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)
Nov 26, 2007
Newly-elected Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has promised to apologise to Aborigines for historic injustices, as the conservative party he defeated faced a bruising leadership battle.
Mr Rudd's pledge to say sorry to Aborigines was a radical departure from his predecessor John Howard, who during 11 years in power argued that contemporary Australians bore no responsibility for past wrongs.
It would be the first time that an Australian federal government had apologi
Source: Times (London)
Nov 26, 2007
Oxford University was preparing for lockdown tonight ahead of threatened protests against the decision to invite two controversial far right figures to a debate.
Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, and the historian David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for Holocaust denial, are due to speak at the Oxford Union debating society on the subject of free speech.Oxford colleges e-mailed their students warning them to stay in their rooms, and many colle
Source: CanWest
Nov 25, 2007
As Canada seeks to assert its Arctic claims, the founder of a Quebec historical society says the time has never been better to honour an explorer who helped the country claim a huge chunk of the North.
In the late 1800s, Quebec-based captain Joseph-Elzear Bernier tried to persuade a young Canada of the importance of claiming sovereignty over the islands of the North. The British government had formally ceded the land in 1880 but the Canadian government had yet to exercise its jurisd
Source: AP
Nov 25, 2007
In a small survey boat, maritime archaeologist J. Lee Cox Jr. was checking the bottom of the Delaware River at the Sunoco Logistics pier in South Philadelphia when he got a hit on the side-scan sonar. A pipe? A log? A hazard to the oil tankers docking nearby?
No one was sure until a diver was sent down weeks later and found a strange pointed object buried in the muck about 40 feet down.
Earlier this month, Cox identified it as the business end of a cheval-de-frise, an
Source: AP
Nov 25, 2007
The gravestone of a young woman executed more than 60 years ago after being caught on a clandestine mission to save Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust has been moved to Israel, officials said Sunday.
Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jew who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944 to help rescue Jews, was honored on Nov. 7 as her gravestone was placed alongside her former home on a kibbutz farm next to the Mediterranean, Israel's Defense Ministry said. The ceremony marked the 63rd anniv
Source: AP
Nov 25, 2007
The U.S. Justice Department began trying to deport former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk more than three decades ago, claiming that he was an armed guard at a Nazi death camp and helped murder Jewish prisoners in World War II.
Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and was under a death sentence until Israel's Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that Demjanjuk was not the sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp in German-occupied Poland whom prisoners called "Ivan the Terrible.&
Source: Chicago Tribune
Nov 25, 2007
A mysterious box of letters, memos and legal documents pertaining to the White Sox team accused of throwing the 1919 World Series -- some of the papers thought to be lost since the middle of the last century -- is bound for the auction block this week after being uncovered by two Chicago-area collectors.
The identity of the sellers is not being disclosed and the story of how the papers came to emerge is incomplete. The auction house, Mastro Auctions in Burr Ridge, says the owners pr
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 25, 2007
NEARLY five years after it was ransacked by hordes of looters in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, the Iraq museum in Baghdad is about to open its doors again.
The museum, famous for priceless antiquities representing the world’s earliest civilisation, is scheduled to open next month, according to its acting director, Amira Emiran.
Visits will be confined to just two galleries on the ground floor containing Assyrian and Islamic treasures that are too large and hea
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2007
FROM the 1880s to the 1960s, at least 4,700 men and women were lynched in this country. The noose remains a terrifying symbol, and continues to be used by racists to intimidate African-Americans (who made up more than 70 percent of lynching victims).
In the past decade or so, only about a dozen noose incidents a year came to the attention of civil rights groups. But since the huge Sept. 20 rally in Jena, La., where tens of thousands protested what they saw as racism in the prosecuti
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2007
PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to “South Park,” from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department.
A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2007
IN 1960, Richard Nixon ran for president against John F. Kennedy on a slogan that had powerful resonance for cold war America: “Experience Counts.” Nixon had been vice president for eight years, a senator for two, and a House member for four. Kennedy had been a senator for eight years and a House member for six, and was also a war hero and the scion of a politically powerful family.
Nixon’s claim to experience, though, were those eight years in the White House — he was dispatched by
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2007
YEKATERINBURG, Russia — On the outskirts of this burly industrial center, off a road like any other, on a nowhere scrap of land — here unfolded the final act of one of the last century’s most momentous events.
A short way through a clearing, toward a cluster of birch trees, the killers deposited their victims’ bodies, which had been mutilated, burned and doused with acid to mask their origins. It would be 73 more years, in 1991, before the remains would be reclaimed and the announce
Source: Reuters
Nov 24, 2007
A LEADING Italian archaeologist said that the grotto whose discovery was announced this week in Rome is not the sacred cave linked to the myth of the city's foundation by Romulus and Remus.
The Culture Ministry and experts who presented the find said they were “reasonably certain” the cavern is the Lupercale - a sanctuary worshipped for centuries by Romans because, according to legend, a wolf nursed the twin brothers there.
But Adriano La Regina, Rome's superintendent o
Source: http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk
Nov 24, 2007
ONE was a notorious Nazi war criminal, the other a young Tyneside soldier.
They came from different countries and from different backgrounds, but they forged a friendship of sorts and ended up playing chess together.
This is the remarkable real life story of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess and Maurice Williams of the Durham Light Infantry.
Charged with guarding Hess in Berlin’s Spandau Prison, Maurice the pair ended up playing a game of chess.
“It
Source: Boston Globe
Nov 24, 2007
A clue, a clue, my kingdom for a clue.
With apologies to William Shakespeare, that line sums up the plea of scholars who for years have tried to untangle one of literary history's most nettlesome knots: To which church did the Bard belong?
Was he Roman Catholic, the religion of his mother's family, many of his schoolteachers, and perhaps the closet faith of his father? Was he Protestant, a version of which was the official religion of Elizabethan England, where he craft
Source: BBC
Nov 23, 2007
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's... well he doesn't have a name yet, but the Orange Order hopes to win a new generation of fans with their own superhero.
The origins of the Orange Order may date from the 17th century battle for supremacy between Protestantism and Catholicism, but they have high hopes for this 21st century makeover.
King William has been an Orange icon for more than 300 years, but it seems the curly wig and pointed hat combo were not doing it for the
Source: AP
Nov 23, 2007
On Saturday [Nov. 24], Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33, engineered by Soviet authorities to force peasants across the former U.S.S.R. to give up their privately held plots of land and join collective farms. Millions perished.
Now President Viktor Yushchenko is leading an effort to gain international recognition of Holodomor — or death by hunger, as it is known here — as a crime rather than merely a disaster, by labeling it an act of genocide.
Source: Reuters
Nov 23, 2007
A Springfield rifle owned by the famed Apache warrior Geronimo fetched $100,000 during an auction of Wild West guns and weapons that brought in more than $1 million.
Lawman Wyatt Earp's double-barreled shotgun garnered $65,500, while a saber attributed to U.S. Army cavalry commander George Custer sold for $20,315 at the Bonhams & Butterfields auction Tuesday.
Some of the guns were offered by a private collector who spent a lifetime accumulating firearms once carried
Source: HNN Staff
Nov 23, 2007
M. Stanton Evans, a stalwart of the conservative movement for half a century, has written a new book about Joe McCarthy, the long-reviled senator from Wisconsin whose name became a term of opprobrium.
In a review in the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, Robert Novak asserts that Evans make a convincing case that McCarthy was innocent of the three main charges leveled against him:
The demonization of McCarthy was essentially a three-part
Source: C-SPAN
Nov 23, 2007
Featuring film, sound and video clips that have not been aired yet during our programs - Eleanor Roosevelt speaking with troops in the Pacific, Kennedy family home movies, Gerald Ford Election eve program from Air Force One, and others. Also an interview with Sharon Fawcett, Asst. U.S. Archivist for Pres. Libraries.
