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: http://www.registerguard.com
Oct 31, 2007
Critics of a speaker widely viewed as one of the nation’s most prominent deniers of the Holocaust say they will counter his talk in Eugene on Friday with a competing event and a later symposium.
Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, will speak on “The Israel Lobby.” His visit comes at the invitation of the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group founded by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter.
Weber, a historian who grew up in Portl
Source: AP
Oct 31, 2007
Parliament condemned Gen. Francisco Franco's nearly 40-year dictatorship Wednesday in historic legislation addressing a dark chapter of Spanish history that had been largely off-limits.
The bill sponsored by the Socialist government and passed by the lower house of parliament also makes symbolic amends to victims of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. It formally denounces Franco's regime, mandates that local governments fund efforts to unearth mass graves from the Civil War and decla
Source: AP
Oct 31, 2007
American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan may soon be playing cards with the ace of artifacts or the king of archaeological digs.
Nearly 50,000 decks of cards meant to help troops avoid unnecessary damage to ancient sites and curb the illegal trade of stolen artifacts will be shipped to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as training sites in the United States.
The cards were developed by a Colorado State University researcher and graphic artist working with the Defens
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Oct 31, 2007
Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda — a half-scale Roman Pantheon in red brick that is almost certainly the most famous university building in the United States — is in line for a renovation intended to give it a larger role in students’ daily lives, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The university has hired a preservation-planning firm, John G. Waite Associates, to study the building, which was last renovated three decades ago. The firm has produced a 700-page report, which the univ
Source: NYT
Oct 31, 2007
In an exchange with Mr. Russert [at last night's Democratic Party presidential debate], arguably her third toughest opponent on the stage, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly declined to say whether she would push the National Archives to release correspondence from Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Clinton in the White House when he was president. Mr. Russert held up a copy of a letter from Mr. Clinton asking the Archives not to release any of those documents until 2012.
“Well, that’s not my decision to mak
Source: National Post (Canada)
Oct 31, 2007
Thirty-two years after Franco died, all of Spain, including the church in the Valley of the Fallen, is about to be stripped of every symbol associated with the Spanish dictator and his Nationalist cause. Today, parliament in Madrid is expected to pass a controversial law that condemns Gen. Franco's dictatorship and honours his victims.All statues, street signs and symbols associated with Gen. Franco and his Falange movement must be removed from public buildings.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 31, 2007
A stone tool found on a remote Pacific island has provided evidence that early Polynesians travelled 2,500 miles by canoe using only the stars, clouds and seabirds as navigational aids.
Scientists have found that the stone adze, found on a coral atoll in what is now French Polynesia, was quarried from volcanic rock in Hawaii, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
It was transported about 1,000 years ago by Polynesian voyagers in wooden canoes, either as a chunk of unc
Source: NYT
Oct 31, 2007
President Vladimir V. Putin paid his first visit today to a memorial and church built on the site of a killing field where thousands were executed, as Russia marked the 70th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror and the decades of Soviet political repression that left millions dead.
The site, on the grounds of a pre-revolutionary estate on the edge of Moscow, became a secret territory of the N.K.V.D., a predecessor of the K.G.B., the intelligence agency in which Mr. Putin rose
Source: AFP
Oct 31, 2007
More than 60 years had passed, but Akira Makino still suffered nightmares about Filipino hostages and the injections that rendered them unconscious. Then there was the one about the surgical knife gouging a human liver.
Every time he woke up to the flashbacks of horrific killing scenes, he shut his eyes tight and tried to turn his mind away from something he no longer wanted to think about.
But Makino, 84, also felt he had to speak out about his wartime experiences to a
Source: David Price at the website of Counterpunch
Oct 30, 2007
[David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.]
Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultu
Source: http://www.pinknews.co.uk
Oct 30, 2007
Two pink triangles, the symbols of Hitler's hatred towards homosexuals, are up for auction in Shropshire this week.
They are expected to fetch hundreds of pounds when they go under the hammer at the Mullock's Auctioneers at Ludlow Racecourse on Thursday.
Also being sold at the auction are other rare items including a description of a Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions and an apologetic letter from composer Edward Elgar.
Source: BBC
Oct 30, 2007
The Red Lady of Paviland has always been a little coy about her age - but it appears she may be 4,000 years older than previously thought.
Scientists say more accurate tests date the earliest human burial found in the UK to just over 29,000 years ago.
When discovered in a cave on Gower in the 1820s the bones were thought to be around 18,000 years old, but were later redated to between 25,000 and 26,000.
Researchers said it casts a new light on human presenc
Source: Fox News
Oct 30, 2007
A group of congressmen has asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to retain the tradition of reciting the significance of each fold in the flag-folding ceremony at military funerals.
"The flag folding recitation is a longstanding tradition which brings comfort to the living and honor to the deceased," Rep. Heath Shuler, D-N.C., writes in his letter Tuesday signed by 11 other congressmen. "The recitations accompanying each fold pay tribute to the service and sacrific
Source: History Today
Oct 30, 2007
A painting given by Winston Churchill to Harry Truman is to be auctioned in London by Sotheby’s. The 1948 painting of Marrakesh is valued at £500,000 and was given to the American President three years later; it is now to be sold by his daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel. Churchill’s note along with the gift read: “It shows the beautiful panorama of the snow-capped Atlas mountains in Marrakesh. This is the view I persuaded your predecessor [Roosevelt] to see before he left North Africa after the C
Source: AHA Blog
Oct 30, 2007
The Library of Congress and the Xerox Corporation have announced that they will be collaborating on a project to develop new ways to store, preserve, and access digital images, according to a press release on October 25th. The two organizations are experimenting with the JPEG 2000 image format, a newer format for representing and compressing images, which they hope will make digital images easier to store, transfer, and display. JPEG 2000 “holds promise in the areas of visual presentation, simp
Source: NYT
Oct 30, 2007
Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”...
Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business Internation
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Oct 30, 2007
Andrew Carnegie is 78 years old, far from Pittsburgh and the steelmaking that made him rich. His voice is shrill, laced with an unmistakable Scottish brogue, as he reads from his 1889 essay "The Gospel of Wealth," a text he altered slightly for a reading inside Thomas Edison's sound studio in the Bronx, N.Y.
The recording, set down 93 years ago on a contraption known as the "Kinetophone," is far from pristine, both in quality and performance. Amid static, the gre
Source: CNN
Oct 30, 2007
In tiny Bishop, California, five hours north of Los Angeles, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California, wants to build a museum honoring the mule.
McKeon has requested a $50,000 earmark to explore the possibility of building a museum in the town that every Memorial Day weekend holds the biggest mule celebration in the United States.
It might sound preposterous but McKeon is doing what many of his House colleagues are doing -- appropriating federal funds for pet projects back home
Source: CNN
Oct 30, 2007
Vice President Dick Cheney spent about eight hours hunting Monday at a secluded Hudson Valley gun club where well-heeled enthusiasts shoot ducks and pheasants.
It was Cheney's second visit to Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club in Dutchess County, about 70 miles north of New York City. The previous trip was in fall 2001.
Although a heavy police presence kept the media and curious local residents at a distance, Cheney's visit did stir up a bit of controversy when a New York
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2007
The buccaneering, but largely forgotten, exploits of an 18th century Scottish soldier, who once controlled vast tracts of Europe, are to be commemorated by the German village where he died in battle.
James Keith, a charismatic military mastermind, governed Finland, Ukraine, and Berlin. He was feted as a soldier in Spain, in Russia and in Prussia, and sought as a lover by the Tsarina Elizabeth I.
But despite contemporary acclaim, Keith's career is today more shrouded in
