feb 13, 2008
Britain's Prince Andrew on Wednesday defended comments he made suggesting the United States might have been better off had its leaders learned from the British experience with colonialism before invading Iraq.
"The fact is that we have learned, sometimes at our expense, in the years when we were a colonial power," he told CNN.
"So there may or may not have been things and ideas that were of valid use to what was going on at that particular time."
Source: AP
Feb 13, 2008
A group of Chicago investors are putting the 138 acres of mountaintop property just to the west of the "H" in the Hollywood sign on the market Wednesday.
The Fox River Co. said the property, once owned by Howard Hughes, offers a stunning 360-degree panorama of the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley.
The asking price: $22 million.
Hughes once planned to build a love nest there for his then paramour Ginger Rogers. Though their relationshi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 13, 2008
An 88-year-old veteran of the Spanish Civil War has had a bullet removed from his shoulder almost seven decades after he was shot.
Faustino Olivera is recovering in hospital in Barbastro, in the northern Spanish region of Aragon, where doctors last week performed emergency surgery to remove a painful lump from his left shoulder.
They were astonished when they extracted a bullet fired from a Mauser 98.
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2008
Making some of his most pointed remarks on race relations, President Bush on Tuesday denounced racially charged incidents involving nooses and called the era of lynchings from the 19th to the 20th centuries “a shameful chapter in American history.”
“The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice,” Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “Displaying one is not a harmless prank. And ‘lynching’ is not a word to be mentioned in jest.
Source: LiveScience
Feb 12, 2008
The epic journey by which the Americas were first settled has been a great mystery for centuries. Did it happen by land or by sea? Did it happen one dozen or so millennia ago or three dozen?
The answer might be "yes."
New findings reveal the settling of the New World did not come in a single burst, as is suggested by most theories, but was, in a way, a play with three acts, each separated by thousands of generations.
The first stage of this voyage
Source: Newsweek
Feb 12, 2008
With sorrow, the Abraham Lincoln industry chopped off a major commemoration Tuesday due to weather. First Lady Laura Bush was to be in Hodgenville, Ky., at the site of the 16th president's birth in 1809, to help lead the nation in a celebration worthy of his life. Perhaps it's just as well that the party did not come off. What, after all, would the country do to follow that act next year, on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth?
That question may not be so easy to resolve. As it
Source: BBC
Feb 12, 2008
With torment still in his voice, Frank Byrne recalls the day six decades ago when he was taken from his mother and their community in Christmas Creek, Western Australia.
He was just five at the time, and his mother, Maudie Yooringun, had long feared the day that the government would come to seize him - and he would be "stolen".
"The government came to Christmas Creek where we had a mud house and told me I was been taken away," he said.
&
Source: BBC
Feb 12, 2008
With torment still in his voice, Frank Byrne recalls the day six decades ago when he was taken from his mother and their community in Christmas Creek, Western Australia.
He was just five at the time, and his mother, Maudie Yooringun, had long feared the day that the government would come to seize him - and he would be "stolen".
"The government came to Christmas Creek where we had a mud house and told me I was been taken away," he said.
&
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2008
President Bush honored Georgia Congressman
John Lewis and others Tuesday at an event marking Black History Month at the White House.
In his remarks, Bush took aim at a resurgence in the display of
nooses as misguided and disturbing type of prank. The President
said it indicates that some Americans may be losing sight of the
suffering that blacks have endured across the nation.
Bush said"The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in
American history.'' He said the that a noose"is
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 12, 2008
A century of Westminster-style pageantry and pomp took a backseat in Australia’s capital Canberra today when Aborigines smeared with white body paint and playing didgeridoos opened parliament for the first time.
The colourful ceremony came as prime minister Kevin Rudd prepares to deliver an historic apology to the Stolen Generations — Aboriginal children who were removed from their families in an attempt to integrate them into white society.
British parliamentary tradi
