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
Jan 21, 2008
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, experts warned Tony Blair that occupying the country and trying to impose a western-style democracy was doomed to failure. He dismissed their objections, convinced that victory was a formality. In the first of three extracts from his new book, Jonathan Steele looks at how Britain went to war unbriefed, unprepared and with no idea of the fallout that would ensue.
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Source: AP
Jan 21, 2008
While the nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, three states celebrate another man as well.
In Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi, the slain civil rights leader shares a state holiday with Robert E. Lee, commanding officer of the Confederate Army.
The two figures seem to coexist in the very fabric of the Arkansas' capital city, where streets bear each of their names.
Source: Independent (UK)
Jan 21, 2008
They were the blue-eyed blonds born into a sinister SS scheme to further the Aryan race. But the defeat of the Nazis left Norway's 'Lebensborn' facing the vengeance of an entire nation. Here, five former war children talk for the first time about their ordeal – and their fight for compensation.
Source: Scotsman
Jan 21, 2008
SCOTTISH history is to be restored to its position at the heart of the school curriculum to combat young people's "ignorance" of their nation's past, the education secretary promises today.
Fiona Hyslop maintains that making history relevant to the lives of children will "create a better understanding of how Scotland came to be, where it is now and the part the nation could play in shaping the future".
In a move likely to be greeted with suspicion by
Source: National Security Archive
Jan 21, 2008
Documents published today by the
National Security Archive reveal that Mexico’s secret service captured a
squad of Argentine military intelligence operatives and expelled them for
spying on [exiled rebel] Montoneros living in Mexico" in January 1978. At
the time, the Mexican press denounced the presence of foreigners attempting
to target and assassinate the leadership of the Argentine Montonero
insurgents. Today, the documents of the now dismantled Mexican Federal
Security Directorate co
Source: AP
Jan 21, 2008
Nearly 40 years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., some say his legacy is being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message.
“Everyone knows - even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King - can say his most famous moment was that ‘I have a dream’ speech,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo. “No one can go further than one sentence. All we know i
Source: WaPo
Jan 21, 2008
ATLANTA, Jan. 20 -- Sen. Barack Obama took the pulpit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church here Sunday and drew a clear link between King's vision of an America free of segregation and racism and the central tenet of his own presidential campaign, a call for unity after years of partisan rancor and division.
"If Dr. King could love his jailer, if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we
Source: WaPo
Jan 20, 2008
The National Park Service envisions a prime venue for demonstrations: a broad space at the foot of the Capitol with restrooms, seating, a paved surface, even a stand for the media.
Attorneys for activist groups fear a designated, government-approved "pit," limiting freedom of speech and movement in a hallowed place of protest.
The proposal to turn Union Square, the site of the Capitol reflecting pool and the Grant Memorial, into an "urban civic square&quo
Source: AHA Blog
Jan 20, 2008
The stock market may be volatile these days, but the Museum of American Finance is bullish on the future of financial history. The museum re-opened its doors on Friday, January 11, after a $9 million renovation project. The museum is located one block from the New York Stock Exchange and operates with the goal “to become a major tourist attraction in lower Manhattan, an educational destination where busloads of school children can learn the basics about the country’s financial system, and an a
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Jan 20, 2008
FOR more than 60 years RAAF veterans Geoff Burn and Arthur Lewis kept silent about the terrible secret hidden in a disused railway tunnel at the foot of the Blue Mountains.
Thousands of barrels filled with chemical weapons, including mustard gas, were stored in the tunnel at Glenbrook and other sites around Australia during the Second World War.
The men were part of a secret unit formed to look after the deadly stockpile, kept for use against Japanese troops - a fact th
Source: columbiatribune.com
Jan 20, 2008
One of the most vivid memories George Esper has from his years as an Associated Press correspondent during the Vietnam War was of a flight he took on a U.S. military transport plane loaded with the bodies of dead American soldiers.
Esper had been in the demilitarized zone covering a battle. Afterward he asked the pilot of the plane if he could hitch a ride back to Saigon. The pilot agreed, and Esper was directed to the aircraft’s freight section.
There, Esper found he a
Source: CBS News
Jan 20, 2008
On Monday, the country will officially mark the holiday celebrating the life of Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. This year will mark the 40th year after his assassination. His dream of economic and racial equality still lives on. Or does it?
For many living on Chicago's Martin Luther King Drive, the hopes of the slain civil right's leader are more like a dream, deferred, reports CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller.
Source: NYT Week in Review
Jan 20, 2008
IT is now a part of the Republican catechism to regularly invoke the name of Ronald Reagan and to ritually wrap oneself in his cloak. This year’s Republican candidates (and even one Democrat, Barack Obama), have all called down the spirit of St. Ronald of Dixon, Ill., to bless their candidacies.
But they will have a hard time topping the greatest Reagan pander of all time, delivered in the summer of 1995 by Senator Bob Dole, embarking on his quest for the 1996 Republican presidentia
Source: NYT
Jan 20, 2008
[R]ecent history shows that it’s often the anticipation of a recession that depresses stock prices, not the actual experience of a recession. So if we’re out of the anticipatory stage, stocks could soon start to stabilize.
Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at S.& P., studied the performance of the stock market during the last 11 recessions, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, going back to 1945. He found that the S.& P. 500 fell 26 percent, on aver
Source: AP
Jan 19, 2008
A young veteran back from war whose struggle to rejoin society has failed, at least for the moment, fighting demons and left homeless.
But it is happening to a new generation. As the war in Afghanistan plods on in its seventh year, and the war in Iraq in its fifth, a new cadre of homeless veterans is taking shape.
And with it come the questions: How is it that a nation that became so familiar with the archetypal homeless, combat-addled Vietnam veteran is now watching as
Source: AP
Jan 19, 2008
Evelyn Johnson's father has never liked talking about his time in the Army during World War II. He was angry that black servicemen like him fought for freedom overseas only to come home to face discrimination, she says.
Johnson, however, now has a window into her father's experiences, having recently inherited about 30 letters he wrote his mother while stationed in North Africa and Italy.
On Saturday, Johnson learned how to best preserve the box full of letters — writte
Source: AP
Jan 19, 2008
MILWAUKEE - Booker Townsell rarely spoke about his time in the Army or his wrongful conviction in one of the largest courts-martial of World War II.
But his past took center stage on Saturday, when the late Townsell received military honors at his grave site and a salute. His family also accepted the U.S. flag that was denied at his burial almost 25 years ago.
The ceremony and reception that followed attracted hundreds of people, including local and state dignitaries, a
Source: NYT
Jan 19, 2008
ROME — As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero’s welcome here on Friday.
When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon
Source: American Libraries website
Jan 18, 2008
The Library of Congress announced January 16 that it has teamed with the photo-sharing website Flickr to broaden public access to the 14 million photographs and other visual items in LC’s collections.
The pilot project is beginning with 3,000 photos from two of the library’s most popular collections—the George Grantham Bain Collection, featuring the photographic files of one of America's earliest news picture agencies, and Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photo
Source: Wired.com
Jan 18, 2008
Ulrike Poppe used to be one of the most surveilled women in East Germany. For 15 years, agents of the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service) followed her, bugged her phone and home, and harassed her unremittingly, right up until she and other dissidents helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today, the study in Poppe's Berlin apartment is lined floor to 12-foot ceiling with bookshelves full of volumes on art, literature, and political science. But one shelf, jus
