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: IHT
Oct 22, 2007
A Slovenian government program is working to help people come to terms with a hidden legacy of unprecedented slaughter during the World War II. So far, 540 sites have been registered across Slovenia. They are believed to hold up to 100,000 bodies."The killings that took place here have no comparison in Europe. In two months after the war, more people were killed here than in the four years of war," said Joze Dezman, a historian who heads the committee for registeri
Source: Newsweek
Oct 22, 2007
Never mind the man she's married to, Hillary Clinton isn't big on feelings. "Unthinking emotion," she wrote a friend in college, "has always been pitiful to me." In "For Love of Politics," Sally Bedell Smith's new book on Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage during their White House years, the First Lady is a woman determined not to surrender to emotion, even when her husband and the nation have. While President Clinton idles away an hour hugging his way through a ro
Source: NYT Magazine
Oct 21, 2007
Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy
in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory
of criminal behavior.
In the early 1990s, a surge in the number of teenagers threatened a
crime wave of unprecedented proportions. But to the surprise of some
experts, crime fell steadily instead. Many explanations have been
offered in hindsight, including economic growth, the expansion of
police forces, the rise of prison populations and the end o
Source: http://www.star-telegram.com
Oct 21, 2007
They called it the Great Hanging.
And for 145 years, Gainesville has tried to forget the largest mass lynching in American history.
Now, it is remembering those 14 deaths plus 28 other men executed amid the political tension of the Civil War.
A city park filled with 42 tiny crosses was dedicated Friday to remember the 1862 deaths. Most of the men were convicted and hanged as Union sympathizers. Fourteen were hunted down and lynched outright by a renegade mo
Source: Guardian
Oct 21, 2007
Thousands of eyewitness accounts recounting the bloodshed and violence of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 are to be made public for the first time.
More than 3,000 testimonies, which have been in storage at Trinity College, Dublin, for almost 300 years, are to be transcribed and digitised in a project to be launched on Tuesday that aims to shed light on one of the darkest moments in Ireland's past.
The Catholic uprising remains one of the bitterest controversies in Irish hi
Source: Daily Express
Oct 21, 2007
ORIGINAL photographs of pre-war Britain taken by the German Luftwaffe have been discovered and are now on sale through a new website.
The aerial snaps originate from a rare 140-page book printed in 1942 containing reconnaissance pictures of Scotland’s east coast, including clear photographs of RAF Kinloss, the sea approach to Edinburgh and several Aberdeen docks, which were taken clandestinely on civil flights.
However, the top-secret document was smuggled out of Nazi-o
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Oct 21, 2007
Salem | ... New England in general is bewitching this time of year - the color of the leaves, the crispness of the air - but in this seaport, sorcery and the sad lessons of history are on display, always.
More than 300 years ago, 19 people were hanged and another pressed to death after being unfairly convicted of practicing witchcraft. Today, the occult is to Salem what snow is to Utah, and October is the most wonderful time of the year.
They celebrate Hallow
Source: Roger Atwood, a visiting researcher at Georgetown University, in a paper delivered at a conference at Yale this past spring, as published by savingantiquities.org
Oct 21, 2007
Its coverage has been staggering in terms of column inches, which has been by far the greatest of these three papers, and all the more so bearing in mind how few of its stories actually bring new information to the table or break some new angle. I don't find a single article that you could properly call investigative in the entire New York Times opus on this issue during this period, not a single inquiry of its own into the provenance of antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or any other
Source: AP
Oct 21, 2007
A United States magistrate rejected arguments by the Bush administration and urged a federal judge to order the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mail messages. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola said it was necessary to hold out the threat of a contempt of court citation to ensure that White House personnel safeguard backup tapes of electronic messages that may have been deleted. Whether to issue the order is up to Judge Henry Kennedy of Federal District Court. The administration has 1
Source: NYT
Oct 21, 2007
MAMARONECK, N.Y. It all began with an Indian who wanted to eat peyote.
His name was Alfred Smith. He belonged to the Klamath tribe in Oregon and was a member of the North American Church, whose sacramental rites included ingesting peyote buds.
On March 2, 1984, when he told his boss at the alcohol and drug treatment center where he worked that he would be attending a church meeting the following day, he was told that if he used peyote there he would be fired. He did, an
Source: AP
Oct 20, 2007
Marion Oltman spent the last eight months of World War II in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, and tears still fill his eyes when he recalls those desperate days.
After working all day to fill craters left from Allied bombing, each prisoner got a boiled potato and a slice of bread with sawdust used as filler. Oltman was given the task of slicing the bread to feed 12 men.
"You don't know what it's like to look in the eyes of guys that are that hungry," the 89-year-o
Source: http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland
Oct 20, 2007
The North's first Minister, Dr Ian Paisley has said he will hold talks with the Taoiseach about developing a shared memorial for Irish people from North and the Republic who died in both world wars.
Dr Paisley said the time was right to remember those who gave their lives to save democracy.
He said Irish men and women contributed just as much as those from the UK.
He also added that he will gladly come south of the border more often if organisations are pre
Source: AP
Oct 20, 2007
As Peru heads into the most sensational trial in its history, the country is being taken back 16 years to the night when hooded men stormed a barbecue in a Lima tenement courtyard and machine-gunned the crowd, killing 15 people including an 8-year-old boy.
It was November 1991 — just a year into the 10-year presidency of Alberto Fujimori — and a dirty war was raging between government forces and Maoist rebels calling themselves the Shining Path. The police investigation of the Lima
Source: Kansas City Star
Oct 19, 2007
If you want to see one of the oldest black churches in the United States, take a tour of south Philadelphia.
At Sixth and Lombard streets you will find Mother Bethel AME Church, the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the nation.
The historic church venue was a stop on a recent tour of south Philadelphia I took with the Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists. As our tour bus came to a stop in front of the church, we saw the marker out front designati
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2007
Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.
The new evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language. The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2007
On the docket for the weekly selectmen’s meeting here on Monday were the location of park benches, a liquor license for Vinny T’s restaurant and, not for the first time, the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey 90 years ago.
The debate in this affluent Boston suburb, home to many Jews and Armenians, centered on a local program to increase awareness of bias. The issue was not the program itself, but its sponsor, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish advocacy group, which has t
Source: http://www.dailypress.com
Oct 19, 2007
Archaeologists probing beneath the surface of a Merchants Square parking lot have discovered evidence of a rare 17th-century building that dates back to a little understood colonial outpost that preceded the town's founding in 1699.
Located under the SunTrust Bank parking lot at the corner of Prince George and Henry streets, the 40-foot-long post-in-ground structure is one of only a handful of buildings known from the days of Middle Plantation, which was established in 1633. It coul
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Oct 19, 2007
A resolution has been introduced in the House of Representatives to
honor the participants in"Post Office Box 1142," a military
intelligence interrogation program from World War II.
"In advancing the Nation's interests and uncovering vital secrets, the
interrogators at P.O. Box 1142 never resorted to tactics such as sleep
deprivation, electrical shock, or waterboarding. Their captives were
never sexually abused, humiliated, or tortured. They never resorted to
the methods that have rece
Source: Reuters
Oct 19, 2007
When Japanese soldiers gave out grenades to residents of Okinawa toward the end World War Two, Kiku Nakayama says she and her friends knew what they were for.
Then a teenage military nurse, she was told to fend for herself when the hospital where she worked was abandoned as U.S. forces approached.
"We were given grenades and we all interpreted that to mean we should use them to kill ourselves," Nakayama said.
"Many people were given two and t
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2007
The problems swirling through Japan’s ancient sport of sumo recently would seem to be random, unconnected events.
A coach was expelled from the sumo association this month for inflicting fatal injuries on a 17-year-old apprentice in a hazing incident and may face criminal charges. One of the two grand champions, Asashoryu, has been suspended for claiming an injury and then being filmed playing soccer in his native Mongolia. He is also suspected of fixing matches with other wrestlers
