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: NYT
Aug 23, 2007
An unusual program that allows Austrians to volunteer in Holocaust institutions in the United States in lieu of serving in the Austrian military has been disrupted because of difficulties in obtaining visas from the American government.
Officials with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust said the visa application for a prospective Austrian intern had been rejected twice since May and was on a final appeal. The museum was informed by the immigration authorities that the program wa
Source: Jerusalem Post
Aug 23, 2007
The chief spokesman of the Russian Air Force, Col. Aleksandr V. Drobyshevsky, has confirmed in writing for the first time that it was Soviet pilots, in the USSR's most-advanced MiG-25 "Foxbat" aircraft, who flew highly-provocative sorties over Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona in May 1967, just prior to the Six Day War.
Gideon Remez and Isabello Ginor, who co-wrote the recent book Foxbats over Dimona, which asserts that the Soviet Union deliberately engineered the war to
Source: Time
Aug 23, 2007
Israel has always tiptoed around the whole idea of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, in which 1.5 million Armenians perished cruelly at the hands of Ottoman Turks. You’d think that if anybody could understand, and sympathize, about genocide, it should be the Jews, since they suffered their own genocide during the Nazi holocaust, right?
Not exactly.
Israel needs to maintain good relations with Turkey –-for its stuffed grape leaves, beach resorts and to have at least on
Source: Time Magazine
Aug 23, 2007
Politically, President Bush has reached the point all gamblers fear: being so far down that higher stakes start to look worth the risk. Public support for his handling of the war in Iraq is already abysmal, with 70% against him and only 25% still in his camp. So perhaps he felt he had very little to lose when Wednesday, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Mo., he effectively doubled down, arguing not only that America needs to stay in Iraq until a stable democracy can tak
Source: WaPo
Aug 23, 2007
Arthur Bremer, the man who attempted to assassinate Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace during his 1972 presidential campaign will be released later this year, Maryland corrections officials confirmed today.
The candidate was 52 years old on that May afternoon in Maryland -- 52 and surging in his third bid for the nomination, having won three Democratic primaries and expected to win in Maryland and Michigan.
Surrounded by a boisterous crowd of about 2,000 in the parking lot
Source: LAT
Aug 23, 2007
For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.
There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution....
[But then dementia set in after her second husband passed away.] Lying in her room at th
Source: NYT
Aug 23, 2007
The American withdrawal from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war — but one with few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.
Now, in urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, President Bush is challenging that historical memory.
In reminding Americans that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of bloody upheaval in Southeast Asia, Mr. Bush argued in a speech on Wednesday that Vietnam’s lessons provide a reason
Source: NYT
Aug 23, 2007
The authorities in Estonia on Wednesday said that they had charged a cousin of a former president with genocide in connection with his role as a Communist bureaucrat involved in the deportation of civilians to Siberia in 1949.
The man, Arnold Meri, fought the Nazis and became a prominent official in the Communist Party during the decades of Soviet occupation in the Baltics. He was charged last week, his lawyer and the authorities said. If convicted, Mr. Meri, 88, could be sentenced
Source: Novelist Andrea Camilleri in the NYT
Aug 23, 2007
[NYT CORRECTION 8/30/07:"A recent Op-Ed article about the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti described the original charges against the two men incorrectly. The charges did not include possession of subversive pamphlets. And Sacco and Vanzetti faced only one trial together, not three."]
In the previous century millions of men and women died in wars, epidemics, genocides and persecutions, and unfortunately their memory is all too much in danger of vanishing. Yet the deaths
Source: AFP
Aug 23, 2007
Experts say that US President George W. Bush may be misrepresenting history when he drew a parallel between the bloody wars Americans fought in East Asia to the current US "war on terror" to back his case for maintaining US troops in Iraq."My understanding of the history of the Vietnam war and the lessons of that differs rather dramatically from Mr Bush's," Robert Hathaway, an Asian expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told A
Source: Seattle Times
Aug 23, 2007
The White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn't want any.
A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance employees extensive instructions in the art of "deterring potential protesters" from President Bush's public appearances.
Among other things, any event must be open only to those with tickets tightly controlled by organizers. Those entering must be s
Source: http://antiquesandthearts.com
Aug 22, 2007
If you do not believe auctioneer Bill Mishoe has the patience of Job, consider the tug of war he has endured over a trove of Civil War letters that were first due to be auctioned three years ago and are now set to cross the block September 29.
Back in August 2004, Mishoe had scheduled an auction of more than 400 Civil War letters, when to his shock and dismay — as well as to the many collectors who had traveled to Columbia for the sale and the consignor himself — representatives of
Source: BBC
Aug 22, 2007
Scientists in Pennsylvania believe they have found a mass grave containing the bodies of 57 Irish immigrants who died 175 years ago.
The men from Donegal, Tyrone and Londonderry had made the journey across the Atlantic in the summer of 1832 to work on the railroads, but their time in the US was tragically short.
Mystery still surrounds the question of how they met their deaths just six weeks after getting off the boat - a cholera epidemic was blamed, but foul play has n
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Aug 22, 2007
A recent report on students’ research habits raises questions about all the hand-wringing in academe concerning students’ overreliance on Google and Wikipedia to complete assignments. The report, based on a study conducted this year at Saint Mary’s College of California, found that most students started their research by turning to course readings or the library Web site, not Web search engines or Wikipedia.
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2007
To a mostly empty gallery, the man known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing villages in northern Iraq under Saddam Hussein stood up and identified himself as “the fighter, Ali Hassan al-Majid” on Tuesday, the first day of trial for his role in brutally suppressing the 1991 Shiite uprising in the south of the country.
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2007
With a tough battle with Congress over the future of the war expected to come in September, President Bush offered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy today, declaring that he envisions an American victory there and asserting that a hasty withdrawal by the United States would unleash a bloodbath reminiscent of the Vietnam War era.
Mr. Bush accused the Congress of planning to “pull the rug out from under” American troops. He said the American pullout from Vietnam more than 32 years
Source: Chicago Tribune
Aug 22, 2007
The Chicago History Museum is making some history of its own as it offers its first exhibit on a Chicago suburb, picking Schaumburg for the honor. That's Schaumburg as in Woodfield Mall, IKEA and "autoburb."
After 150 years of marking such big-city milestones as the Great Fire, Al Capone and the first "L" train, the museum has gone suburban, officials say.
"We finally broke out of the city limits because Chicago extends -- it's not just the city
Source: Sabre Foundation, Inc. via IraqCrisis email announcement
Aug 22, 2007
Last week brought two front page articles on Iraqi universities and scholars. The Financial Times, August 26, 2007 article, "Gates Foundation to help Iraqi academics escape persecution" describes a new fund, administered by New York City-based International Institute of Education, to relocate persecuted Iraqi scholars to neighboring countries. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 August 2007 article offers a sharp contrast, "Oasis in Iraq: Universities Flourish in Kurdistan&q
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 22, 2007
A branch of the Women's Institute has been told it cannot organise a market in a town square - despite a charter from Henry VIII granting permission to hold one there "forever".
Jacky Roberts-Wake, the president of Colyton WI, in east Devon, said they had been told by Devon county highways that there was no legal mechanism for closing the road.
The WI went ahead yesterday with its "buzzing" farmers' market in the local churchyard. Customers signed a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 22, 2007
Lord Puttnam, the Labour peer and Oscar-winning film-maker, has stirred up controversy by suggesting Michael Collins, the violent Irish patriot, was a peace icon.
His remarks drew an irate response from those who view Collins as a cold-blooded killer and contest the romantic republican view of him as a man who helped liberate Ireland from British oppression.
Lord Puttnam was speaking at a gathering held to mark the 85th anniversary of the rebel's death in an ambush duri
